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

You cannot give us any instance where the church has spoken

about the proper reading of Ephesians 3 .9, can you?

Well, right here.

There it is.

So in this way for hundreds of years.

Hundreds of years, okay.

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.

So which was the Holy Spirit?

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Bosky 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.

Good evening.

Good evening, gentlemen.

How are you guys doing?

What do you do?

I like how I get an epithet and Jake doesn't.

It's just, yeah, Jake.

Oh, and then the not yet Calvinist Matthew.

Let's bring that in.

You've accomplished so much.

Have a tag king, something like that.

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

Yeah.

I'm thinking of calling Jake the interrogator, based on his background in the military

and the fact that he's pretty strong.

What are we gonna call Richard?

Uncle?

I'm good with Uncle Richard.

Yeah, okay.

Well, we'll have him a nickname too.

Well, anyhow, 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.

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

and Dr. Peter Van Cleek on the subject of the Textus Receptus.

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.

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

There was a lot of interaction between the two.

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.

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.

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

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

Number one, it's October everyone.

And October is Reformation month.

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 Wittenberg, thereby sparking the fire that would become

the Inferno of the Protestant Reformation.

That is October 15th, 1517.

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

I'm fixing your theology.

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

And so it's a meme shirt.

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

I'm also drinking tonight.

I won't tell you what it is.

It's milk.

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

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.

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

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

So it was really good.

It was really good.

Jake, go ahead and start.

I know you had some things you wanted to say.

Yeah, after the last podcast, I put out a call to upgrade my sound equipment

and some really awesome guys chipped in.

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

Rick Nagy, who sent me this mic.

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

He's a great guy.

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.

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

mix.

So thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Awesome.

Awesome.

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

Anybody you want to thank?

I wish I had a fourth monitor.

Okay.

That is literally actually necessary tonight based upon the eldritch abomination of software that is all

tied together.

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

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

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

We'll see how it goes, audience.

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

So this could be fun.

I understand.

All right.

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

We're going to begin the review.

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

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

But I was going to ask if one of you would take just a couple of minutes and

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

Cleek.

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

I try, I really can.

We have all listened to the debate multiple times.

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

Dr. White.

Even Matthew was a moderator in his debate on the issue of homosexuality when he

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

So Matthew knows him very well as a moderator.

Jake, you were the one who hosted him here.

I've hosted him at my church.

So none of us are really coming at this unbiased.

We all have a background with Dr. White's materials.

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. White's position.

So whichever one of you guys want to take, you know, one or two minutes to explain Dr. White's position, the eclectic text position

versus the textus receptus, and who wants to go first?

Matthew, you pick, buddy.

You know this hard work.

Could I, when we say the word text, I think we need to define that first.

Okay.

And then we can go into the positions on it.

So to the listener that hears this Latin -y sounding word, because that's what it is, textus

receptus.

So let's go back to the start.

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

The New Testament was written by apostles in a language called Koine Greek.

This is marketplace Greek.

They wrote to churches, most of them, they wrote in life, they wrote as they were

encountering issues and things like that.

And all three of us are biblical inerrancy advocates.

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

But as they wrote, they would send this letter, Paul would send this letter to Ephesus or to Caesarea Philippi or

to these other places, they would get it.

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

I have papers that I've pulled out of files that have been in filing cabinets for only 20 years or so, and they're already yellowed and kind of crinkly and

stuff like that.

So these papyri would degrade very quickly.

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

we had no ability to do that.

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

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

Laodicea.

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

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

would make copies of them.

But because of that, there are occasional mistakes.

So we believe the process by which God inspired the scriptures was infallible, that nothing that God or everything

God wanted in the scriptures got there.

But as people make copies of them, they make, some of them make mistakes, some of them make intentional changes, though that's not the majority

of what happens.

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

So 2000 years later, and I'm skipping literally all of church history, we now have the task of saying, okay,

how is it that we get back to what was originally written so that we can know what

God's word says?

