Review of the Textus Receptus Debate between James White and Peter Van Kleeck

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00:00

you cannot give us any instance where the church has spoken about the proper reading of Ephesians 3.9, can you? Well, right here.

00:13

There it is.

00:14

So in this way for hundreds of years.

00:16

Hundreds of years, okay.

00:17

So the Latin Vulgate was used by God in the Western church for 1,100 years and has numerous readings in it that this rejects.

00:26

So which was the Holy Spirit? Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

00:47

My name is Keith Boscky and I am a Calvinist and I am joined tonight by two of my good friends and regulars on the show, Jake Korn and the not yet Calvinist, Matthew Henson.

01:02

Good evening.

01:02

Good evening, gentlemen.

01:03

how are you guys doing? What do you do? I like how I get an epithet and Jake doesn't.

01:10

It's just, yeah, Jake.

01:11

Oh, and then the not yet Calvinist Matthew.

01:12

Let's, let's bring that.

01:13

I've accomplished so much.

01:16

I am thinking about for the caricatures that I'm having made of all of us.

01:21

I am thinking of nice little titles.

01:24

Yeah.

01:24

I'm thinking of calling Jake the interrogator, you know, based on his background in the military and, and the fact that he's, he's pretty, he's pretty strong.

01:34

What are we going to call Richard uncle? I'm good with uncle Richard.

01:37

Yeah.

01:37

Okay.

01:38

Well, we'll have him, uh, we'll have him a nickname too.

01:41

Well, anyhow, uh, for those of you who don't know tonight, we're going to be doing something that we've never done before in the program.

01:47

We're going to be reviewing a debate that recently took place between Dr.

01:52

James White and Dr.

01:55

Peter Van Cleek on the subject of the Textus Receptus.

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And the focus of the debate was the contention that the Textus Receptus actually does perfectly mirror the original autographs that being the original writings of all the apostles and prophets have been preserved perfectly in what we know now as the Textus Receptus.

02:23

And so this debate was, uh, two hours and some change went back and forth.

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There was a lot of interaction between the two.

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And I want to begin tonight by thanking Matthew, because Matthew took the time to go in and clip out some of the clips from the video.

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And he's done all the work to make those video clips available for us to watch tonight as we watch and respond to what is being said.

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But before we do that, I do have a few shout outs that I want to make.

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And I know that Jake has at least one shout out that he wants to make.

02:57

Number one, it's October everyone.

02:59

And October is Reformation month.

03:02

We're looking forward to October 31st, which is the traditional day that we believe Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the castle church door in Bentonburg, thereby sparking the fire that would become the Inferno of the Protestant Reformation.

03:15

That is October 15, 15, 17.

03:18

And so my shirt tonight represents it says the door is fine.

03:24

I'm fixing your theology.

03:25

You can't see that part, but it's down there.

03:27

And so it's a meme shirt.

03:28

Somebody in my church bought me this and I'm wearing it.

03:31

I'm also drinking tonight.

03:32

I won't tell you what it is.

03:34

It's milk.

03:35

I was drinking milk from a coffee cup because I don't drink coffee very much.

03:39

And this is from my good friend, Claude Ramsey, the happy Calvinist who sent me not only some of his decals, but he sent me this wonderful mug, the Here I Stand Theology Podcast.

03:50

And I want to thank you, Claude, for sending me this mug.

03:53

And as you see me drinking tonight, I'll be drinking a toast to you, my friend.

03:56

Thank you.

03:57

And he has a great show for those who haven't seen it.

03:59

I just posted one of his shows on the Conversations with a Calvinist page just this week.

04:04

It was a wonderful show where he called out a health and wealth false teacher.

04:08

So it was really good.

04:09

It was really good.

04:10

Jake, go ahead and start.

04:11

I know you had some things you wanted to say.

04:12

Yeah.

04:13

After the last podcast, I put out a call to upgrade my sound equipment and some really awesome guys chipped in.

04:21

So I wanted to thank David Martin for sending me an audio interface.

04:25

Rick Nagy, who sent me this mic.

04:28

Rick Nagy, I deployed with him to Iraq in 2008.

04:30

He's a great guy.

04:31

And then some buddies donated to a GoFundMe, Samuel Johnson, Gavin Thorpe, and my chaplain buddy, Daniel Neville, who sent money to pay for the accessories and cables and stuff.

04:43

So hopefully my plosives sound a little bit more tolerable and I can get y'all a better mix.

04:49

So thank you very much.

04:50

I appreciate it.

04:51

Awesome.

04:52

Awesome.

04:53

Well, I want to take the time as we begin to go into this conversation, unless Matthew has anything he wants to add.

04:59

Anybody you want to thank? I wish I had a fourth monitor.

05:03

Okay.

05:03

That is literally actually necessary tonight based upon the Eldritch abomination of software that is all tied together.

05:11

I have this nickname of the tech romancer, still do in some circles.

05:15

Being able to bring technology back from the dead was my talent.

05:19

And so this is, yeah, this is going to be fun.

05:22

We'll see how it goes, audience.

05:23

Every test has worked fine, but live fire is always something different.

05:28

So this could be fun.

05:29

I understand.

05:30

All right.

05:31

Well, like I said, we're going to get on to talking about the debate.

05:33

Now we're going to begin the review.

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And what I would like to do is, uh, and I didn't tell them I was going to ask them to do this.

05:39

So if either one of them decides they don't want to do that, I won't make them.

05:43

But I was going to ask if, uh, one of you would take just a couple of minutes and explain the position of Dr.

05:50

White and the other one, take a couple of minutes and explain the position of Dr.

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Van Cleek.

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I can see Jake just really wants to explain Van Cleek's position.

06:00

Um, I try, I really can.

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We have, we have all listened to the debate multiple times.

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We have spent time, uh, and most of us, and I want to say this from the outset, all of us have met Dr.

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White, even Matthew was a moderator in his debate on the, uh, the issue of homosexuality when he and Dr.

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Michael Brown debated the two homosexuals over the subject of homosexuality in the Bible.

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So Matthew knows him very well as a moderator.

06:27

Jake, you were the one who hosted him here.

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I've hosted him at my church.

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So, so none of us are really coming at this unbiased.

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We all have, we all have a background with Dr.

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White's materials.

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We all are very familiar with him, but I know that there's going to be people listening who might not be familiar with Dr.

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White's position.

06:42

So whichever one of you guys want to take a, you know, one or two minutes to explain Dr.

06:46

White's position, the eclectic text position versus the Texas receptus.

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And, uh, who wants to go first? Matthew, you pick buddy.

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Um, or could I, I, when we say the word texts, I think we need to define that first and then we can go into the positions on it.

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So, um, to the listener that hears this Latin sounding word, cause that's what it is.

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Textus receptus.

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So let's go back to the start.

07:10

So the new Testament is what we're talking about primarily tonight.

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Um, the new Testament was written by apostles in a language called Koine Greek.

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Um, this is marketplace Greek.

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They wrote, uh, to churches.

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Most of them, they wrote, uh, in life, they wrote as they were encountering issues and things like that.

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And, uh, and all three of us are biblical inerrant inerrancy advocates.

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We believe in the inerrancy of the scriptures, the infallibility of the scriptures, all that sort of thing.

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But as they wrote, they would send this letter, Paul would send this letter to Ephesus or to Caesarea Philippi or to, to these other places.

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They would get it.

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And then papyrus, which is what most of this was written on would degrade very, very quickly.

07:53

Um, I have papers that I've pulled out of files that have been in filing cabinets for only 20 years or so.

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And they're already yellowed and kind of crinkly and stuff like that.

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So these papyri would degrade very quickly.

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So what they would do is they would make copies of them and they would spread them around because we didn't have scanning.

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We didn't have the internet.

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We had no ability to do that.

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And then they would pass them around to the different churches.

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In fact, in, um, in, in Colossians, it says, be on the lookout for the letter that I sent to, uh, I think it was Laodicea.

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And most scholars think that was Ephesians that he's referring to because it was a circular letter.

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So they would make copies of these, they would, they would spread them all over the place and, and everyone wanted the new Testament and would make copies of them.

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Um, but because of that, there are occasional mistakes.

08:35

So we believe the process by which God inspired the scriptures was infallible, but nothing that God, uh, or everything God wanted in the scriptures got there.

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But as people make copies of them, they make some of them make mistakes.

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Some of them make intentional changes, though that's not the majority of the, of what happens.

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And so after only a few decades, you start to get manuscripts, copies of these letters that have differences in them.

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So 2000 years later, and I'm skipping literally all of we now have the task of saying, okay, how is it that we get back to what, uh, was originally written so that we can know what God's word says.

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And when, whenever you have a number of manuscripts of say the gospel of John, um, and they differ from one another, that's called a textual variant.

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You'll hear that quite a bit.

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The textual variant just means that one copy differs from another copy.

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And so that gives you a little bit of a background on what we're dealing with.

09:28

The Textus Receptus specifically is a particular, uh, collection of Greek manuscripts, uh, from as early as it's a set of printed editions, um, from around the 1500s.

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And so it is one particular sort of thread in the story of how the new Testament came to be.

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It's, and again, we're dealing with the new Testament here.

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This is, this is not an old Testament subject.

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So the Textus Receptus is a particular collection of manuscripts from which the King James was translated from which, um, the new King James was translated.

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There's a couple others that, that use it and is contrasted over against a different position that looks at not just the subset of manuscripts, but the huge breadth of manuscripts that we have discovered and picks the best from all of those.

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So that's kind of a long-winded introduction, but when we start throwing around these words, variant, manuscript, all this kind of thing, it helps to be grounded in, in history where that started.

10:25

So that was no one's position.

10:26

I think both, both men would affirm everything I just said there.

10:30

Yeah.

10:31

But when we, uh, now looking at Van Cleek's position, I don't know if you're going to talk about that or Jake is looking at his position, he would, he would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, cause I'm gonna let you explain it a little further, but he would say there's one particular set of manuscripts, one printed text that represents the perfect copy of the originals.

10:50

So go ahead and explain that further.

10:52

Sure.

10:52

So any good debate has a thesis, which can be argued or answered yes or no.

10:57

Um, and so the thesis of this debate was that the Textus Receptus so composed as we have it today, um, is the, is identical to the autograph.

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So the assertion being made, the autograph is when John took quill, I guess, to parchment and John wrote a letter, uh, first John, and it was sent wherever it was sent.

11:19

We don't actually know that is called the autograph, the actual, the apostle writing.

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And so the assertion of the Textus Receptus position of Peter Van Cleek, Dr.

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Peter Van Cleek's position is that the Textus Receptus that we have today is identical to what John wrote, that there are no, that is, it is, it is a perfect and exact replication of what John wrote.

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Now, what is the Textus Receptus is something that I think we can get to in just a minute, but what it is, is a, it is a collection of printed editions of the Greek new Testament.

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So someone says, I want to, I want to make the new Testament in Greek so that preachers can, can, you know, preach from it, which wasn't the original reasoning for doing so, but that's what we do nowadays.

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And so you have Roman Catholic priests and scholars and humanists that, that put together, they pulled manuscripts from here and here and here and here.

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They had maybe a dozen to work with because they're geographically confined and they put together, okay, this is the entire new Testament in Greek.

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And I pulled it from say 10 manuscripts.

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Okay.

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Then he came back and tried several more times to improve it.

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He says, Oh, I made a mistake here.

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Oh, that manuscript turned out to be bad.

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I learned something new here.

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And so this guy, his name is Desiderius Erasmus.

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He's a Roman Catholic priest, creates a number of editions of the Greek new Testament.

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He makes five of them.

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Then about 20 years later, a guy named Stephanus makes his own version, basing or building off what Erasmus did in 1550.

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And then finally, Theodore Beza, Calvin's protege, I guess you would say, acolyte.

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Yeah, that's probably a better way to say it.

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Theodore Beza creates his own version again, sort of in the stream using the same source material largely, but he made different choices than Erasmus did.

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So then you take the seven editions that these men did, five of Erasmus, one from Stephanus, one from Beza, and that is collectively considered the Textus Receptus.

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Those versions have differences from one another, however.

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And so what Van Cleek is holding up, he's holding something called the Trinitarian Bible Society Textus Receptus.

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And what that is, is, and this is a little humorous and it's a point made in the debate.

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So the King James translators, when they translated the Bible into English, they were looking at Erasmus' five editions, Stephanus' and Beza's, and they had to make decisions because they differed.

13:42

Does the word say this or does the word say that? And when they made a call, let's say three of them said this and four of them said this, they made a call.

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The word was Ephesians 3.9, oikonomia, which is a, or koinonia, those are the two words, and they look very similar in the original script.

13:58

Well, the King James translators have three on one hand, four on the other, they have to make a call.

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And sometimes they did it based on deciding what makes most sense in the sentence.

