December 28, 2005

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from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded
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Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now, with today's topic, here is
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James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line. How do you start a program?
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After our pre -show today, I introduced everyone to the musical stylings of Milo Hudson -Buehler and his album,
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I'm Outstanding in My Field. And that, of course, is our own dear channel participant,
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Mutato. And if you would like to hear more of Milo's artistry, you can go to www .farmboymusic
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.com. Who'd have thought there was so much talent around? Well, especially in North Dakota.
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That was the important part, was North Dakota produced this, and that's the amazing thing.
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So anyway... Brings a whole new light to watching the movie Fargo now, let me tell you. Well, you know,
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I got a little sense there's a little something about Fargo there. That's what I'm...
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got that too. Yeah, I'm sort of wondering if it's sort of like the Phoenix -Tucson thing, you know?
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That's what I'm thinking, something along those lines. So anyways, no, we, you know, it takes talent to turn
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Stairway to Heaven or Play That Funky Music into something that you can actually listen to with the whole family.
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How do you sing that with a straight face, Milo? Many years of practice,
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I think. I would think so, yeah. I'm definitely, the next time I try to sing Happy Birthday to somebody on the air, though,
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I'm going to have to call him up and have him help me, because that would be very, very, it would be much better than the last time.
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We'd probably want to have him cut a WAV file and send it to us or something, an MP3. You think so? We could play it.
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Well, because remember last time I tried to sing Happy Birthday to someone, what happened? Well, I had just installed the
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Gettner system. I know that, but remember what happened. It was really bad. The feedback through the whole system eventually crashed it.
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It was very, very bad. No two ways about it. Okay, anyway... Let's see, we heard such memorable ones as Super Cattle Growth Hormone, Play That Polka Music, Crop Dusters in the
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Sky. I think we didn't get a chance to do Who Let the Hogs Out, but we did get
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Pick Up to Lemon, too. So that was, we have them all covered. I have another album coming, so in a future program, we will make that work.
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I'm thankful, yeah. 877 -753 -3341, hope you had a wonderful holiday.
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We were not here yesterday because... It was Christmas, not holiday. Yes, well, okay,
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I'm sorry. Let's not go too far the other direction to where, you know, I do recall as a youth hearing people say
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Happy Holiday, not because they were trying to avoid offending Muslims, okay? It just was another way, because everybody knew what the holiday was.
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So anyway, and one of the two of us wasn't here yesterday at this time.
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But anyways, that's why we didn't do the program yesterday, and just thankful that a certain airline allowed you to come home at all.
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I was out enjoying the wonderful comforts of getting searched by the
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TSA. Yes, yes, well, that's what happens. I'm not going to get into it.
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Okay, I'm not going to say it, not going to say it. There's certain rules about how early you arrive, but I'm not going to go there just, you know, just because I spent half my life sitting in Ed Gates, one of the first people there.
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There's a reason for that, but that's not going to go there right now. Anyway, today on the program, we are continuing our response to Bart Ehrman, getting a lot of positive response from that.
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We'd really like to see a written response put out to his book, I'm Talking to the Powers of B about things like that, as if I didn't have a million other things to be doing right now.
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But we will continue with that. You may recall last week, when we finished the program, we ran out of time.
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I wasn't watching my time closely enough, and I went ahead and played the next clip, and it got into an important discussion about 1
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Corinthians 14 .34, and I said, we'll pick that up on this side, we'll replay that so we get a context.
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We have got that. I have begun listening to the presentations of the grandpappy of all
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Muslim apologists, Ahmed Didat. I was sent a videotape, thanks to the person who sent that to me, a hat tip or whatever it is you call those things.
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I very much appreciate the fact you sent that to me. I MP3'd it so I could listen to it while writing, and there is a lot of, well, let's just say
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I now understand where a lot of modern Muslim apologists are getting their stuff.
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They're just basically repeating what they've heard Ahmed Didat say. I really, really wish
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I had had the opportunity to debate him. He passed away in August of this year.
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My understanding is that he had a stroke shortly after, and this is from his own website.
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I found it odd. I'm not necessarily making a connection here, but it wouldn't be overly shocking to me.
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He had just finished a talk on the atonement theory.
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Of course, the idea that Jesus Christ gave his life as atonement for sins is very reprehensible to Islamic theology, and he had a stroke and was not able to speak again and stayed in that state for a number of years before he passed away in August of this year.
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I believe it was August 5th, as I recall, just off the top of my head. I wish I had had the opportunity. I truly do to have engaged this man because listening.
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Well, first of all, the tape that was sent to me. I've ordered many more.
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I'm going to be listening to a large portion of his body of work as I ride around in the
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Phoenix area and elsewhere, and the tape that was sent to me was a horrible, horrible debate.