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What does it look like? Does it flow well? If I'm just in the middle of a sentence and squirrel, then obviously that's probably not what was originally written.

14:15

What happened was, there was a guy named FHA Scrivener, who a couple hundred years later, he took the English King James Bible, and then he took the seven Greek editions of the Textus Receptus, and he squished all seven editions together.

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And where they differed, he looked, what decision did the King James translators make? And he said, okay, in this particular case, it was three and four, they took this one.

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So then he produced one, one Textus Receptus, it's usually blue, it's got Trinitarian Bible Society on it.

14:47

And when people walk around and say, this is the Textus Receptus, what they are actually doing is holding up a Greek text that was created by referencing an English text, which referenced seven different Greek texts, and use the English text as the deciding, as the, as the tiebreaker on, on what version to use.

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That blue book, it was directly asked in the debate, James White pointed at it and said, is that the original autograph? And he got an affirmative, yes, this is what the Apostles wrote, the work that Scrivener did.

15:17

Now, I've attempted to give you Van Cleek's position, just describing the historical realities of it.

15:22

I don't think he would take umbrage with anything I said, maybe in the implication, but that's his position.

15:27

Maybe to clarify his position one, one step further, right, is he made great umbrage, he took great umbrage to the part of James White's position, which I'll get into, by saying you're a naturalist, and I'm trusting the Holy Spirit.

15:43

That is the key to understanding Dr.

15:45

Van Cleek's argument, is that he believes the Bible when the Bible says that God will preserve his word, and to him that represents a specific, one specific text.

15:58

A couple of pieces of the Textus Receptus argument that didn't necessarily come up during the debate, one is that of the manuscripts available, it is generally held that it is the Byzantine manuscripts are good and preserved, any of the manuscripts from the Alexandrian family of manuscripts, those are not just bad, but intentionally corrupt, and so anything that comes from that family of manuscripts is to be completely thrown away.

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So there is this idea that there's like, again this is, Dr.

16:33

Van Cleek did not say this, but this is common within the position of TR only or King James only, is that those text types are in fact evil, corrupt, satanic, demonic, right, that those represent very specific.

16:48

So you'll hear the term authorized thrown around a lot, especially with King James only types, again Dr.

16:53

Van Cleek did not say he was a King James onlyist, right, but that this is the authorized text, meaning that the inspiration carries from pen to paper all the way through to what we have today, which is not my position, not Dr.

17:07

White's position, right, we maintain the inspiration happened at the pen to paper level, and then a separate act of preservation described differently is what kept it to now, to this time.

17:19

Yep, okay, so Jake, just in clarifying you, you're representing, or not representing, you're explaining Dr.

17:29

White's position, and again so many people probably already know it who listen to this program, because many people know that I, you know, am like Dr.

17:38

White and have mentioned him many times, maybe they've heard his position, but the position that he takes is the eclectic text position, which would say the opposite, right, would say that those Alexandria manuscripts are not intentionally evil.

17:51

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, right, that the entire collection of the Alexandria manuscripts cannot, or is not considered corrupt on its face, right, so Dr.

18:01

White's position, my position, I think most of the reform community's position, right, is that what Erasmus did was very valuable in its time, in its place, right, he did with what he had something which really hadn't been done yet until that time, in fact, we owe a lot of the Reformation to Erasmus, right, his was the concept of ad fontes and returning back to the original language that Luther took, you know, and ran with, so what Erasmus did essentially was a baby version of gathering an eclectic text, right, he gathered the quilt squares of what was out there and made the best decisions possible with what he had, neither he nor Stephanus nor the King James guys would have said this is somehow a holy golden plates delivered by the angel Moroni from on high, you know, they just, they did, they did the work of textual criticism with what they had, right, so carry that forward to now, how do we get, well, first we kind of pass through that era of the modernists and, you know, the science era starting to degrade what we thought was relying, you know, the authority of the Bible, so all of a sudden you get all of these very liberal theologians starting to say, well, the Bible's not reliable, it's not being supported by archaeology, so maybe it's just a symbol, and there's this, like, there's this road to liberalism, and then all of a sudden the Dead Sea Scrolls, like, awaken this, this, like, reality that, no, God preserved so much more than we had any idea of, and because God in his wisdom did all of this work in, like, the driest portion of the world, all of these other manuscripts, because archaeology got better, because the world opened up to archaeology, because after World War II we were allowed to go places as Western scientists that we weren't really able to go to before, we were discovering all these other manuscripts and looking at them and going through a scientific process of saying, okay, this manuscript, where did it come from, who wrote it, when did it come from, how does it fit in, and our goal on the Dr.

20:27

White side and on my side, I can't speak for everybody, right, is we want what the apostles wrote, we want that, that's what we want, we want to get there, we probably will never actually get those things, and I think that's part of God's wisdom, that we'll never get the pen to paper autograph, so our job is to get as close to that as possible, as is reliable, so we take all of these texts, compare them one to another, there's a very scientific process of determining, are these texts reliable, how do they compare one to another, I mean, we can get into the nerdiness of that as much as you want, but I mean, between reading Bruce Metzger, who was brought up a lot during the debate, Dr.

21:13

Dan Wallace has a lot of great material on how did we arrive with what we have today, when we compare all of these manuscripts one to another, and you can determine from them what the original said, if you have five versions of one sentence, and only one of them has one word that's slightly off from the others, and you can now tell that, well, that one is actually older, or younger, and from a different place, well, maybe we can discount how we got there, so Dr.

21:45

Van Cleek brings this up at one point, kind of mockingly, but you are looking for the oldest, most widely distributed, shortest manuscripts, because over time, as scribes are copying over and over again, the sentences actually tend to get longer as they're writing, not shorter, well, why is that? Well, if a sentence said Jesus, and Jesus, and you're writing Jesus over and over again, at some point, a scribe is going to say, I think we should say Lord Jesus, because this sounds a little inappropriate, and so they'll add a Lord Jesus to it, right, and so comparing these one to another, we've been able to refine, essentially, back to what we believe is as close to the original as we can possibly find.

22:31

Now, to the person who thinks that sounds liberal, that sounds like I'm saying, oh, so we don't have the originals, well, Dr.

22:40

Wallace will say, you know, what we have is a hundred-piece puzzle, but we have 110 pieces, then all of the pieces are there, but over time, additional pieces have been added, so we do have the original, right, it's now our job to just kind of get rid of those extra extraneous pieces, because you have to admit, either through accident or corruption, stuff was added and changed over time, so what's at play here? Well, stuff like the longer ending of Mark, right, which everybody on my side of the debate, almost everybody on my side of the debate would say, it's clearly not original to Mark, it's clearly not, we can't find it on any manuscripts earlier than a certain date, it doesn't match the rest of Mark based off of the, you know, the grammar and thematics and stuff like that, it's clear that that was added later by a later scribe, and we can guess as to the reasons why, but it clearly is problematic and has brought problematic theology into the conversation.

23:45

Snake handling.

23:46

Right, there's snake handling, and you have to speak tons to be a Christian and so on and so forth, so we would look at that and go, yeah, clearly Mark didn't write that, we can obviously see that in time, but the TR people would say, well, it's in the TR, so there we go, so I'll save some of the more specifics on that, but hopefully that got us closer to.

24:08

Yeah, absolutely, I just want to, I think you both did a great job, I want to add one thought before we get to the video clips, and that is this, I was unimpressed with Dr.

24:22

Van Cleek's performance, but I want to be as fair as I can even to somebody who I don't necessarily agree with or even think I would enjoy spending time with, and I don't mean that to be ugly, I'm just saying, you know, Jack Bassford just said, someone asked Matthew about the password on the church computer, okay, I'm sorry, please don't say that publicly, he'll send you a private message.

24:54

I have so many questions and I want them answered.

24:58

That's funny, but here's the thing I want to say about people like Peter Van Cleek and people in his camp, I understand the desire for certainty, and the problem is, and Dr.

25:15

White has said this many times, and I've said this in sermons before, the problem is replacing truth for certainty, and that is, he even said that in this debate, the desire on behalf of the TR advocates, and it really is, in my opinion, a veiled form of King James onlyism, the desire on behalf of those who take this position and who argue for the longer ending of Mark, who argue for the Percopae Adulterae, who argue for the Communion, the people who are arguing for this, I think, truly believe that what they're arguing for is God's faithfulness to His word, in the same way that I would argue that an Arminian is often arguing because they believe they're somehow protecting God, I talked about this on our last show, somehow protecting God from being misrepresented as unjust.

26:08

I think the King James only advocate, TR advocate, is trying to save God from being represented as unfaithful to preserving His word, so I think that's the fairest I can give to somebody from that position.

26:24

The problem is, I think they're going at it from a position that is just patently untrue, that the problem is you can't defend certainty with falsehood, and that's where we are.

26:38

Well, there was this claim, like I said several times, that Dr.

26:41

Van Cleek said to Dr.

26:42

White, yours is a naturalist position, you're not trusting the Holy Spirit, which is, I think, frankly uncharitable, and really, to me, the overall, before we get into the specifics of this debate, is like, did you just throw the entire Reform position out the window? Because it's a fundamentalist position that he's taking, it is entirely a fundamental, there is the providential control of the Holy Spirit in the eclectic text position, right? And I think it's this, if we had the autographs, if we controlled the original in the third century, all it would take is the power of the Roman army to obliterate it, and it's gone, or our idolatrous hearts to make an idol out of it, and it's gone, but instead, God in his wisdom, spread it, spread it, so that it would grow and continue to move and reach, and like, that was God using wisdom to preserve his word for us, so we do believe that the Holy Spirit, but the whole time I'm this debate, I'm asking one thing, did you prepare the bell? By what standard? By what standard? Hold on.

27:57

Did you prepare a bell? I do actually have one, I don't know if mine will pick it up.

28:07

There you go.

28:09

And at what point did the Texas Receptus become the Texas Receptus? Yeah.

28:15

Those are the two big things I want to know, so.

28:18

Let's do this.

28:19

We're going to have Dr.

28:20

Van Cleek actually state his position.

28:22

These are the three arguments that he said, Dr.

28:25

White, at the end, he claims himself the winner of the debate, which is quite a bit of Congress on his part.

28:33

Again, Matthew's going to, his beautiful face is going to go away from us, and we're going to actually see, sorry, yeah, we're going to see the debate participants as they come up on the screen in Matthew's window.

28:44

Yep.

28:46

We're going to hear Peter Van Cleek give the three reasons for the Texas Receptus, and these are the reasons at the end of the debate he says Dr.

28:53

White does not answer, and therefore makes him the winner of the exchange.

28:58

So Matthew.

28:59

Yeah, give me just, you guys just give me a thumbs up if I need more volume, because I can push some more into it.

29:05

All right.

29:06

All right, here we go.

29:10

My aim tonight is to frame the textual debate for Christians.

29:15

This debate between two Christians is in the midst of a Christian audience.

29:20

As such, tonight's debate is not about subjective interpretations of manuscript evidence, but rather it is about what the Spirit of God, through the Word of God, tells us to believe about the words he has preserved for us.

29:31

I appreciate Dr.

29:32

White's robust, though narrow, evidential argument in defense of scripture, which he regularly employs against Muslims, Mormons, and atheists, but tonight that argument will not do, and it will not do because in large part, few if any of our Christian beliefs are primarily based on evidential grounds.

29:48

Beliefs like God created the world in six literal sequential days, that Adam was created in God's image, the parting of the Red Sea, that Jericho fell by marching around its walls, that David killed Goliath, that Thomas was a disciple of Christ, that Jesus raised Lazarus.

30:03

In this manner, belief in the Bible is not special simply because we have thousands of manuscripts.

30:10

Christians believe their Bible to be God's Word in the same way they believe the aforementioned beliefs, by the Spirit of God speaking through the words of God to the people of God, who then receive the words of God by faith.

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In short, this simple reframing is to ask you to believe in each word of your Bible like you believe Elijah called down fire to consume his water-drenched sacrifice, or like you believe King David was once a shepherd boy.

30:35

In affirming the thesis, the TR as the Word of God is equal to the New Testament autographs, I offer the following three arguments.

30:42

One, God's Word regards itself in autographic terms.

30:46

Two, because God's Word regards itself in autographic terms, the Reformers historically regarded the TR as equal to the autographic New Testament text.

30:53

And three, the probability that the TR is equal to the autographic New Testament is very high.

30:58

Beginning now with my first argument.

31:01

Jon Moffitt All right, well, let's bring Matthew back in here.

31:08

Right away, I think that it has to be recognized that when he says the Word of God, he is automatically assuming, and this is, you know, he used a lot of debate language.

31:22

He would accuse Dr.

31:23

White of ad hominem and things like that.

31:25

He used a lot of logical fallacy arguments.