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It was horrible. It was the
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Christian pastor. I believe it was somewhere in Scandinavia, the Christian pastor. Neither of them was
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English, their original tongue, though. Ahmed Didat is a far more accomplished speaker, and so the pastor was struggling with the
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English. You could tell that, but beyond that, it was just a slaughter. The pastor really didn't strike me as being overly orthodox.
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He made a few decent points, but at some point he was talking about what almost sounded like some kind of Bible code thing, and it was just horrible, and he ignored the vast majority of the things that Ahmed Didat said, and the shame was, in fact, maybe if I remember,
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I was just yesterday listening to it, and actually the day before yesterday, and there was an audience question, and it was horrible, horrible, horrible.
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I don't even know how to describe it. It was about Mark 16, and this guy gets up, and he quotes from the passage about handling serpents and drinking poison.
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All right, now someone gets up, throws that out to me, and says, you know, would you drink some poison for us now, or blah, blah, blah, blah, if you say you believe in Jesus.
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I'm going to give a 20 -second response to that. You know, I'm going to say, well, I'd invite you to read the discussion of the textual data in regards to Mark 16, 19, 20 in my book,
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The King James Only Controversy. The fact of the matter is that that is the longer ending that was added to the
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Gospel after it was originally written. That's well known among scholars, and thankfully, because of the way the
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New Testament was transmitted over against the way the Koran was transmitted, Koran i .e. after the Uthmanian revision, you burn all the ones that you just changed, and so on and so forth, so you only got one text.
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Unlike that, we have the ability to go back and see these earlier manuscripts and to know these things, and so that's the largest text we've read in the
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New Testament. So read what I wrote about it in the book, or we can go into further detail if you would like to do so, and you move on from there.
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Um, this pastor went nuts. Just completely lost it.
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It was, it was horrible. And so I can't recommend, I can certainly see why
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Ahmed Didat and his folks make this debate available because it was a slaughter.
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It was simply a slaughter. No meaningful responses were provided to any of the alleged contradictions or textual variants or anything.
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But the point is, it would have been quite easy to have provided those responses if he had been debating someone who could do that.
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And so it's a shame that that didn't take place. So anyway,
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I have queued up portions from that debate as well because the fact that I think he is so popular.
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If you go on to various Islamic bookstore sites and search for Didat, D -E -E -D -A -T, you will see that his videotapes and DVDs and books and stuff are very, very popular.
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And so I like to prepare you for what you're probably going to hear people throwing out at you.
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Not that you're necessarily going to be running into an Islamic apologist, but you might be talking to a Muslim who has listened to him.
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And if you've listened to him and then you hear an objection being presented to you, that would, you know, maybe confuse you initially.
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But if you've heard Didat speaking, then maybe you will be able to help in that situation in sort of translating and then explaining and so on and so forth.
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So we'll begin looking at some of that material as well on the program today. So Bart Ehrman and, excuse me,
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I, along with everybody else in my family, have been playing with the weakness of the flesh, shall we say.
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And it's still there, just a slight bit hiding in there. So the
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Honest Sherosh debate was better, I imagine. You know, I hope it would have to be almost.
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Thank you very much, sir. Just got a little water there to wet the whistle. It would have to have been better than that because that was just really, really, really bad.
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But before we get to that, last week we played a section from Bart Ehrman, his
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NPR interview. There are two of them. We'll get to the second one in time. And we can take your phone calls too.
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Don't, just because, just because I'm responding to stuff or playing clips and stuff like that, we can intersperse that between calls.
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We can mix things up. And it's toll -free numbers. So 877 -753 -3341.
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1 Corinthians 14, 34, the women are to keep silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak but are to subject themselves, as the law also says.
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If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home. What is improper for a woman to speak in church?
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Was it from you that the word of God first went forth or has it come to you only? Verses 34 through 36.
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There is a variant here. It's a, what I would call a minor variant.
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And the reason I call it minor is that it is limited not only as far as the number of manuscripts and sources, but to a very limited group.
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In other words, it's one thing if you have a variant in a number of different families of manuscripts.
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If you have manuscripts that represent the Alexandrian family, the Byzantine family, the Western and the
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Gospels, Caesarean has been identified by some. If you have different modern language or ancient language translations that have it, even if it's a small number, if it's a wide representation, okay, that's different than if you just have manuscripts that are closely related to one another, giving the same kind of reading.
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And in 1 Corinthians 14, 34 and verses 34 and 35, several witnesses
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I'm reading from Metzger's textual commentary, several witnesses, chiefly Western, transpose verses 34 through 35 to follow verse 40.
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So in other words, they take the section on women and they put the end of the chapter right before chapter 15, which then starts off with a summary of the gospel.