31:29

So you're using a post hoc or something.

31:32

But in that, he is begging the question because he's assuming his position in his argument.

31:39

And that is that the TR is the autograph because it is the autograph.

31:44

And when he says, when you read your Bibles, well, when I read my Bible, my Bible is the ESV.

31:49

I read from the English.

31:50

It's the one we purchased for the church.

31:52

That's the one we have in the seats.

31:54

That's the one I stand up and preach from every Sunday and have for the last 16 years.

31:58

So when I stand and look at that, my Bible doesn't read like his Bible.

32:02

So who's who gets to win in that case? Because he says, he says, when you read your Bibles, he's assuming in that that that if you don't have a TR, you don't have a Bible.

32:11

Yeah.

32:11

Yeah.

32:11

Like if let me if I accept the premise that that God in his wisdom would have preserved one manuscript family forever.

32:21

Right.

32:22

Let's say I accept that premise.

32:24

By what standard is it the TR? By what standard is it that one and not another one? How do you know? How do you make that discernment? Other than Erasmus and then some guys after him said, this is the Bible and no one before that did.

32:43

How do you know it's that one? Like later he'll get into this argument and say, well, the Bible never names your wife, but says you must love your wife.

32:50

Yeah, man, the Bible never says which translation, but says follow the Bible.

32:56

So, so you're right.

32:56

He's automatically conflating that we've given that the TR is the Bible, which he'll claim later in saying the shepherd's voice, the shepherd's voice, you'll know the shepherd's voice.

33:06

And it's like, bro, if you're making an argument that Steven Anderson is making, you're already on the wrong side of history, my man.

33:12

Yeah.

33:12

And this, and this is very similar to something I've heard people say, and they say it innocently, but I do think that it's part of the, it's part of the overall problem.

33:22

And here's what people will say.

33:24

They will say, well, the NIV took a verse out or the NIV took a word out.

33:29

And what they're doing when they say that is they're assuming the preeminence and the complete accuracy of the King James.

33:38

Therefore, if the, if the ESV takes out the word blood, or if the ESV takes out the word fasting, uh, they assume that that is the, the, the, the ESVs error, because there was a standard.

33:50

The standard was the King James and the standard must be the standard forever.

33:56

And for them, it's the TR, but it's just, again, it's just a veiled version of King James only ism.

34:01

And there, well, there is a direct one-to-one relationship because the TR he held up was the work done by Scribner and Scribner.

34:09

So the text he's defending, the specific TR he is defending is FHA Scribner's construction.

34:17

And the, the, um, it's not a direct back translation from the King James back into, into Greek.

34:25

It's a, it's using the King James as the lens by which you decide what the reading should be.

34:31

And, and so, uh, uh, Dr.

34:34

Van Cleek will do a lot of work to try and distance himself from King James only ism.

34:38

The problem is the book he is using the, the, the TR he is holding would not exist without the King James through the King James to get, it couldn't, it, the King James became the ruler.

34:49

Um, it's the 3d glasses, if you will, that make it make Scribner's work possible.

34:55

So the word, the word he uses is plumb line.

34:58

He says there has to be a plumb line and to him, the TR slash KJV is the plumb line.

35:04

I will give folks this, right.

35:06

It does look on its face like liberal creep.

35:11

When you do take certain, the Kama Yohana, you take it out of, out of the Bible.

35:17

It looks like, yes, they are intentionally trying to degrade the Trinity.

35:21

They're intentionally trying to remove that stuff.

35:24

Now, now that, I mean, that is very hurtful to the godly men who are, you know, really trying to do the work of, of preserving the tax, because if, if John didn't write that, if Mark didn't write that, I don't want it.

35:38

I don't care how much I like the woman caught in adultery story.

35:41

If John didn't write it, I don't want it.

35:43

Right.

35:44

And, and so there's a reason why real quick, I have a unicorn tattooed on my arm, right.

35:54

And underneath that is Latin for words mean things.

35:59

And this was my, this was my post seminary present to myself to remind myself to never stop doing the hard work of translation.

36:09

Why? Because the King James Bible has unicorns in it.

36:13

Why? Well, because bad translation, it's bad translation work.

36:16

I'm sorry.

36:17

It just is.

36:17

There was a better word they could have used.

36:19

They chose unicorn.

36:20

Right.

36:21

And so you have to, you have to make that explanation.

36:23

Another thing he does in that argument is he makes this major category error.

36:27

You know, Dr.

36:28

Van Cleek, I'm sorry.

36:29

I don't have a PhD.

36:30

I only have one master's degree.

36:32

I don't teach at the widely regarded Jacksonville Trinity Baptist University, but it is a category error when he says, well, the same way you believe in David is the same way that you should believe the TR is your Bible.

36:49

Well, that's, that's a category error.

36:51

That is a massive category error.

36:53

You believe, how would you know anything about David? Well, by, by reading that, that Bible.

36:57

So by that comparison, those aren't the same thing.

37:00

So he can't say that in the same way that you believe David is the same way that you believe the Bible.

37:06

You know, Dr.

37:07

White makes that point later.

37:08

Otherwise you would have the next book of the index would be an inspired book of the Bible.

37:13

We'd have a 67 book Bible and we don't.

37:16

So that's going to be really important as we go forward.

37:18

I thought through that some more, that argument there would be like saying, all right.

37:23

So if my wife writes me a note and the notes on the kitchen counter and it gets wet and some of the ink blurs out and I can't read it.

37:31

And someone comes in and says, no, I know what that word was.

37:34

It was this.

37:35

And my belief in that is the same category of belief as believing your wife exists.

37:40

Yeah.

37:40

No, no, it's not.

37:42

Yeah.

37:42

It, my wife said something and there is a problem in determining exactly what this particular word meant.

37:50

I know the content of the note.

37:52

I know what it was trying to tell me.

37:53

I don't know this particular word and it could go a couple of ways, but someone's coming in and saying, no, no, no, it's this.

37:59

I know what it is.

38:00

And if you disagree with me, you're saying Aaron doesn't exist.

38:04

That that that's utterly fallacious argument.

38:06

That's a category error.

38:08

Yeah.

38:09

All right.

38:09

Well, let's move on.

38:10

We've got several videos left.

38:12

Some of them are a little longer than others.

38:13

This next one's only about 30 seconds long though.

38:15

This is James White's framing the real issue.

38:19

Now, again, we can't listen to the whole debate.

38:21

Go listen to the whole debate.

38:22

It's two hours and some change, but here's his framing the issue.

38:27

And so very quickly, here's what we need to keep focused upon this evening.

38:33

What did the original authors write? That will be the determiner of how this debate comes out and how benefited we are by it.

38:44

Thank you very much for your attention.

38:47

Hey Matthew, can you bring that back up and pause it? I want to read what else, because he didn't get to all of his screen.

38:53

I don't know if he's running out of time or if he just felt like it was, you know, important.

38:57

You want it here or next slide? I want to see the slide.

38:59

I want to see.

39:00

So I need you to remove your face.

39:02

I know I'm working it.

39:04

I'm working it.

39:04

Is that what you want? Yeah, because he only gets to the top line of his, which is what did the original authors write? That's the ultimate question.

39:13

But then this is the other deciding issues that he didn't say.

39:18

The second one is how were their words preserved for us throughout each century of the church? And then the third thing is how can we demonstrate the historical validity of, and I'm assuming this is the transmission of their transmission over time.

39:32

Those are the things that really is the key to this debate.

39:37

And Van Cleek would not allow this to be the focus because he doesn't care what the authors write, because he's certain that the TR is what the authors wrote.

39:49

Therefore, how they were preserved doesn't matter.

39:52

Therefore, how their historical validity doesn't matter.

39:55

Whether or not the last six verses of Revelation came from the mind of Erasmus and not from the pen of John doesn't matter because this is what the authors wrote according to him.

40:06

And again, I think it's a begging the question.

40:08

He's assuming his answer and just arguing from the assumption.

40:11

There's a great point in the debate where during the cross-examination where Van Cleek is asking Dr.

40:17

White, is there any text of the Bible that you would reconsider, that you would change if you found evidence to the contrary? And I wanted to reverse that question and I wish Dr.

40:30

White had asked, hey, if Mark, if we could get a time machine and brought Mark here to you and he said, yeah, dog, I didn't write that ending, would you change your position on the longer ending of Mark? I wonder if he would because the standard isn't what we can obviously see Mark wrote.

40:47

The standard is this is the authorized preserved text.

40:50

Yeah.

40:51

And if Mark did say, yo, dog, this is what I wrote.

40:54

I would be like amazed.

40:59

America, America, America, America.

41:02

Bring your face back, Matthew.

41:04

Well, what I was going to, what I was going to say is, and this is very much in passing, Stanley Hauerwas would say, no, Mark would have no right to do that.

41:11

Yeah.

41:12

He actually took the position that if we were trying to interpret Romans and we time machined Paul here, he said, if Paul was sitting across the table from you and you were trying to determine what a verse meant, Paul's statement on that verse would be as valid as yours, which is just that.

41:27

Now that's a matter of interpretation, not textual issues.

41:30

Those are two different things, but I just find that interesting and frustrating.

41:34

All right, well, moving on to I want to look now at Dr.

41:38

Van Cleek's rebuttal.

41:40

And I, this part is just for those who maybe aren't familiar with debate.

41:46

They both had opening statements.

41:47

Then both had a rebuttal statement.

41:50

This is the rebuttal statement that is filled with sass.

41:55

That's the nicest way I can say, I was going to say up.

41:58

So in the opening statement, I'm willing to give this dude a chance.

42:01

I'm like, okay, he wrote a book.

42:02

He's got a PhD.

42:03

I'm in, he's got a weird math equation.

42:05

I don't understand that, but I'm in as soon as the rebuttal starts, you just see all that attitude.

42:11

And I'm like, oh, nevermind.

42:14

I see, because this is just fundamentalism's ugly face.

42:19

That's all this is.

42:20

It's just fundamentalist by another name, man.

42:24

You have a Calvinist soteriology, I guess, but you're a fundamentalist and you can see it real bad.

42:29

And what you call sass, I call really bad attitude.

42:33

And I have a bad attitude.

42:34

I really am trying to be nice at some point.

42:39

At some point, maybe Dr.

42:40

Van Cleek will watch this.

42:42

I doubt it.

42:43

Maybe he'd be interested in coming on and talking with me.

42:45

I doubt it.

42:46

But this is sass.

42:50

Well, you know, what's funny is we are bowtie groupies.

42:55

We watch James White debates forever, and he's always the one getting the bad rap for being snarky and rude or whatever.

43:02

So it's like, when Dr.

43:04

White is coming across, I love the man, but when he's coming across as warm and pastoral and gentlemanly and kind, like, man, you got to reconsider.

43:13

Even if your position was right, and it clearly isn't, you've lost everybody.

43:17

Because you're debating for normal people, right? This wasn't necessarily a debate for a bunch of PhD students.

43:23

This was for normal people to watch and consider their position.

43:28

There's no winsomeness, no gentlemanliness.

43:31

It was ugly.

43:31

Sorry.

43:32

No, absolutely.

43:33

Let's see it.

43:34

Let's see it, Matthew.

43:34

Yeah.

43:35

I had some thoughts, but let's play it first.

43:37

No.

43:37

Oh, I'm sorry.

43:37

Go ahead.

43:37

Go ahead.

43:38

I'm sorry.

43:38

No, no.

43:39

I'm saying I'll share once we play it, because I want the listener to be able to know what we're talking about.

43:44

So here we go.

43:47

Oh, his mic is off for a second.

43:49

Over 1,500 minutes of Dr.

43:51

White's material in preparation for this debate.

43:53

I have seen those slides and heard that even some of the jokes are repeated.

44:00

So why not Dr.

44:01

Mueller? Okay.

44:03

I mean, if you want to disagree with a preeminent church historian, wrote post-reformation reform dogmatics, fine.

44:09

He's not alone.

44:10

Richard Mueller is not a TR guy, nor is Richard Brash.

44:15

But he also came to the same conclusion, and his journal article was just published in 2019, making the same case that I'm making today as far as the TR and it being standard.

44:28

Not one Greek text is identical to the TR.

44:30

I don't think you can find one Greek text that's identical with any other Greek text.

44:33

So don't find that as even remotely a problematic.

44:37

The critical text is based on everything we possess.

44:40

Everything we possess is not everything we've had.

44:43

All right.

44:43

And if you listen to Dr.

44:44

White, he's clear in bringing this out.

44:46

You've got fires in Alexandria.

44:48

You've got wars.

44:49

You've got bugs, as he says, and you've got weather.

44:53

It destroys manuscripts.

44:54

So honestly, we don't know how many we've ever had.