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So in light of that, Metzger makes comments, such scribal alterations represent attempts to find a more appropriate location in the context for Paul's directive concerning women.
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He then mentions the 6th century Codex Fuldensis. He describes how it is laid out.
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It says the Latin text, 1 Corinthians 14, runs onward throughout the chapter to verse 40. Following verse 33 is a scribal siglum that directs the reader to a note standing in the lower margin of the page.
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This note provides the text of verses 36 through 40. Does the scribe, without actually deleting verses 34 through 35 from the text, intend the liturgist to omit them from reading the lesson?
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It's just unknown. So you have a very small number of manuscripts. There's really no question about the originality of the text.
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It's just that in the Western manuscripts, someone early on had an issue with, probably certainly wasn't a woman scribe anyways, with where to place this in the instructions that Paul gives to the church.
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So with that in mind then, we go back to the discussion from Bart Ehrman and pick it up from there.
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I'm going to back it up just a little bit so we can get some context going here so we can how he, in my opinion, spins this particular concept.
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There's a passage that's quoted commonly today in the arguments over whether women should be allowed a ministerial role in the church.
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That's found in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, where the apostle Paul, who wrote 1
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Corinthians, evidently says that women are to be silent in the churches, that they're not to speak in the church services.
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This passage, though, is a passage that is under dispute by textual scholars because there are some manuscripts that put these verses at a different place in the text, and these verses have characteristics in them that make it look like Paul didn't write them.
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So it looks like to many textual scholars today that these verses originated as a marginal note by a scribe who was opposed to women speaking in church, and that later these verses got stuck into 1
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Corinthians 14, so they're not originally by Paul. Now, talk about overreaching, okay?
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To make these verses unoriginal due to the fact that in a small group of manuscripts very closely related to one another and connected to one another, there is a transposition of the verses simply down to the end of the chapter.
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It is tremendously overreaching, and obviously what the assertion is on Ehrman's part is, well, see, you know, we really can't know the role of women.
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The Bible's insufficient to tell us what the role of women is because there's a textual variance at this one place. It's not like there's nothing else the
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Bible says about women or that Paul doesn't say things elsewhere, but because in Western manuscripts there's a transposition.
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It's still there. The text is still there. It's just at a different point. Then you notice the little, did you notice the mixture of two things there?
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You have the textual data, but then you have this assertion that, well, and there's internal aspects that make scholars, not named, but scholars think this was not original.
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Which scholars and what are these aspects? That's what I would like to know. It's very easy to just throw that kind of thing out there and say, ah, see, but who?
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What are the aspects? Is it something about the language? What specifically is it?
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That's what I'd like to know. So, again, when I see
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Ahriman and then enemies of the faith, this is the same thing that you'll find, for example, in the
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God Who Wasn't There video, Islamic apologists are parroting
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Ahriman just repeatedly over and over and over again. It's all an agenda.
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You take the same data, we're all looking at the same data, and now we spin it. How can we spin this?
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How can I spin this if I'm apostate? How can I spin this to defend my abandonment of what
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I once said I believed? How can I make that work? If you're a Muslim, OK, I want to destroy any confidence in the
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Bible's word of God. Don't bother me with the fact that if Ahriman were to address the Qur 'an, that the results of that would be significantly, if he were to be consistent at all,
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I don't know whether he would be, but if he were to be consistent at all, he would have to point out that, well, the
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Qur 'an can't even compete with the New Testament in this area because of what happened to its text later on, the creation of a synthetic ecclesiastical text, the burning of probably the most important early witnesses, etc.,
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etc., and the fact that in many Islamic countries today, if you were to even attempt to address this particular issue, if you were to attempt to study the earlier text of the
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Qur 'an and attempt to say to anyone that in point of fact there might be any issues with the
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Qur 'an, you would end up in jail or dead, one of the two. Put all that together, and you have a completely different situation.
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So you're hearing spin, and really what we have to learn to do is to recognize spin, and the only way to recognize spin is to know the facts well enough to recognize when only a portion of the facts are being represented, or when the conclusions being drawn are not the only conclusions that could be drawn, and when they are consistently drawn one direction, then you get an idea of what's really going on.
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So we continue. What about the question of homosexual behavior? Well, the question of homosexual behavior is also a difficult problem, but it's not one that is related to textual issues per se.
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It has more to do with translational issues, and there the problem is that our term homosexuality, we tend to think that people have an orientation of one way or another, and homosexuality refers to a certain orientation.
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The problem is ancient people didn't talk in terms of orientation and hadn't conceived of the idea of orientation. And so when a word gets translated by the term homosexuality, it conveys precisely the wrong idea to us today.
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There wasn't an ancient word for homosexuality, so the Greek words that are being translated homosexuality actually had a different nuance in the ancient world.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is a facile, simplistic, highly inaccurate regurgitation of some of your standard
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Scanzoni, Mollenkot, Helminiac, all those liberal writers on the subject of homosexuality referenced in my book,
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The Same Sex Controversy, co -written with Jeff Neal. And I'm seeing someone asking if this is from an
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Islam debate. I'm going, no, this is from an NPR interview. I have no idea what this person's asking.
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Anyways, just sort of confusing me a little bit. Anyways, all of that stuff you just heard there, you have to break each one of them down.
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You have to break each one of those assertions down and go,
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OK, what do you mean by they didn't think of this? They didn't think in these terms.
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And when you do that, you discover that these types of assertions just simply are not true at all and that they well understood the idea of pedophilia, of pederasty, of homosexuality.
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You know, there was an excellent example of someone with modern arrogance, modern arrogance.
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They just didn't know about these things, you know, they weren't as insightful as we are.
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Baloney, Baloney, they knew all about this stuff. And they did describe it. Plato had described it.
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Come on. That's just absurd. And when you get into the actual terms themselves,
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Paul is very, very direct in the terminology he uses. Arsene Coytes coming from the
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Septuagint and so on and so forth. These are all issues that we will be hearing again in November of this year, I assure you, when this subject is debated in Orlando, if you didn't hear the last dividing line, when
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I will be debating John Shelby Spong on that particular subject. So anyway, that was that's the kind of thing that's just passed off.
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But how many people sitting there going, oh, that's a he's a Bible scholar. And he's just said that we can't really, really can't address the issue ourselves, you know.
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And I'm like, you just that that's where you really, really wish, you know, it's odd when
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I wrote the co -authored The Same Sex Controversy with Jeff Neal, I don't remember being contacted by NPR.
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They didn't want to do an interview on my book. I wonder why that might be.
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Well, anyway, this is a rather complicated topic, as it turns out. The the word that normally gets translated homosexuality in the
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New Testament is a word that's the the word is arsenic, which is the
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Greek word. And it's a it's a word that hardly ever occurs in Greek literature. Paul may have made it up, but he's right.
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I think Paul did literally means a man who has sexual intercourse with a man.
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Hey, I'm going to keep that one as a clip to play for certain other liberals out there that don't seem to understand how to translate that.
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So the ancient people did did know that there were same sex relationships in the ancient world, but they didn't think it was due to sexual orientation.
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And the reason it was wrong for people like for people in the ancient world and the Roman world generally is because it meant that one of the men was behaving as a woman by by being on the receiving end of the sex act.
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And that meant that man was being dominated sexually and domination wasn't acceptable for men.
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But those passages have become so debated as to whether, in fact, the whole notion of lying with a man was reviled and would cause a man to be cast out of the church.
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Well, the problem is that in the in the ancient world, when two men had had sex, only one of the men was condemned for it, the man who was on the receiving end.
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And people overlook that contextual fact when they use these passages. It's excuse me, excuse me.
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That's not the case in Leviticus 18 and 20, which is probably the Greek septuagint origination of the term that Paul is utilizing, ars in ekoites, which
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Ehrman correctly says Paul probably himself created that term from the two terms that are used in the septuagint in Leviticus 18 and 20 on this issue.
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And it's not just one person who is condemned. It is both who are condemned in that context, not just one.
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Well, part of the problem that people have to put these texts in context, or if they rip them out of context, they misunderstand them.
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Yes. And the context would be a biblical worldview of sexuality and creation.
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A biblical worldview of sexuality and creation. And of course, that's what nobody on NPR is certainly going to be wanting anyways.
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That is what is always missed in these books on homosexuality is you won't allow for a biblical context.
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These folks won't allow for the idea of there being a biblical teaching on God's purpose in the creation of man and the creation of the sexual orientation of man and woman.
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They won't allow for that. So it's it always is funny to me to listen to former evangelicals talk because they can't totally get rid of it.
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It still comes up. It still pops out every once in a while. And they're not.
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I see a major difference, at least in my limited experience, between those who are former evangelicals who have become liberals, who have apostatized or done whatever, and those who were raised in it, in the way that they that they phrase things, the way they say things, the way they respond.
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I see a real difference. I don't know if anybody else does, but just thought I'd share that with you. At 27 before the hour, you're listening to the
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Diane Rehm show. So one has to say how good of a translation is the version that most of us are familiar with the
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King James Bible. Well, the King James Bible is obviously a classic of English literature, and I encourage my students to read the
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King James Bible for its literary merits. There's been nothing like it since.
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But if what you're interested in is knowing a an English approximation of what the authors of the
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New Testament or the Hebrew Bible actually wrote, then the King James is not a good translation, because the
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King James translation was based on manuscripts from the Middle Ages that, by and large, are not very good manuscripts.