44:56

And to claim that we have more now is simply irrational, because you can't know how many they had in Alexandria or how many they had in Constantinople.

45:03

It's simply inscrutable.

45:06

Every reading is a probability.

45:08

So if I use Bayes' theorem as a probability calculus, every reading that you get in the Nestle Law 28 is a probability.

45:15

No one's going to tell you for certain this reading right here is actually the autograph.

45:19

No one's going to tell you that.

45:20

They're going to say, based on the evidence and based on our expertise, we're going to make the best play that we can.

45:25

But this is simply false, all right, to claim that somehow Bayes' theorem can't apply.

45:29

It absolutely does apply.

45:30

It just doesn't apply the way he would like it to, right? Oldest, shortest, best internal, external evidence.

45:35

I just bring in Bayes' theorem and say, hey, there's a different way we can do probability.

45:38

There's nothing wrong with that.

45:40

Would you like me to go ahead and roll part two of the rebuttal? Yeah, go ahead.

45:45

Okay.

45:46

We need the papyri.

45:48

If you guys are into this, you need to read myths and mistakes.

45:50

Great book about textual criticism.

45:52

Really appreciate the work.

45:53

Had several conversations with Elijah Hickson.

45:57

Just consider this.

45:59

It is further evident from the papyri that closeness and proximity to the physical autographs does not necessitate a reliable and more accurate copy text.

46:08

Again, it is unlikely to New Testament autographs still existed and influenced the text by the time of their earliest copies.

46:13

Even if they did, this alone would not guarantee that the existing manuscripts are reliable.

46:18

And then my last one, two factors that are most important in determining the reliability of a historical document, the number of manuscripts copied in existence and the time between when it was first written and oldest existing copy.

46:28

They say, don't make that argument.

46:30

Dr.

46:31

White's making the argument right now.

46:32

The guys in myths and mistakes say, don't make that argument.

46:34

They're all trained textual critics, like actually do it for a living, wrote their PhDs in textual criticism, all right? They say in answer to that, aside from the conflation of textual reliability with historical reliability, which is what happened here, which is a logical fallacy, he's equating, well, because we have the papyri, we know better than the reformers did.

46:51

That's conflating textual reliability and historical reliability.

46:55

Apart from that, such claims commit the logical fallacy of assuming that a larger number in an earlier date necessarily equate to more reliability.

47:03

So it doesn't matter if the Protestants didn't have the papyri.

47:07

This is his big case, but it doesn't matter if they had them because in the end, even the guys, they don't agree with me.

47:13

None of these guys from myths and mistakes agree with me.

47:15

Not one of them, but they're ready to say, let's be honest about the science.

47:18

This is a bad argument, all right? Right away.

47:26

He's quoting people and then he's saying, but they don't agree with me, but I'm going to make use of bits and pieces of their argument.

47:37

And here's the thing, Dr.

47:38

White is not saying that we know what all was had at Alexandria or all that was had in Byzantium or any of these other places, but we know what Erasmus had.

47:50

We do know what Erasmus had.

47:51

We know what those who wrote after him, Stephanus and Basil, we know what they had there.

47:58

That is documented.

47:59

He's not saying we know what has always existed, but we know what existed then.

48:03

And again, he's conflating two things.

48:07

But Matthew, you said you had some thoughts.

48:08

Yeah.

48:09

So as not that you guys haven't debated or, or enjoyed it, but as the resident debate moderator nerd it's, it's kind of like especially like right after you, you got your MDiv and then you heard like a really bad youth pastor sermon, like a bad one where they just butchered it.

48:30

They picked like this part from the NLT and this part from the NIV to help make the point that they were trying to do.

48:36

And you're just like cringing inside.

48:40

That's what I do when I, when I see some of these debates, because in the opening statement, anything you want to say that is even tangentially related to the thesis is fine.

48:52

In the rebuttal, you are not supposed to say things.

48:56

You cannot bring up new arguments and you cannot rebut things that were not said.

49:02

And so if say, Dr.

49:04

White cited let's, and this happens at one point, he cites Dan Wallace in his opening statement.

49:09

If Dr.

49:10

Van Cleek's rebuttal includes an ad hominem attack on Dan Wallace to say, well, Dan Wallace said this, so we can't trust anything he said invalid.

49:17

If there's judges in the back, they're docking points.

49:19

You can't do that.

49:20

You have to address the points that were actually made.

49:23

And at the start of Van Cleek's rebuttal, he does that.

49:26

He, I'm sure he was taking notes during Dr.

49:28

White's opening statement, and that was snarky, but at least he was able to say it was legal.

49:31

At the end, he starts reading from myths and mistakes.

49:34

He starts saying, well, he starts going off against an argument that had not yet been made from the stage.

49:42

You can't do that, not in a rebuttal period.

49:46

And in fact, when James White and Michael Brown debated on the subject of predestination, James White makes his case and Michael Brown makes his opening statement.

49:55

Then James White rises to rebut and he says, Michael has good manners.

49:59

Michael made an opening statement that did not directly address any of my points because he's not supposed to do that yet.

50:05

Now's the time for rebuttal.

50:06

And those two have a gentlemanly relationship.

50:09

They're experienced debaters.

50:10

That's how that should go.

50:12

If in a rebuttal, you're reading prepared statements, you're doing it wrong.

50:17

That is not how that works.

50:18

It's very similar to counseling someone.

50:20

They come in and tell you what the problem is.

50:22

And then you pull out a three ring binder and just start reading.

50:25

No, every one of them is live and you have to be able to think on your feet.

50:28

That's especially evident in cross-examination, but we'll get there.

50:32

So, so I clearly haven't, I haven't read this guy's book.

50:36

I haven't taken any classes from him.

50:38

So, but from what I picked up, even the heart of his dissertation, this idea that he picked up what Plantinga put down, right? You're going to see that point later that Plantinga has made this, this idea that, that we could look at the TR this way, or, or we could look at scripture this certain way, but he never applies it to the TR.

51:03

Right.

51:03

And so he says, well, I'm going to take that.

51:05

I'm going to apply it to the TR.

51:06

And then later he's asked, well, would Plantinga even agree with you about the TR? He's like, well, no, he wouldn't agree with me.

51:11

Well, then it's the same thing that he's saying about these myths and mistakes guys.

51:16

Like perhaps then if those guys didn't, didn't go there, it wasn't that they didn't go there because they didn't have time.

51:21

It's because they didn't go there because that application isn't savvy.

51:25

I mean, I'm going to read this myths and mistakes book.

51:28

I haven't had time because Jeremy's keeping me pretty busy right now, but the idea that we're not going to, to apply to historical texts.

51:38

And that's what these are, right? The Bible is not the golden plates of the Book of Mormon.

51:43

That is not what God gave us on purpose.

51:46

It is a historical document of historical facts that is signed, sealed and delivered by God.

51:51

But, but it is still something that occurred in history by human hands to say that we're not going to determine the veracity of what is corrupt and what is not corrupt based on how we do anything, how we understand anything about history.

52:09

Instead, we're going to do it by math was bonkers to me, was total bonkers.

52:16

Like you just want to do, probability is something that you do when you're dealing with, with, you know, science and, and elements, but, but not when you're dealing with human beings, these corruptions occurred through human error or through human intention.

52:35

And so that has to be done through a human system, not a mathematical system.

52:40

Bayes' theorem is valid, but it was not used properly.

52:43

I've heard Rome do this before.

52:44

So Rome will say, all right, well, I'm going to use Bayes' theorem to prove the papacy.

52:50

And so they'll say, well, Matthew 16, 18, I think it is where Jesus and Peter, anyway, and there's the, on this rock, I'll build my church and all that.

52:59

I've heard a Roman Catholic apologist say, well, I'm going to use Bayes' theorem to prove this.

53:03

And if the papacy is false, then I only give this verse a 10% chance of appearing in the Bible.

53:10

Therefore the inverse is 90%.

53:12

So the papacy is 90% proven by that verse.

53:17

What? You know, Bayes' theorem works, but you have to have some kind of grounding for the probabilities you're assigning things.

53:27

If you were to do it on the Exodus flood, for instance, and we found a bunch of pottery or whatever, some archeological details along the path that's believed that they took, Bayes' theorem would be appropriate because you'd say, all right, if an Exodus flood story and an Exodus walk did not occur, then what's the odds of us finding all this stuff, right? Like Isaiah existing as a work of ancient literature.

53:50

Well, what's the odds of Isaiah never existing? And also we have all these manuscripts of it existing.

53:56

Well, it'd be 0%.

53:57

So it applies, I think it applies to something like the Book of Mormon as a negative example, right? Because we cannot find archeological evidence.

54:07

But if we assume his premise that there is a Holy Spirit that's preserved the text, then Bayes' theorem, how does that still apply? Because you're now dealing in probability with what your real argument is.

54:21

This was intentionally given by a supernatural all-powerful God.

54:25

So why are you coming at me with Bayes' theorem when what you're actually saying is God preserved this specific text directly? You know what I mean? It's disingenuous to his actual argument.

54:36

I want to jump in on one quick thing and we've never discussed this, so we may all have three different perspectives, but I do find it problematic.

54:45

And I would even say offensive.

54:47

And I don't use the word like, oh, I'm offended, but I use it in the sense of, I think it's offensive in the sense that it's offensive to truth.

54:55

When he begins to throw out things like there's no evidence for sixth day creation, or there's no evidence for the Exodus, there's no evidence for these things.

55:07

That to me is, because we understand the argument he was making.

55:13

We don't have evidence for anything we believe, therefore, why do we need evidence for the Bible? If that is the heart of his argument, is nothing we believe in the Bible has evidence.

55:22

And therefore we believe that because the Bible says it, why can't we just believe the Bible then based on no evidence? And there's a reason why he's not arguing in mosques.

55:31

There's a reason why he's not arguing in Mormon, outside the Mormon tabernacle in Salt Lake City is because that's a ridiculous argument to say we have no evidence.

55:43

I don't have the man's name in my databank, in my brain, but in my New Testament survey class, there was an archeologist who was trying to prove that Luke was a bad historian and set out.

55:58

And this was back in the early 1900s.

56:00

He set out to sort of disprove that what Luke had written in Luke and Acts was wrong.

56:04

And by the time his, who is it? He's probably German early 1900.

56:09

That just sounds like what a German would be doing about that time.

56:11

Yeah.

56:12

And, and, but I have his written documents and I use them in my New Testament class.

56:15

He says very clearly, he says that, that Luke is a historian of, of, of high regard and says that the things that he wrote are actually testified by the evidence.

56:27

And through that, he became a believer.

56:29

And so to say that there's no evidence for the things that we believe in scripture and we just believe them by blind faith.

56:35

That is, that, that is, that sounds like independent fundamentalist writing.

56:41

That is not how Christianity works.

56:44

I would love for this guy to have a conversation with Lee Strobel.

56:47

I mean, if you've read the case for Christ, Lee Strobel lays it out as someone who was not a believer.

56:52

And then he goes and he talks about the crucifixion.

56:54

He talks to an archeologist.

56:56

He talks to a medical doctor.

56:57

Well, maybe Jesus didn't die on the cross and he just, whatever, you know, and at the end of it, he's convinced by the evidence.

57:03

Now our soteriology says, of course, the Holy spirit's involved in this and all that, but he uses means.

57:08

And the other thing is that, that the archeological evidence, the historical evidence, because we live in God's world, it's not going to contradict what God has said.

57:16

And so, you know, like again, there is a place to say that the scriptures have Supreme authority.

57:23

Of course they do.

57:24

And, and our musings on dug up pottery does not override the fact that God said God, but at the same time, what we find will never be incongruent with that because we live in God's world.

57:36

Yeah.

57:37

Yeah.

57:37

So when he's asked, well, how would you deal with this with a Mormon? Right.

57:42

And he goes, well, I would do it like a good presuppositionalist and say that you, you know, you're, you're not subject to living God.

57:48

That's, that's not, that's bad presuppositionalism because you're not, we're not talking about why do you reject God? The question was, how do you determine that your text is wrong? That's not a presuppositionalist argument anymore.

58:02

Presuppositionalism, and I am a presuppositionalist in generally.

58:05

Right.

58:05

But, but that isn't saying by what standard can I say that our John one is the correct John one and your John one is the wrong John one because the, you know, the justice Smith translation changes it by what standard are you determining that if your standard ultimately is the Holy spirit.

58:22

And I know he rejects the idea that we'll just pray about it, but essentially he's still saying the Holy spirit told me that true.

58:30

That's the same standard that the LDS are using.

58:32

So like, like they're by what standard is this the one is this TR the one? I don't know.

58:40

I have no idea other than he says the church has always had it right.

58:44

That's his big, the church.

58:45

I can't wait till we get to that clip.

58:47

Oh, we do have that clip.