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We've discovered hundreds and hundreds, thousands of manuscripts since the King James translators did their work.
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And these newer discoveries have shown us that in many places the
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King James translators simply were translating the wrong text. Now, in case you are not familiar with textual critical issues, let me just mention
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I would in general agree with what was just said in the sense that I addressed this subject in the
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King James only controversy, dealt with the issue of what's called the Textus Receptus, dealt with the differences between Textus Receptus and the majority text, the
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Byzantine text, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the variations that exist within those particular text types, the origination of the
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King James translation, some of the issues in the King James, for example, the fact you had different committees working on different sections of the
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New Testament and the Old Testament, and the final editing was not necessarily perfect in the sense that it did not bring about a consistent translation.
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For example, you have the very same Greek phrase ouf on eusais, you shall not murder, translated in one section of the
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King James in the Gospels as you shall not kill, and in Paul as you shall not murder.
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It's the exact same Greek, but it's different translation, things like that.
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And so various and sundry issues there. If you haven't read the King James only controversy,
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I do recommend it for not just if you are interested in the King James only controversy itself, maybe you haven't run into someone who is
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King James only, but at least it would provide you with the background of the text and so on and so forth.
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I notice that it is time to take our break. And when we come back, we'll continue with Bart Ehrman on NPR and the
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Diane Rehm show, and your phone calls too, if you'd like. Also an
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Abed Didat clip coming up as well. Right back. The Trinity is a basic teaching of the
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Christian faith. It defines God's essence and describes how he relates to us. James White's book,
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The Forgotten Trinity, is a concise, understandable explanation of what the Trinity is and why it matters. It refutes cultic distortions of God, as well as showing how a grasp of the significant teaching leads to renewed worship and deeper understanding of what it means to be a
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Christian. And amid today's emphasis on the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, the Forgotten Trinity is a balanced look at all three persons of the
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Trinity. Dr. John MacArthur, senior pastor of Grace Community Church, says James White's lucid presentation will help layperson and pastor alike.
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Highly recommended. You can order the Forgotten Trinity by going to our website at aomin .org.
32:38
More than any time in the past, Roman Catholics and evangelicals are working together. They are standing shoulder to shoulder against social evils.
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They are joining across denominational boundaries in renewal movements. And many evangelicals are finding the history, tradition, and grandeur of the
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The Roman Catholic Controversy, is an absorbing look at current views of tradition in Scripture, the papacy, the mass, purgatory and indulgences, and Marian doctrine.
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James White points out the crucial differences that remain regarding the Christian life and the heart of the gospel itself that cannot be ignored.
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Order your copy of The Roman Catholic Controversy by going to our website at aomin .org.
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If you can listen to Rush Limbaugh shuffling his papers and adjusting his hearing aid and stuff, you can listen to me trying to survive.
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I feel fine, but the throat's just really dry and scratchy and sort of type thing, you know.
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At least I didn't get what my son had. My goodness, he had one of those coughs where you just want to run into another room, you know, because you just know that he's going to explode or something.
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It was really bad. But anyway, he's back at work today. I'm sure he didn't want to go back to work today, but, you know, that's just what happens when you're 19 years old.
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You get to go back to work. Anyhow, we're listening to Bart Ehrman on the
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NPR program. This is not a Muslim debate. This is Bart Ehrman on NPR.
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This is not Ahmad Didat, and this is not about Islam, okay? I just want to make sure everyone's on the same page this time, because last time, somehow, the transition got lost.
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In fact, I'm going to, well, let's go ahead and play just one more little clip, and then we'll go to the
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Didat thing, and if we get any calls, then we can go back to that. Take a break. I'd like to ask you about the
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Christmas story and about the birth of Christ and how each of the texts differs or is the same and how they may have been changed.
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The Christmas story, of course, we tell every year, and the way we tell the
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Christmas story is that we take the stories found in the Gospel of Luke and the stories found in the Gospel of Matthew, and we conflate them.
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We put them together into one big story, and so you tell the story where there are shepherds and where there are wise men.
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You tell the stories about Herod killing the children and them fleeing to Egypt, and you tell the story about them presenting
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Jesus in the temple after he's born for circumcision. This is combining what
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Matthew says with what Luke says. When you read the accounts carefully, however, I have my students do an exercise.
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I have them list everything that happens in Matthew's account and everything that happens in Luke's account and then compare the two lists, and students are struck by the fact that virtually all the stories in Matthew are absent from Luke, and the stories of Luke are absent from Matthew.
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Oh, I just made a mistake. Instead of hitting pause, I hit stop.