58:48

I'm sorry.

58:48

That's okay.

58:49

No, you're good.

58:49

You're good.

58:51

You want to move to the next one, Keith? Yeah.

58:52

Let's what we're doing now is we're going to move from, we've just left Van Cleek's rebuttal.

58:57

We're now going to move to the first cross examination where Dr.

59:00

White is examining Van Cleek on how he should, how he should come to a conclusion on Ephesians three, nine.

59:06

Now I said, this is the first, there was two, there were two cross examination period.

59:09

So I could be wrong.

59:10

This might be the second, but this is the question is how, how do we determine the reading at Ephesians three, nine, and we've got three different video clips to show from this.

59:20

This was 20 minutes.

59:21

So we couldn't show the whole thing.

59:23

Yeah.

59:23

This is clip five.

59:24

I think.

59:24

Let's see.

59:25

Yeah.

59:27

You can't show me one person who preached a sermon and gave your reading quoted a verse and gave it your way.

59:35

But you are telling us that the church by the spirit of God tells us, this is the reading.

59:43

Is that how you do textual? Is that how Erasmus derived this? Everybody see this? Everything is coming back to textual criticism.

59:53

A bit of a Freudian slip there.

59:54

It's all coming back to how you make an analysis of the evidence.

59:57

Again, this is a straight up Bart Ehrman un-Christian atheistic argument.

01:00:02

He has made no argument at all from scripture and how Christians formulate belief.

01:00:08

He could make an argument from philosophy if he wanted.

01:00:10

I even let that, I left that out of my arguments.

01:00:13

All right.

01:00:14

I could have brought that in here, but no, no, we're all just stuck up on the evidence, but none of you believe what you believe based on evidence, except you know what, for the Bible, you better believe it.

01:00:24

Because James White, Dr.

01:00:25

White says, you know what the evidence says it should be a different word.

01:00:29

So you're on the next clip.

01:00:32

He doesn't even get close to answering that question.

01:00:36

Let's get, well, let's keep going.

01:00:37

Cause he stays on the same topic.

01:00:39

Okay.

01:00:39

All right.

01:00:40

You cannot give us any instance where the church has spoken about the proper reading of Ephesians 3.9, can you? Well, right here.

01:00:54

So this way for hundreds of years, hundreds of years.

01:00:57

Okay.

01:00:58

So the Latin Vulgate was used by God in the Western church for 1,100 years and has numerous readings in it that this rejects.

01:01:06

So which was the Holy spirit? Well, we would say that just like normal church, this is a great thing.

01:01:12

Everybody about federal vision, big fight about among Presbyterians about whether who's absolute canard has nothing to do with this fight right now.

01:01:20

All we're saying is that in the end, yes, sometimes the church can make a mistake, but, but saying that does not all of a sudden say, well, then we got to get rid of the church and making the decision because it makes mistakes.

01:01:32

No, that's the way God laid it out for us.

01:01:34

You come to your conclusion by the Holy spirit, speaking through his words to your heart.

01:01:38

And you submit to those words by faith.

01:01:40

That's what you come.

01:01:41

That's how you come to any belief, including the words in scripture.

01:01:44

And so if that's the way it gets done, can mistakes happen? Certainly can.

01:01:48

But does that recuse the church from its responsibility? No, same thing.

01:01:53

Your husband can make mistakes.

01:01:54

Your wife can make mistakes.

01:01:55

Well then let's abolish marriage and let's do something else.

01:01:57

It's a ridiculous idea.

01:01:59

Do you, do you really believe that the list of beliefs you just laid out has anything whatsoever to do with answering the question when you are saying that this is what we must follow.

01:02:13

And we ask you, where did this come from? And your answer is we pray about it.

01:02:22

Is it, is that how you answer it? Have you prayed about every variance in the new Testament? Have you, the answer to the question is just to tell you that this is how belief works.

01:02:35

I can't even believe I have to defend this.

01:02:37

Like I'm in a group of Christians trying to say, Hey, you know how you believe in your Bible? Like you believe in everything else.

01:02:44

You know how you believe in a reading in your Bible? Like you believe in everything else.

01:02:48

And now I have to defend that though.

01:02:49

Like it's like, Nope, no, that's incorrect.

01:02:52

You can't believe in the Bible.

01:02:53

Like you believe in everything else.

01:02:54

Please pause it.

01:02:55

Please pause it.

01:02:56

I can't die.

01:02:57

I can't, I can't not say what I have to say right now, but what if it's my Bible? Right.

01:03:03

That's the Joseph Smith Bible.

01:03:04

Yeah.

01:03:05

You guys, there's only a half second left.

01:03:08

Okay.

01:03:08

There you go.

01:03:09

Now we're done.

01:03:09

We have one more clip from the cross sex, but go ahead.

01:03:12

It's just when he says, why can't you believe a reading in your Bible? And he's saying the church has spoken, dude, the church is bigger than you.

01:03:20

You are saying you and your cronies, whoever they are, whatever small percentage holds your very particular Van Cleek position that you are the church and, and the church has held this for 400 years.

01:03:33

Not exactly.

01:03:35

Not in that form.

01:03:36

It hasn't been in that form in that way, the Scrivener's edition and all these different things.

01:03:41

Okay.

01:03:42

Who picked that three, nine reading and who had it in 800.

01:03:46

Right.

01:03:46

And he'll say, well, I don't know somebody, the church.

01:03:49

Well, who, who, who of the church, obviously not Rome, right? The whole point of us being reformed is Rome messed it up.

01:03:56

That was the whole point.

01:03:58

So if, if Rome had it for that long and for 1500 years, then where are we at with Maccabees and where are we at with, you know, uh, uh, Tobit? Yeah.

01:04:07

Where are we with those? Why? Because the church spoke, right? Well, we did a whole reformation, bro.

01:04:14

Welcome.

01:04:15

You're in it.

01:04:16

Yeah.

01:04:16

You just, you just became a cartoon character when you went to the audience.

01:04:24

Um, Ephesians chapter three, verse nine.

01:04:26

Uh, the, the, the variant is between the Greek word Koinonia and Oikonomia, um, which is administration in one translation and mystery in the other translation.

01:04:36

Um, it affects that verse.

01:04:40

Uh, it does not overall affect your Christology, your Trinitarianism, your atonement theology, none of that, but it is a useful place to look at because there is one manuscript that we know of that has the reading that made it into the TR exactly one manuscript versus not 5,000.

01:04:57

Cause that's for the whole new Testament, but of that portion of Ephesians hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts predating it by over a thousand years.

01:05:05

So you make a great point that I want to rant on for just a tiny sec, right? Is, is in our world, we're very comfortable with saying, look for this verse, there's, there's a bunch of manuscripts that have it off by one letter and off by this letter, but it doesn't change the meaning at all.

01:05:23

We and the ancient world are okay with that.

01:05:25

And we go, nothing in these variants impacts important doctrines, nothing.

01:05:30

Can I make a point by your tag groups? Yeah.

01:05:34

You have two tag groups.

01:05:35

Just say you don't understand reform theology and move along.

01:05:37

Yes.

01:05:38

My favorite.

01:05:38

And then you have another one, just say that you don't believe the Bible's authoritative and move along.

01:05:43

Oh yeah.

01:05:43

They're slightly different.

01:05:44

Yeah.

01:05:45

But if you said, just say that you don't understand reform theology and move along, you have not tampered with the meaning of, of the, of the statement, right? Right.

01:05:53

And one, you have a, that, and the other one you don't.

01:05:55

And explaining that, cause I speak German explaining that difference to a German, they can't get it.

01:06:00

They don't understand.

01:06:02

It's they can't even comprehend the difference in, in a different language.

01:06:06

So, so he'll Van Cleef will say, no, God inspired every single word, exactly the same.

01:06:14

It's not for us to say how important a doctrine is or isn't.

01:06:18

So when we, when we go, no major doctrine is impacted by variants because none is he'll go insufficient.

01:06:25

God did the words.

01:06:27

And when we say, yes, he, he did.

01:06:29

You're absolutely right.

01:06:31

But we have 10,000 of them and we're not just going to go by your word and, and, you know, Sam Gibbs word that yours is the one we have to have another method, which is the wisdom of the elders of the church, which includes prayer and includes, you know, the same standard by which we do everything else.

01:06:50

Yep.

01:06:51

All right.

01:06:51

No, no, absolutely.

01:06:53

All right.

01:06:53

So we have one more, do we have one more clip from that cross examination? Yes, we do.

01:06:58

It is, it skips about a minute.

01:07:01

So this is one minute later than when we, when we just were.

01:07:03

So I'll let me get my switches set here and we'll get that playing.

01:07:07

This is clip seven, Keith.

01:07:09

Yep.

01:07:10

Okay.

01:07:11

For example, Dr.

01:07:12

White said he read my books.

01:07:14

Yes, it did.

01:07:15

And if he read my books, then he knows it's not prayer.

01:07:17

He knows that in the end, it is properly functioning faculties in an environment that's conducive to those faculties, according to a design plan aimed at truth and properly.

01:07:27

So aim that's not prayer.

01:07:29

That is how the spirit of God works in this world and by regeneration.

01:07:34

So no, I don't have to do that.

01:07:36

But to his question, Alvin planning calls what I just described to you, the Aquinas Calvin model, which means, yes, we do make the argument from Calvin for those five steps, properly functioning faculties in an environment, conducive to those faculties, according to a design plan, properly aimed or aimed at truth and properly.

01:07:57

So aim.

01:07:58

Okay.

01:07:58

So yeah, I guess the answer is yes.

01:07:59

I can point you to Calvin.

01:08:01

Okay.

01:08:01

Calvin's theology.

01:08:02

And the reality is that neither planting nor Calvin ever made the application to the text of the new Testament.

01:08:08

You do.

01:08:09

Incorrect.

01:08:09

It's incorrect.

01:08:10

Then can you now give me the example where Calvin gave that in regards to how we are supposed to do technical criticism? You said planning, and so planning makes an argument when he gets to making his Aquinas Calvin model.

01:08:22

It's only at one spot because what he wants to do is he wants to stick with kind of the bigger confessions or the bigger displays or summaries of the Christian faith.

01:08:30

But he does point out that there is one, I think it's the Helvetic confession that does indeed say that we need to ascribe to every word spoken by God.

01:08:40

And then he says in warranted Christian belief, he says, but I'm going to put that to the side because that's not my argument.

01:08:46

My argument is for the doctrine of God.

01:08:48

And that's what my PhD was about because I watched Alvin planning go, perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher alive say, this is something we could talk about, but I'm going to set that to the side.

01:08:59

And that's what you're supposed to do with PhD dissertations.

01:09:01

You pick up something that somebody put down.

01:09:03

So again, this is incorrect.

01:09:04

And that's partly because I don't think Dr.

01:09:06

White has read planning on this point.

01:09:08

Does Alvin plan to use the Texas receptus only position? I don't think so.

01:09:14

I know exactly.

01:09:16

I clearly didn't misunderstand him because he said you're allowed to apply the Aquinas Calvin model, particularly the extended model toward scripture, but he hasn't done it right.

01:09:26

He hasn't done a lot of things.

01:09:28

Okay.

01:09:28

All right.

01:09:30

So, okay.

01:09:31

I just have to real quick.

01:09:34

My wife is listening.

01:09:36

Hey, honey.

01:09:36

And she, she just posted.

01:09:38

He's so angry.

01:09:40

He is.

01:09:42

He is.

01:09:42

He is the worst kind of Calvinist, but I love the Aquinas Calvin model, right? I read about it.

01:09:50

I agree with him.

01:09:51

That is how you discern the works of the Holy spirit.

01:09:55

And so using his five-step thing, I look at that and go, yeah, that's how we do text criticism with all of those things in mind.

01:10:02

That's we're doing text criticism with that.

01:10:06

So I don't know where we're at.

01:10:07

And the whole, like I said before, the planning of the thing planning said you could do this, but he didn't apply it in his life to the TR.

01:10:15

So you did, you're just cannibalizing him.

01:10:18

Because who would, other than someone with an a priori or a priori commitment to the TR, no one would get to where he's getting unless they start there.

01:10:28

You don't arrive at this.

01:10:30

You have to start with this.

01:10:32

It's important to note that the King James editors, especially said, this is not an authorized Holy spirit, you know, preserved single texts.

01:10:45

They specifically said that now I've never read that Erasmus said that, but from everything I do know about Erasmus, he would agree.

01:10:51

It was the work of a faithful saint.

01:10:54

Now granted he was, he was a papist, but it was the work of a doing the best he could.

01:10:59

He debated Luther actually.

01:11:01

He just dropped a hard bow on Erasmus.

01:11:06

But I love my Catholic brothers.

01:11:09

But they would not have said that.

01:11:12

So we know the TR began at a specific time, but those guys would have said, we're using text criticism.

01:11:23

And before that, it just existed.

01:11:26

We don't know where mystically somewhere, someone had it in time.

01:11:31

And even though we got it through Rome from Erasmus, and we don't trust anything else Rome gave us, especially when it concerns scripture, we're going to trust them on this, even though they also want us to bring Maccabees and so on and so forth in the equation, but they're wrong about that.

01:11:45

Then by what standard have we thrown out Maccabees? Yeah.

01:11:48

By what standard? Yeah.

01:11:51

Well guys, this leads us this lead or go ahead.

01:11:54

I'm sorry, Matthew, you didn't get to speak.

01:11:55

I'm sorry.

01:11:55

No, it's okay.

01:11:59

Cross X is the best part of a debate because it forces someone to publicly answer a question.

01:12:05

It's a, it's actually, and I'm not saying there's a sin issue being addressed here, but when there is one, it's the biblical model of handling that.

01:12:11

In fact, the United States confrontation rights and trials, and the fact that you can, you have to confront your witnesses as a biblical idea.

01:12:19

That's God's law.

01:12:21

Cross examination is where you separate wheat from chaff, where Facebook groups and all that fade away.

01:12:27

And you're looking directly at the person.

01:12:28

You get to ask them questions and have to answer them.

01:12:34

You can, you can rehearse a good fiery opening statement.

01:12:38

You can slip in a rebuttal that is not legal in debate rules by rebutting points that weren't made, but points that you think are tangentially related.

01:12:50

But when you get in cross X, man, that is where arguments melt if they're not good.

01:12:56

And I think you saw this in the Molinism debate that James White did is that the guy was smooth and he was right there and he was, he nailed it on all the other ones.

01:13:05

And then he filibustered cross X.

01:13:06

He ate as much cross X time as he could by just chewing up time.

01:13:09

Cause he knew that's he was going to get killed.

01:13:12

And in this case, I don't think Van Cleet necessarily filibustered, but you could see very uncomfortable.

01:13:18

Did not, did not understand how to answer the question being presented.

01:13:23

It was, this is the part where arguments melt.

01:13:26

And I think that's what you saw.

01:13:27

And even if he's right and he isn't, he isn't being compelling.

01:13:31

So he isn't making the argument and that matters a lot here.

01:13:35

So his frustration is that I guess he assumes the audience is on his side and maybe they were, but I don't think the wider internet audience is following along simply because he's not making the case.

01:13:47

Right.

01:13:48

Yeah.

01:13:49

The next part is what I call the epic moment.

01:13:53

And I know Matthew about climb out of his skin over this particular section, but I loved it.

01:14:00

I loved it only because it shouldn't have happened.

01:14:03

It's and I, the moderator is going to get involved.

01:14:08

I'm not going to say any more.

01:14:09

Go ahead and play.

01:14:10

I instantly thought of Matthew.

01:14:11

I said, there's no way Matthew would ever do that.

01:14:13

I would never, I just, is this clip eight Keith? Yeah.

01:14:17

Okay.

01:14:17

Coming up the, in the fallible and fallible readings into the infallible readings that actually represent the autographs that you can't show us down through history at all.

01:14:30

Yeah.

01:14:30

When did it happen? Yeah.

01:14:31

So you just move, talk about a category error.

01:14:34

You just move from readings to people or from people to readings.

01:14:38

The point is, is that the way we get from Erasmus and Stefanos and Beza until we have to answer that question.

01:14:46

Go ahead.

01:14:47

Go ahead.

01:14:47

The way it works is, is just like all other beliefs that we all grow in our belief.

01:14:54

And so the church grows, we would say that the church grew out of the first century.

01:14:58

We get into the middle ages, right.

01:15:00

And then we would say in a lot of ways, the church didn't grow in a lot of ways it did, but a lot of ways it didn't make some really wrong turn.

01:15:06

And then the reformation happens.

01:15:08

And we see the church grow.

01:15:09

I'm not talking about just individuals, though.

01:15:11

Individuals are growing because the church is growing.

01:15:13

And so the same thing happens with our belief in the Bible.

01:15:16

Same thing happens with each one of your individual beliefs.

01:15:19

You grow, it's called sanctification.

01:15:21

And so the church had Erasmus.

01:15:24

So we got away from the Latin.

01:15:25

We went to Greek, which is a huge change.

01:15:27

And then we get Beza and Stefanos, and then we get the TR.

01:15:30

Each one of these iterations is a growth, not because the men, of course, the men are fallible.

01:15:36

Yeah, I'll give that to you.

01:15:37

But the Holy Spirit is guiding his people, leading his people to believe in his words.

01:15:44

Just like he believes in everything else.

01:15:46

I know I'm not supposed to do this.

01:15:49

So then could the advancement of the critical texts and the addition of the other texts be a growth in that same thing? I'm sorry, I'm new at this.

01:16:01

I'll say this is the hardest.

01:16:04

The hardest part of this job is to keep my mouth shut.

01:16:08

I'm going to stop us now.

01:16:10

Anyway, we do have the next section.

01:16:13

Dr.

01:16:14

White was pretty gracious.

01:16:16

Yeah, because I know how he feels about this issue.

01:16:19

When we were setting up our debate at Switzerland, he grilled me on, are you sure your guy understands? This guy better understand.

01:16:29

And then Chris Arnton's like, hey man, you better be sure that your guy knows what he's doing.

01:16:32

And then Rich Pierce, hey, are you sure this is the guy? I'm like, he's got it.

01:16:36

He's fine.

01:16:37

And this is why.

01:16:39

And my guy, my guy was awesome.

01:16:42

But this guy, whenever he watches the debate twice, I have to skip it.

01:16:47

I cannot sit through it.

01:16:49

Can't do that part.

01:16:50

Yeah.

01:16:50

See, here's the thing though.

01:16:53

And as I agree, it was wrong.

01:16:56

It was wrong.

01:16:57

It was wrong.

01:16:57

I'm not, I'm not defending pastor Devin, I think is his name.

01:17:02

I actually sent him a message through Chris Arnton.

01:17:05

I'm not defending his error.

01:17:07

I am saying though, that he nailed him to the wall with that question.

01:17:11

Because the question was, if you believe that the church is growing in sanctification and the sanctification is bringing about a more correct text, then why do you believe that that stopped at a certain point? And it's not still growing and learning and evolving now.

01:17:29

Cause that's essentially his view of sanctification is certainly it's an evolutionary view of the church that it's going to grow and evolve and change for the better up until the TR.

01:17:38

And that's it ends and the dude nailed him.

01:17:40

Cause, cause he could, and of course it was wrong.

01:17:44

I'm not defending him.

01:17:44

I'm just saying that I wish dr.

01:17:47

White would have said it.

01:17:48

That's all.

01:17:49

Well, dr.

01:17:49

White said, Hey, that's what we're all thinking, man.

01:17:51

That's right.

01:17:51

He did.

01:17:52

He did.

01:17:53

Yeah.

01:17:53

So during, during their debate at, at our church and, and I'm contractually obligated because I was asked to by the pastor in chat at Switzerland community church in 2018, Jake.

01:18:03

Yes.

01:18:04

Is it September of 18? Yeah, I think so.

01:18:07

Okay.

01:18:08

Um, yeah, there, first off homo, homosexuality is like a super hot button issue and we had no clue who was going to come in the doors.

01:18:16

We didn't know if we were going to get picketed.

01:18:17

We didn't know if we're getting protesters.

01:18:19

I mean, like, yeah, we're in Ruby red Northwest St.

01:18:21

John's County, but still like, you know, we didn't know.

01:18:26

And so we were super strict about it.

01:18:27

We're telling the audience, like you will not clap or cheer.

01:18:31

The only thing we want to hear is pages turning.

01:18:33

Like it was, it was on lockdown because we were, we're playing with a powder keg.

01:18:37

That issue right there was a powder keg and as moderator.

01:18:42

So, so my job, as I said, was to be relentlessly neutral, right? You shouldn't know what side of the debate I was on.

01:18:49

And I think rewatching it, you wouldn't.

01:18:51

And in fact, it was during cross-sex when I'm trying to sort of maintain decorum and say, okay, the positive and the negative side, because you have a statement and the statement was homosexuality is compatible with new Testament obedience.

01:19:03

And you can have, you can, you can try to negate that, or you can speak positively to it.

01:19:09

And I kept calling Dr.

01:19:10

White and Dr.

01:19:10

Brown, the negative side, because they were, they were attempting to negate the statement and not attempting in my own opinion, they did so.

01:19:18

And then at a point, Michael Brown's like, we're not all that negative, right? Like we're nice guys, you know? And then we had a bit of and that was funny, but that was not interrupting a person's time.

01:19:30

It was not participating in the debate had nothing to do with the topic.

01:19:34

It was a chuckle.

01:19:35

The whole room got to have, you don't do that as a moderator.

01:19:38

I don't care.

01:19:40

Here's okay.

01:19:40

Here's the thing.

01:19:41

If you've seen some of Dr.

01:19:42

White's other debates where the opponent face plants, the face plant is a face plant because the guy did it by himself.

01:19:50

Yeah.

01:19:51

The Steve Cassies.

01:19:52

Right.

01:19:53

And so, and so Van Cleek made the point that the moderator was biased against me.

01:19:57

Okay.

01:19:58

Unfortunately I have to grant in this moment, perhaps, but throughout the rest of the debate, he was a simple timekeeper and undermines the truth.

01:20:06

It does.

01:20:07

It takes away the neutrality of the moderator position.

01:20:11

It's you know, it's, it's the judge in the courtroom, high-fiving the prosecutor when he's done with his argument.

01:20:17

You don't, you don't do that.

01:20:19

And to the brother who was the mod, I understand.

01:20:22

I love you.

01:20:23

I've probably not like a thing that you do weekly.

01:20:26

I'm not trying to hate on you.

01:20:27

I'm just like big, no, no.

01:20:30

We felt that tension in the room and, and you know, a good pastoral move is to undo the tension, man.

01:20:36

But yeah, but it did, it did undermine the work that was being done there because now he can play a bit of the victim and say, it wasn't fair.

01:20:44

And I mean, that always hurts the debate when I, as a moderator and as a moderator in college politics debates, I got called biased by both sides on two different debates because we got to call infractions.

01:20:58

We got to be active moderators and we weren't calling specific logical fallacies, but like real actual, like when the person just insults the other person.

01:21:06

And we got to, we got to basically dock them and make a statement and pause the debate.

01:21:10

And so you can't do that.

01:21:11

Well, one debate, the, let's say the red side had someone who was just not controlling their tongue well, and they got all the penalties and it's like, well, clearly the moderator was biased.

01:21:21

Well, then the very next week it was the other team.

01:21:24

And so if one team is misbehaving and the mod has to step in a lot against them and not the other side, that can just mean that one team's playing fair and one's not.

01:21:32

So anyway.

01:21:33

Yeah.

01:21:35

Well guys, I want to, we have two more video clips.

01:21:38

This next one is, I think one of the longer ones it's it's five, four, four minutes and some change, but this is again, Dr.

01:21:46

White cross-examining Van Cleek on the last verses of revelation.

01:21:50

And I want to say this.

01:21:53

I, I, I'm the one who chose these video clips.

01:21:56

So if anybody wants to say I was biased and I only chose James White cross-examining Van Cleek, and I did, I did not choose any of Van Cleek cross-examining Dr.

01:22:04

White.

01:22:04

That is true.

01:22:05

But again, the whole debate's there for you to watch.

01:22:07

We're I just found the ones that I thought were most interesting for us to talk about.

01:22:11

And that kind of showed some of the places where the wheels fell off the cart for the side that I would disagree with.

01:22:16

But again, I'm not saying that, you know, I was, I'm not unbiased.

01:22:22

Obviously I have a position.

01:22:24

Yeah.

01:22:24

Yeah.

01:22:25

I'm not.

01:22:25

Yeah.

01:22:26

But just to be clear, you know, there was a, and it was also done with a little bit of, you know, a little bit of haste.

01:22:34

We only had a couple of days to put everything together.

01:22:36

So anyway, we're going to watch now, this is James White cross-examining Peter Van Cleek on the last verses of revelation, the last six verses which read very differently than, well, we'll see what Dr.

01:22:48

White says.

01:22:49

Okay.

01:22:49

Here it comes.

01:22:50

Dr.

01:22:51

Van Cleek, for 1100 years, believers read in the West, the scriptures in Latin, and they had numerous readings that are not in the TR.

01:23:01

Indeed.

01:23:02

Did the Holy Spirit bless those non-autographic readings to those people when they preached them? No.

01:23:10

The Holy Spirit only speaks through his own words.

01:23:12

Okay.