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Oops. Many apologies. Now, just for a moment, just for a moment, what if that wasn't the case?
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Now, I'm not really commenting on Ahriman at the moment, but if you would just consider the debate with John Dominic Crossan and the normal stuff that you see on television these days about the
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Gospels and, you know, when all the liberals get all their, you know, their free air time that conservatives are never given, so on and so forth.
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What do you hear? If the two Gospels relate the same thing, then you focus on the alleged differences.
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If they focus on different things and don't narrate the same things, that's taken as an indication of the impropriety of the
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Gospels. In other words, it doesn't matter what they do. I mean, let's face it. If they gave the same story in the same words, in fact, in the
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DDOT debate, he goes to a place where in Isaiah and, I think, his first Kings, you have the exact same text, clearly using the same historical source material.
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And since they're identical word for word, that means it's not the Word of God because it's plagiarism. And if you then go to where you're telling the same story but they tell it in different ways, that means that they have different purposes and they're changing the history.
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And if they don't tell the same story, then that means that they are relating different things, and that means it's not history.
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So what could the Bible do? How could the Bible say anything that folks will not find a way of saying, see, that means it's all wrong.
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It doesn't matter. You can say the exact same words, different words, or not the same words at all, or not even tell the same story, and all of them are considered to be evidence that somehow the
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Bible's garbled. Is that how it works? Seems to be to me, anyway. Well, I'm not sure where the little cursor thingy was, so we're going to waste a moment here.
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...accounts. And so what we have here are two different accounts of the birth, rather than...
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And the virgin birth. The virgin birth, yeah. So, well, I think
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I skipped something there. Let me try this. ...are struck by the fact that... There we go. ...virtually all the stories in Matthew are absent from Luke, and the stories of Luke are absent from Matthew, to the extent that when you compare these lists carefully, it's very hard to reconcile the two with one another.
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Why? Because in Matthew's gospel,
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Herod is out to kill the babies in Bethlehem, and so he sends out the troop, but Joseph is warned in a dream, so they escape to Egypt.
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In Luke's account, there's nothing about that at all. On the contrary, after Jesus is born, 30 days later they go to the temple, they perform a sacrifice, and then they return to Nazareth.
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Well, if they perform the sacrifice in Jerusalem and return to Nazareth, how is it that they fled to Egypt? It's...
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Why? I mean, if we've got two years here, most people feel that the... You have a two -year time frame here.
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Remember Herod's asking about this stuff? So if you've only got one month at the beginning, this is two years later, why is there a problem?
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I'm confused. It's impossible to reconcile these two accounts. Impossible? Why? Why is the reconciliation that has been understood for 2 ,000 years...
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Well, okay. 1 ,800 years, says his first comment on it. Why is that impossible?
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I see an agenda here. So what we have here are two different accounts of the birth, rather than...
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The virgin. Well, before we listen to Diane Rehm's asking about the virgin birth, let's move over.
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Here's some more discussion here. You're probably going to have to play with the equalization over there, oh great guru of the soundboard, because...
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Well, then again, you made this recording. But actually, you made this recording off of a videotape, so what can we say?
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And then we played with all that stuff afterwards. This is toward the beginning of the debate between Ahmed Didad and this pastor fellow that I honestly don't even remember what his name was.
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It will sound great. Now you're on the records, you're stuck. It's going to have to sound great.
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He has started off by asking which Bible translation the pastor is going to defend.
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And ironically, at the end of the debate, one person does get up and says, you know, most of us in this room can speak more than one language.
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We all understand the differences between translations and the necessity of that. Are you trying to say because there are different translations that the
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Bible is invalid? That's clearly what he was saying at the beginning. But then at the end, he says, oh, no, no, no,
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I was talking about the textual issues. But that wasn't what he was saying. And I skipped over that because it was it was a waste of time.
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Now he gets into more of a discussion of the Bible. So we would like the pastor to explain who did this and who did this with the word of God, if it is the word of God.
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Then in the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
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700 times we are told that this is not the book of God.
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This is not the word of God. 700 times. Now, did you catch that?
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700 times. 700 times in the Pentateuch.
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. We are told this is not the word of God. Now, here's what you need to understand.
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From the Islamic perspective, the Koran is Allah speaking.
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Now, I'm not, they keep saying that, but I've found, no, this is not the
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Diane Rehm show. Wow. The holidays were rough on a few folks.
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This is the debate from somewhere in the 1980s and 90s in Scandinavia. For the
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Muslim, this is all Allah speaking. Now, I'm not sure how that works because he's about to say, well, we have, you know, we have saying, and the
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Lord said to Moses and Moses said to the Lord and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that means this is not
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God speaking. It's not God's word. This is a recording of what happened in history, as if that means that could not be
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God's word. So, they have a much narrower understanding of what constitutes the word of God. We believe that the word of God is
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Theanostos. It's God -breathed and it is expressed in human language. And hence, you can have, for example, the psalmist expressing his deepest feelings of abandonment when he is under the wrath of God or he is facing trial and tribulation, and it's still the word of God.