01:23:13

So when Erasmus asked his printer to change revelation, just tear out what he did and use the Align reading.

01:23:26

If the Align had used almost any Greek manuscript, the book of revelation would be completely different in here than it is now.

01:23:36

Would that be the autograph or not the autograph? It's hypothetical.

01:23:39

No, it wouldn't be the autograph because it's not the autograph.

01:23:42

Because the autograph was in the Latin commentary and the autograph was also in Erasmus's mind when he translated from Latin into Greek for the last six verses of Revelation chapter 22.

01:23:56

That was the autograph that no Christian had ever seen.

01:23:59

Or do you say that all Christians had seen that and Erasmus just happened to smack dab get it right in producing this? No, it's false choice.

01:24:10

In the end, Erasmus, this is one thing.

01:24:12

When you quote from, say, the Patristics, right? When he put it up on the board, he talked about all the Patristics and Patristics citations, right? But Erasmus, he can't get it right.

01:24:23

But the Patristics, like, oh yeah, the Patristics, like they had it nailed because they were close to the original.

01:24:28

But Erasmus, he can't do it right.

01:24:30

No, that doesn't fly.

01:24:32

Yes, Erasmus can do that.

01:24:33

I have a quote right here.

01:24:34

Hold on.

01:24:34

Let me add to my answer to that question.

01:24:37

I didn't say Erasmus didn't get it right.

01:24:40

You were using language like being inspired or that he had it right in his head.

01:24:45

Maybe you don't understand.

01:24:47

Let me try it again.

01:24:48

Erasmus did not have a Greek original for the last verses of Revelation chapter 22.

01:24:56

And so he translated from his own Latin, not the 1100 year venerable Vulgate, but from his own Latin translation back into Greek and produced readings that have never been found anywhere but in his translation.

01:25:14

So if that is the autograph, then the autograph had disappeared for the entire history of the church that we are aware of.

01:25:23

Are you seriously suggesting to us that we just don't have enough manuscripts to know that, yes, Erasmus got it right when he translated this and all the other manuscripts we have down through church history and every sermon ever preached on it was just wrong? Is that what you're telling us? It was like five questions.

01:25:46

What do you want me to answer? I think everyone understands exactly what I was asking you.

01:25:51

And I've got a lot of people saying they want an answer.

01:25:54

So I'll make it very, very clear.

01:25:56

Are you telling us that the end of Revelation in here is what John wrote autographically? It disappeared from every stop.

01:26:06

All right.

01:26:07

I got to answer that one first for him to say it disappeared is for him to say, no, we don't have it now.

01:26:12

This is a horrible argument.

01:26:14

Just because you don't have it now, all of a sudden doesn't make it false.

01:26:17

So what you are saying then is that it was there.

01:26:22

It's disappeared from history.

01:26:24

No, it's just disappeared from our history.

01:26:26

Okay.

01:26:27

But the church, what other history do we have, sir? Because history has fallen along a course of, of human existence simply because I don't have, it doesn't mean the medievals didn't have it simply because I don't have, it doesn't mean that the patristics didn't have it simply because I didn't have, it doesn't mean the reformers didn't have any evidence whatsoever.

01:26:45

I do.

01:26:46

I just explained to you, there's three kinds of evidence, posterior, prior, and background.

01:26:50

And because I believe the Holy spirit speaks to God's people that counts as evidence, unless you're working with a naturalistic paradigm and you don't count the church as evidence.

01:26:59

Thank you.

01:27:00

I think, I think we just saw exactly what is going on here.

01:27:03

I don't, I don't even want to, I don't even want to confuse anything more.

01:27:08

I will yield my time.

01:27:13

That's a moment.

01:27:14

I know it's happened before.

01:27:16

I can't claim to know exactly when, but it's very few times when Dr.

01:27:21

White will yield his time.

01:27:22

But by yielding his time, what he's saying is I don't have any more to say to this guy.

01:27:26

He is not rational.

01:27:28

Yeah.

01:27:28

It's the same as when he walked out of the Steven Anderson conversation.

01:27:31

It's done.

01:27:32

We're good.

01:27:32

We're good here.

01:27:33

We accomplished everything that's going to get done.

01:27:36

I mean, who, who is the church at that point? Who is that? Who is this, the church? Because right now, all the Christians that we know of all of them through time, Augustine, Chrysostom, Athanasius, all of them, we can point at all of them and say, did you have this revelation? No.

01:27:54

Did you? No.

01:27:55

Did you? No.

01:27:56

Okay.

01:27:57

Who had it? He just says the church, but can't point to anyone in the church until Erasmus literally.

01:28:05

And we know this by his notes, which by the way, he says he did not read Erasmus' annotations, right? It's really important.

01:28:13

Erasmus says how he came up with this rendering of Revelation 22, which is essentially just pull it up.

01:28:23

Right.

01:28:25

Right.

01:28:25

Okay.

01:28:26

I now know what part is going to start the show.

01:28:28

There we go.

01:28:31

Right.

01:28:33

But so he says the church has it, but can't point to anyone in the church until Erasmus creates it from, from thin air.

01:28:41

Who is this church? Who is this church? And it's the pastor Jim theology, right? There's this really famous internet meme, which is a painting of, I think it's Nephi or one of the LDS heroes, you know, burying the golden plates, right? That's the, that's the picture.

01:28:59

But the, the meme is faithful pastor Jim hiding the original King James in the year 361 before the Catholics come and destroy him.

01:29:09

You know what I mean? Like, it's this idea that there's this like faithful invisible group of, of independent fundamental Baptists who are holding onto the TR through time, but never come up for air and show up on recorded history.

01:29:24

It's insane, man.

01:29:25

It's crazy insane.

01:29:26

That's the one.

01:29:27

Thank you.

01:29:28

We, we, but that's it, right? That's his, the church.

01:29:34

Moments before his capture and subsequent execution at the hands of Constantine and his Catholic henchmen, the last remaining Baptist of the fourth century pastor Jim buries the King James Bible in hopes that one day a true believer will find the scriptures and restore the one true faith.

01:29:51

If you watch this, this is your argument right here.

01:29:56

This is your, the church that held it.

01:29:59

This is your belief because there's no, I know you hate the word evidence, but there's no testimony.

01:30:05

There's no testimony of the church.

01:30:07

How about that word? There is no testimony of faithful elders in the church who have your reading of Ephesians three, or you have your reading of revelation 22.

01:30:16

There are no Christian testimonies of it, but like yours, my man doesn't exist to the reader.

01:30:25

What we're talking about here is that Erasmus is trans is not translating rather he's compiling a Greek edition of the new textual criticism.

01:30:33

Yeah.

01:30:34

Erasmus is looking at, and my, my desk happens to be very messy right now.

01:30:38

So Erasmus is looking at a bunch of different papers.

01:30:40

Okay.

01:30:41

That are copies that are hundreds of years old, that are treasures.

01:30:44

I mean, we're glad he had them and he's having to say, all right, I'm doing all the different books of the Bible.

01:30:51

Um, uh, how, uh, how do I come up with a consistent Greek text when all of these differ? So he has to make choices.

01:30:59

Okay.

01:30:59

So he gets to revelation and, uh, he didn't really care about revelation that much because it's pretty evident Erasmus didn't even really think it was scripture.

01:31:08

And so Erasmus doesn't, he doesn't have manuscripts of revelation.

01:31:13

So what he does is instead he borrows a commentary from a friend that has a sentence in Greek and then a bunch of Latin commentary on, and then a sentence in Greek, which is kind of how our English commentaries work today.

01:31:23

He pulls all the Greek out of the commentary and he says, yeah, that's it.

01:31:28

Not knowing where that commentary got its Greek from.

01:31:31

Then he gets to the end.

01:31:33

The last pages of the commentary have fallen out.

01:31:37

So he has no source because books back then were not bound as well as they are now.

01:31:41

He has no source for the last six verses of revelation, but he needs, he needs some Greek.

01:31:46

So he goes to his Latin translation that he had made in previous years.

01:31:51

He says, he's looking at the Latin and he translates that back into Greek.

01:31:55

He fills that in for the final six verses, and then he prints it and that's it.

01:32:00

That became what's in the Textus Receptus.

01:32:03

And in subsequent evolutions, his printer comes to him and he tells his printer, hey, look, I botched revelation horribly, especially those last six verses.

01:32:12

I didn't really care about it.

01:32:14

Can you, can you fix it? Go get, there's someone else who's done a Greek New Testament since then go get their version and use it to fix mine.

01:32:22

So his printer goes and does that.

01:32:24

Here's the problem.

01:32:26

The, the one that Erasmus' printer goes and gets, they had copied his.

01:32:32

So, so Erasmus makes a faulty Greek ending to revelation.

01:32:39

Someone else takes that and then Erasmus tells his printer, use their edition to fix mine, not knowing that their edition had come from his.

01:32:47

And so to this day, and all the way up until when the King James translators did their work, those readings that Erasmus created at the end of revelation are still in that Bible today.

01:32:57

Am I saying your King James Bible is broken, decrepit, doesn't contain the gospel? I am saying none of those things.

01:33:02

Those are not words that came out of my mouth, but for wanting to know what did John write as he closed out the Bible, then having Erasmus' back translation, probably not a great thing.

01:33:13

And when Dr.

01:33:14

Van Cleek is asked, hey, Erasmus has new readings in here that made it into the that no one had ever seen before.

01:33:21

Where did they come from? Well, the church confirmed them.

01:33:24

Always had it.

01:33:24

That's all we had.

01:33:25

That's all.

01:33:26

That's all we got.

01:33:27

Always had that.

01:33:28

Yep.

01:33:28

That's it.

01:33:29

No Christian ever can attest to that.

01:33:31

So you're bearing false witness on every church Christian that's ever spoken, but the church has always had it.

01:33:38

It's the people that go back to the patristics and they say, well, Athanasius disagreed with me about this one point.

01:33:43

So clearly he didn't have the gospel and that's it.

01:33:45

Like, that's just, we've just written off Athanasius.

01:33:47

This is where I get to the point where I say, like, you, you might have a Calvinist soteriology.

01:33:51

You are not reformed, my man.

01:33:53

You are not reformed in any capacity.

01:33:55

There is no, the reformation was built on Luther looking at scripture and saying, I want what the apostle Paul wrote.

01:34:04

I don't want anything else.

01:34:05

I want that.

01:34:07

Not what you say, you, the church, not based on your authority, not based off of your reason, not based off of any, I want what Paul wrote.

01:34:16

Kill me.

01:34:17

If I accept anything else, that's what the, that is what the reformation was built on.

01:34:22

He is not reformed.

01:34:23

Yep.

01:34:23

It might be Calvinist.

01:34:24

I have no idea.

01:34:26

We got one more clip, Keith, unless you wanted to say something.

01:34:28

Yeah.

01:34:29

I just wanted to cue up the next clip because we are, we're running to close to the two hour mark, so we need to start a, this'll be the last thing that we do.

01:34:38

I titled this the dumbest answer I've ever heard to an audience question.

01:34:43

I wasn't trying, I wasn't trying to be ugly.

01:34:46

But I mean, look at me.

01:34:48

I'm going to be honest.

01:34:49

I didn't listen to this part of the debate.

01:34:50

I cringe just as much at the audience portion because the questions are so dumb.

01:34:54

So this will be new to me.

01:34:56

Well, this is the, the, an audience member asks a question and this is his answer.

01:35:02

And what you may disagree that this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, but the, the, please play it.

01:35:09

All right.

01:35:10

Come on up.

01:35:13

Drop this, drop six, add to fire for effect.

01:35:16

Here we go.

01:35:17

All right.

01:35:17

We do pick up Dr.

01:35:18

Van Cleek back to it.

01:35:19

You stated that no two manuscripts agree totally, and that we don't know which ones we are missing.

01:35:24

So which TR is the real one, which TR has the autographs and how can you be sure you have the correct TR? Yeah.

01:35:33

The short answer is, is that each TR would be an iteration of sanctifying work in the whole, through the Holy spirit in God's people.

01:35:41

And so I would say now it's the TBS TR because that's where we are now.

01:35:48

But if there is no TBS TR, like he was talking about, about these Pat folks at Nicaea, there was no TR there, but the autograph was there.

01:35:57

And so before the TR, you got a Beza, for example, or a Stephanas or an Erasmus is TR.

01:36:02

But that was in time.

01:36:04

As soon as you take it out of time, you're like, well, Erasmus is TR and your TR different.

01:36:09

Therefore there's got to be a contradiction.

01:36:10

I would say, no, it's not a contradiction.

01:36:12

It's that God was working through Erasmus and then based on Stephanas.

01:36:16

And now he has worked through the TR, TR.

01:36:20

And so it's an act of sanctification through time, like every other Christian act of sanctification.

01:36:26

Okay.