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Our understanding of what the word of God is is much wider, much deeper, much broader,
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I think, than what you have in Islam. But that doesn't make any sense to me because you have
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Jesus talking in the Quran. Does that mean that's not the word of God when
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Jesus is responding to Allah? I've not figured out how that works and can't get anybody to call in to answer such questions anyways, but anyways, so that's where this is coming from.
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You read, and the Lord said unto Moses, and Moses said unto the
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Lord, the Lord said unto Moses, and Moses said unto the
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Lord, which means the Lord didn't speak these words, nor did
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Moses write those words. Why? I mean, he will make this kind of assertion.
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And he is, I guess, just assuming that certain people in a certain worldview are just going to believe whatever he has to say.
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But the fact of the matter is that he will make that kind of assertion, but he won't explain why that means that this isn't the word of the
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Lord, that Moses didn't write it, or that God didn't speak these words, or things like that. Is it the truth that somebody else is talking, this is what he heard, his information is, this is what
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God told Moses, and Moses told God, and Moses told, God told Moses, and Moses told
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God. 700 times God told, this is not the word of God.
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Then this book, these five books, attributed to the Holy Prophet Moses. But in the last book, the book of Deuteronomy...
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Now, what you're going to get here, of course, is the discussion of the narration of the death of Moses.
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And Moses couldn't have written that, and therefore, I guess that means Moses didn't write all the rest of it. Even though the
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Lord Jesus Christ said that Moses wrote the five books, and there is no contradiction between saying
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Moses wrote those books, and saying that when his compilation was collected by the people of God, that they added the story of his death to that, and that the
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Spirit of God somehow can't do that. All of that, of course, might be effective against an absurdly literal fundamentalist, but it's not effective against anyone who actually thinks about the issue of the authorship of Scripture.
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So, I'm going to move a little bit beyond that to his next primary objection here.
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Died, this pastor, died in English. Moses was 120 years old when he died.
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When he died. Okay, more about Moses. That he was 120 years old when he died.
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And when he died, his eyes were not dimmed, nor his natural forces abated.
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He was too strong enough, vigorous enough to marry another 16 -year -old. He had those powers. Moses say that?
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Not sure how we know how old she was, but that's an interesting idea. Before he died, and there arose not a prophet, since in Israel, like unto
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Moses, whom the Lord did face to face. Did Moses say that? Yes.
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No, this is not only not the word of God, it's not... It's not only the word of God, it's the word of Moses.
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So, if someone, if the people of God, comment upon the life of Moses.
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Now, you know, if this was some other book, I guess it's just because it's in this book, as if somewhere in the book it says every word in this book was only written by Moses.
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I mean, this is, again, it would have been nice if there had been a meaningful response given, but it wasn't even touched in any part of the debate at all in response.
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Somebody else is writing it. On the very face of it, any school child in the kindergarten who can understand and read this will be able to confirm and tell you, this is not
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God's word, and this is not the word of Moses. These twins that I have.
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Now, to show you that these twins are not really twins. These are not identical. There is some discussion...
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He's referring to twins, in case you're wondering. He had brought up these two different World Council of Churches translations, probably revised standard version,
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I'd assume. At least in English. I don't know what it would be in Scandinavia or wherever it was.
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But they're from different years. But they were the same cover, so on and so forth.
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And so he's holding the two of those up in the video. They're identical in the paper, but I don't know whether the pastor would like to cooperate.
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I would like him to open... Now, what's he's going to do here? And when you listen,
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I can go ahead and play the whole clip here, because at the end, you get this wild applause. And every time
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I hear applause, I wonder, what are these people thinking? What are they thinking to applaud for something like this?
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It's so ridiculous. What he's going to do is he's going to read from Isaiah.
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He's going to have the pastor follow along with 1 Kings. And there's a section of identical text, which only means that both were using the same historical source, maybe even using 1
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Kings in Isaiah, providing the historical... It has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
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That's plagiarism, he's going to say. And that proves it's not the word of God. And there's this wild applause.
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And you just wonder, what kind of person finds this to be a meaningful argument?
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I really don't understand it, but you have to listen to it to understand. If you Jesus, if you will help me, otherwise
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I have to call somebody from the audience. If you will help me, this book here,
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Isaiah chapter 37. It will only open Isaiah 37. No, this one here, these are pins.
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You want to compare the pins to see how they are deceiving the Christian world, how they are producing by the millions and deceive the ordinary people.