01:36:27

Okay.

01:36:28

I have to say it.

01:36:31

He just destroyed his own argument.

01:36:34

He just argued for text criticism.

01:36:35

That's exactly right.

01:36:36

He's the dumbest answer I've ever heard.

01:36:38

Cause what he did is he undid everything that he said prior to that, everything he said prior to that is a TR is unquestionable as this, but when asked, well, which TR is right? He says, well, there's, there's obviously several of them that are called the TR and it's the one that I'm holding.

01:36:52

That's right.

01:36:52

And all of these yeah.

01:36:54

And is there another TR coming? Yeah.

01:36:57

It's, it's the eclectic text.

01:36:59

It's just from a smaller sample.

01:37:01

It's from a smaller pool.

01:37:02

He's completely just rejecting every other manuscript based off of whatever standard he wants, but he's still doing text criticism with less evidence, which is exactly what we're saying Erasmus did and, and did fine.

01:37:14

He did work through Erasmus and then he did work through Stephanos and now he is working through the NA28 soon to be 29.

01:37:21

Yeah.

01:37:21

That one, Keith, you're right.

01:37:23

That, that killed it right there because his whole point is we do not have an evolving text.

01:37:27

We have what God gave us.

01:37:28

And so then get the bell ready.

01:37:31

By what standard would we accept a new TR if, if right, if FHA Scribner, which did his, and I think the 1800s, this is it.

01:37:39

That's where we're stopping.

01:37:40

Well, what if we did the Matthew, Keith and Jake TR? What if us three got together, pick some manuscripts, put it together, bounded on a hard bound and say, instead of the FHA Scribner, this is the MKJ version.

01:37:55

Ooh, there we go.

01:37:56

Well, I'll tell you, and it would only be based on our commitment to fundamentalist piety.

01:38:03

Yeah.

01:38:03

That's the only standard, right? Is, is that we're committed to, because that's what it is the other day.

01:38:08

This is an act of fundamentalism and fundamentalism is a straight road to piety.

01:38:13

That's all that matters here, because that's his whole argument.

01:38:15

He gets so animated by saying, well, you're a naturalist, but I believe in the Holy spirit, basically saying you're a liberal, but I'm holding on to the true word.

01:38:24

And that's just King James only ism of a, of a different stripe.

01:38:27

It's King James only ism without a Southern accent.

01:38:30

I appreciate that.

01:38:32

Here's the saddest part.

01:38:35

We, again, we're an hour and 42 minutes in to our, uh, our review of this debate.

01:38:42

I don't know how many people are going to actually listen to this whole podcast.

01:38:45

I know we got people still listening to us.

01:38:46

I see people posting and liking.

01:38:48

I'm thankful for that.

01:38:50

But if you didn't listen to anything else, I may put that in the beginning.

01:38:54

I may move that what he just said, because his, he just cut himself off at the knees.

01:39:01

He just robbed himself of any validity that his position had.

01:39:05

Because when asked which TR is it, it's mine, because that's where we're at right now.

01:39:10

It was Stefanos.

01:39:12

It was Bayes.

01:39:13

It was, uh, Erasmus now it's mine and it's mine, mine, mine.

01:39:17

It's like my, my five-year-old who grabs her Nintendo switch and says, no, you can't play with it.

01:39:23

Cause it's mine.

01:39:24

It's mine.

01:39:25

It's not about the church.

01:39:26

It's about him.

01:39:27

And again, I want to make this personal, but it's really is about him and his cronies who hold this very unique position and, uh, and our historical one.

01:39:37

And I, I hate to be a jerk, but.

01:39:40

So he also declared himself the winner in his closing statement, which we didn't get that clip.

01:39:44

Um, but he said, I, I won, I won the debate.

01:39:47

Um, reminds me of a Margaret Thatcher quote.

01:39:51

Um, she said, being a leader is like being a woman.

01:39:54

If you have to tell people you are, then you aren't, um, and winning a debate like that.

01:40:01

If you have to tell people you won buddy, like, uh, he uses this phrase over and over again.

01:40:09

I absorb his position, but he is not absorbing mine.

01:40:12

Well, yeah, it's because you're both doing text criticism.

01:40:15

You're just doing it poorly.

01:40:17

Yeah.

01:40:18

I mean, at the end of the day, you're doing it by bringing in a presupposition that all those Alexandrian texts are no good.

01:40:25

I mean, that's all you're doing.

01:40:26

You're doing science, but you're saying, but none of this data counts for me.

01:40:31

Yeah.

01:40:31

And, and so you're just, you're just doing bad science.

01:40:34

So you're still doing it.

01:40:35

You're doing the same thing.

01:40:36

You're just doing it poorly.

01:40:37

And everybody can tell.

01:40:38

There was a moment in the debate where the civilian clique mocks, dr.

01:40:41

White for not, not changing up his PowerPoint.

01:40:44

Oh, they're stale.

01:40:44

The slides I've seen him, whatever.

01:40:46

And dr.

01:40:46

White's like, well, the Rasmus hasn't done anything since I made this PowerPoint.

01:40:51

Like he's, I mean the fact that historical facts of who he was and what he did have not changed.

01:40:58

So like, well, yeah, you're right.

01:41:01

I didn't change it and it hasn't been refuted yet.

01:41:03

So.

01:41:04

Yeah.

01:41:04

And he, he, he sort of alludes to dr.

01:41:07

White being old and like his arguments being old.

01:41:10

Krusty.

01:41:11

He used the word Krusty.

01:41:13

And the idea is, well, he's consistent.

01:41:16

Yeah.

01:41:16

And, and there is something to say about a man who has had a consistent argument ever since I've been listening to him for, you know, over 20 years now.

01:41:24

It's been a consistent argument throughout on this position.

01:41:28

What's amazing to me is at the same time, these guys are saying, we're, we're holding on to the old ways.

01:41:33

This is what the church has always done.

01:41:35

You know, we're maintaining, and you guys are a bunch of crazy liberals with your progressive new ideas.

01:41:39

Also at the same time, I got all these great new ideas of how I'm going to defeat you Krusty old, you know, old wizened men.

01:41:46

And it's like, probably, I mean, you've got to, you've got to pick one.

01:41:49

Like, which is it? You have new ideas or do you have old ideas? And frankly, James White is doing the same thing Rasmus is doing.

01:41:58

He's doing the same thing.

01:41:59

Yeah.

01:42:00

With more data.

01:42:02

And to, so to one question, a rhetorical question, and then I'll, I'll say something to the and I know we got to wrap up Keith.

01:42:08

So I'll kind of make this my sign off there, but so Dan Wallace gets brought up in the debate and Dan Wallace is, I believe the director of something called CSNTM, the center for the study of new Testament manuscripts.

01:42:20

Dan Wallace's job at this point is to get on planes and fly to middle Eastern countries and dig up and examine manuscripts, which are copies of the new Testament and other ancient documents too, but primarily CSNTM new Testament manuscripts is what he does.

01:42:34

And so Dan Wallace has added and others like him Adolph Diceman was the first one that brought up the papyri in the early 1900s has added to the, the mountain of evidence we have for the veracity of the new Testament.

01:42:51

The, the accuracy of the new Testament, the fact that what we have is what they wrote that we're just fiddling with little tiny, tiny bits here.

01:42:58

The TR position says that Dan Wallace should just leave them buried in the sand.

01:43:02

That's right.

01:43:03

That there's no point.

01:43:04

There is no point whatsoever.

01:43:06

There's no point to archeology.

01:43:07

If we could find five copies of the gospel of Luke from the first century, even which we don't have utterly irrelevant to the, to the TR position, completely irrelevant, doesn't increase anything whatsoever.

01:43:19

And so get, you know, it's a wrap.

01:43:22

Why is Dan Wall, Dan Wallace is wasting his money.

01:43:24

Everyone, as soon as Erasmus was done will actually be Baza in 1598 was done or, or I guess you could say by extension Scrivener Scrivener was done.

01:43:33

That's it.

01:43:35

That we're done here.

01:43:36

We're not doing this anymore.

01:43:37

And that's the position you have to take now to the listener who says, well, you know, does that mean my King James Bible is defective? No, it is not.

01:43:47

Okay.

01:43:50

Okay.

01:43:50

I know many new testament readings that, that differ, but if you apply the same methods that you study one translation, as you do with the King James or the ESV or the NIV, or any of these translations, you will have the deity of Christ.

01:44:08

You have the resurrection, you will have the Trinity, you will have atonement.

01:44:11

You have all the doctrines that we, we define Christianity as.

01:44:15

And so to the person that thinks they have an incomplete gospel because they're using a King James or a new King James or whatever.

01:44:23

No, you do not.

01:44:24

Okay.

01:44:24

You just have the gospel plus unicorns, the gospel plus unicorns.

01:44:28

That is true.

01:44:28

You have you have a couple of things in there that we would question the authorship and validity of, but the fact of the matter is this is not grounds for splitting a church.

01:44:38

This is not grounds for calling one person to Christian and the other one, not in spite of the hostility you saw in this debate.

01:44:44

If you have a Bible, it was produced by a, a, a major committee produced translation doing textual critical work, not the watchtower garbage or any of that stuff.

01:44:57

You have a good translation.

01:44:58

And, and any of the three of us, if you're wondering which ones are good and which ones are not, we would be happy to recommend one to you at any time.

01:45:05

But this is not a matter of this translation is defective.

01:45:10

And this one is not unless it's the watchtower Bible.

01:45:12

There's just garbage, but anyway, so that's, that's kind of my close out to the listener.

01:45:17

All right, brother, brother, Jake, finish out.

01:45:20

Yeah, look, this stuff matters a lot.

01:45:24

And we got here because brothers in the faith have worked hard.

01:45:29

Some of them like Tyndale have died for this issue.

01:45:33

This position did not exist until the early 20th century.

01:45:38

So it's not a position that Erasmus or Beza or Stephanus held.

01:45:43

It's not a position that King James only guys held.

01:45:45

It's not a position Scrivener held.

01:45:47

It's a position that existed that came about in the, at the beginning of the 20th century, maybe end of the 19th century, because the, the fundamentalists in America felt like the church was becoming too liberal.

01:45:59

And so we got to hold the ground on something.

01:46:01

Do your history.

01:46:02

This position didn't exist.

01:46:03

And so this is a, a problem.

01:46:06

This is a solution that was looking for a problem that didn't exist.

01:46:09

If we follow what the church has done, we will continue.

01:46:13

And that's what the textual criticism has done.

01:46:15

And this matters a lot to me personally.

01:46:17

I am a Calvinist today because I watched the Steven Anderson pisseth on the wall video and thought it was funny.

01:46:24

And then I watched James White talking to Steven Anderson about the King James.

01:46:28

I'm like, who's this bald guy? He's pretty cool.

01:46:30

And then I watched, you know, debates that got me to the debate with Leighton Flowers that taught me that said, Hey, I probably need to translate Romans nine for myself.

01:46:39

So like the Reformation and how it is intrinsically tied to what, where is my Bible, right? Is so important to our Christian faith.

01:46:50

We are standing on the shoulders of giants and those giants are still working today.

01:46:55

And the real, the problem is this, this distracts us from the real bad actors.

01:47:00

There are people who are corrupting the text.

01:47:03

It's not the NIV because they took out the Kama Yohanian.

01:47:06

They're not the bad actors, the Passion Translation, the Watchtower edition, the Joseph Smith Translation, right? So like, again, and I will say this until I want this on my tombstone, is you're going to make these definitive claims by what standard do you make them? Like this stuff really matters.

01:47:28

I'm done.

01:47:30

All right, brother.

01:47:30

Thank you so much.

01:47:31

And thank you both for the time and effort that you put tonight.

01:47:35

I know that our listeners appreciate it.

01:47:38

And, and so do I, and to the listener, I would say, this is definitely a subject.

01:47:43

I agree with Jake that this is a subject that deserves to be studied.

01:47:46

And I want to do a shameless plug because it's my show and I can do that.

01:47:52

I am beginning on October 23rd, just a couple of weeks away.

01:47:57

I'm going to be teaching an eight week survey of church history.

01:48:01

It is available.

01:48:02

If you live in Jacksonville, you can actually come and sit in the class, but if you're not able to be there in person, you can do the course online.

01:48:10

We offer a certificate of completion when you finish these courses through Sovereign Grace Academy.

01:48:14

And one of the things we are going to be talking about in that course is how we got our Bible.

01:48:19

So if you want to know more about this subject and you want to be in an opportunity where there are, it's a classroom environment where you can ask questions and enjoy a good opportunity of learning, please look up Sovereign Grace Academy and go to sgfcjacks.org slash academy.

01:48:34

And again, I want to thank you for listening to Conversations with a Calvinist.

01:48:38

My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

01:48:41

May God bless you.