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Now notice what he's saying there. Deceiving the ordinary people. This is deception. If two sections say the same thing about historical incident, it's deception.
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Why? We don't know. We're never told. I just want to demonstrate that and I would like him to help me with this one, sir.
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This is the Holy Bible, the standard version. Just open Isaiah 37 and I'll read from here and see whether it is the same.
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That's all. Yeah, it was the RSV's reading. If you will, sir. Shall I?
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Yes, sir. OK. Just open it. Just have a look, sir, whether I'm reading correctly.
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Isaiah 37. Which verse?
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From verse 1, sir. So we don't have to search. Got it, sir?
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Verse 1. When King Hezekiah heard it, he rent his clothes and covered himself with sackcloth and went into the house of the
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Lord. Correct, sir? Yes, I'm following. Yes. And went into the house of the
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Lord. And he sent Eliakim, who was over the household, and Shadna, the secretary, and the senior priest covered with sackcloth to the prophet
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Isaiah, the son of Amoz. Verse 3. They said to him, This day is a day of distress, of rebuke and of disgrace.
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Children have come to the birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth. It may be that the
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Lord your God heard all the words of Rabakshet, of whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to mock the living
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God. And go on to verse 8. The Rabshakeh returned and found the king of Assyria fighting.
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And going on to verse 14. Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messenger and read it.
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And Hezekiah and on and on. Word for word the same. Yes. But sir,
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I'm not reading from the book of Isaiah. I'm reading from the book of Kings.
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Now, now, I stop it right there. Okay, he says,
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I'm not reading from Isaiah. I'm reading from the book of Kings. And immediately, applause erupts.
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Even before he makes the application of what that means. That to me says it was set up.
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That to me says that there were people in that audience who were already set up, waiting for this to break into it, to make it sound like, oh, wow, he just, what a point, oh, man.
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You know, it was sort of like the Lloyd Benson thing. You're no Jack Kennedy shot, you know.
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That's what everyone's going to remember. He was reading from, he was reading verse Kings instead of Isaiah.
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And what is that supposed to mean again? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
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The pastor goes, that's the greatness of the Bible. Well, yeah, in the sense that you have the accurate transmission of that particular historical incident in two different places.
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Yeah. And there's no reason for their, again, this is the common thing you have in dealing with Muslims is they read things anachronistically.
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The Quran is the final authority in all things. Well, the Quran is interpreted by the Hadith anyways. And if the
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Quran represents to them the word of God in one particular form, then that's the way it has to be.
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That's just the way that you have to understand it, have to accept it.
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And if the Bible differs from that, if the Bible, well, of course, remember, one of the big things is that one of their big problems is that the idea is, well, the
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Quran, one author, one period of time, boom, you have 40 different authors, 1 ,500 years.
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And therefore, it can't possibly be the word of God, as if God isn't big enough to be able to do that.
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And I'm going to throw in some, yeah, okay, just got
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PM, absolutely positively, no idea what it means. But more confusion coming from the computer.
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And so since it doesn't say it the way that the particular
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Muslim assumes God speaks in the Quran, then you can't have it in the issue of the
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Bible. So, yes, on my blog, I said I would possibly throw in some Ahmadidat, which is what we've been doing for the past 15 minutes now.
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So what does that mean? I don't know. Anyways, we will continue.
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You see, word for word, word for word, I am reading 2
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Kings 19, and he's confirming Isaiah 37. In other words, word for word, it is the same.
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And let me share with you the knowledge I have gathered from the Christian learned men.
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They tell me, unless the pastor says to the contrary, that the Bible was not a verbal revelation.
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Okay, right there, I'm going to stop that at exactly 2007. The Bible is not a verbal revelation. Here's exactly what
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I mentioned before, the exact same idea before. From their perspective, they just don't understand.
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I'm certain that many have tried to explain it over time, but they don't understand the idea of God speaking through human instrumentality.
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And it's still being the word of God. It has to be, I am Allah, I say this. That's as far as Allah can go.
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Allah evidently is not capable of putting his revelation in such a way that it can have the kind of communicative capacity that the word of God has in the
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Bible, because he can't communicate through what men experience under his sovereignty.
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Just can't be done, I guess. And that means it's allegedly not a verbal revelation. Of course, he also confuses
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Hans Kung and other people as if they are representative of Christianity, and so you have that whole other issue that comes up as well.
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We'll continue with Bart Ehrman and Ahmed Didat, and your calls as well. Well, actually, we only have a little over 24 hours until we're back at it again tomorrow afternoon or evening, six o 'clock eastern standard time.
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We'll be here with The Dividing Line. See you then. God bless. Been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602, or write us at PO Box 37106,
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Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the World Wide Web at aomin .org,
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that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.