And whenever you have a number of manuscripts of say the Gospel of John, and they differ from

one another, that's called a textual variant.

You'll hear that quite a bit.

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

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

The Textus Receptus specifically is a particular collection of

Greek manuscripts from as early as, it's a set of printed editions from

around the 1500s.

And so it is one particular sort of thread in the story of how the New

Testament came to be.

And again, we're dealing with the New Testament here.

This is not an Old Testament subject.

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

the New King James was translated.

There's a couple others that use it.

And it 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.

So this is 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 history where that started.

So that was no one's position.

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

Yeah, but when we, now looking at Van Cleek's position, I don't know if you're going to talk about that or if Jake

is, but looking at his position, he would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, because 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.

So go ahead and explain that further.

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

And so the thesis of this debate was that the Textus Receptus, so composed as we have it today,

is identical to the autograph.

So the assertion being made, the autograph is when John took quill, I guess, to

parchment and John wrote a letter, first John, and it was sent wherever it was sent.

We don't actually know.

That is called the autograph, the actual, the apostle writing.

And so the assertion of the Textus Receptus position of Peter Van Cleek, Dr. 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 it is a perfect and exact replication of what John wrote.

Now, what is the Textus Receptus is something that I think we can get to in just a minute, but what it is,

it is a collection of printed editions of the Greek New Testament.

So someone says, I wanna make the New Testament in Greek so that preachers can preach from it, which wasn't the

original reasoning for doing so, but that's what we do nowadays.

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

manuscripts from here and here and here and here 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 and I pulled it from say 10 manuscripts,

okay?

Then he came back and tried several more times to improve it, he says, oh, I made a mistake here, oh, that manuscript turned out to be bad, I

learned something new here.

And so this guy, his name is Desiderius Erasmus, he's a Roman Catholic priest, creates a

number of editions of the Greek New Testament, he makes five of them.

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

did in 1550.

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

that's probably a better way to say it.

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.

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.

Those versions have differences from one another, however.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What happened was, there was a guy named FHA Scrivener, who a couple of 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.

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.

So then he produced one Textus Receptus.

It's usually blue.

It's got Trinitarian Bible Society on it.

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 tiebreaker on what version to use.

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.

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

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

Maybe to clarify his position one step further, 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.

That is the key to understanding Dr. 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.

A couple of pieces of the Texas Receptive's 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.

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

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

Again, Dr. 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. 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.

Okay.

So Jake, just in clarifying you, you're representing

or not representing, you're explaining Dr. White's position.

And again, so many people probably already know it who listened to this program, because many people know that I am

like Dr. 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, but.

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. 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 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.

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 the science era starting to

degrade what we thought was relying the authority of the Bible.

So all of a sudden you get all of these very liberal theologians starting to say, well, the Bible is not reliable, it's not

being supported by archeology.

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

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 archeology got better because

the world opened up to archeology 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. White side and on my side, I can't speak for everybody, is we

want what the apostles wrote.

We want that.

That's what we want.

We wanna 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. Dan Wallace has a lot of great

material on how did we arrive with what we have today?

Will 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. 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's gonna say, hmm, 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.

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. Wallace will say, no, what we have is 100 piece puzzle,

but we have 110 pieces.

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, that'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 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.

Snake handling.

Right, there's snake handling and you have to speak tongues 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...

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. 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.

I'm sorry.

Please don't say that publicly.

He'll send you a private message.

I have so many questions and I want them answered.

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. 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 only -ism.

The desire on behalf of those who take this position and who argue for the longer ending of Mark, who argue for the

Percocet adultery, 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.

And 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.

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.

The problem is, I think they're going at it from a position that is just patently

untrue.

The problem is you can't defend certainty with falsehood.

And that's where we are.

Well, there was this claim, like I said several times, that Dr. Van Cleek said to Dr. 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 and 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 watching this debate, I'm asking one thing.

Did you prepare the bell?

By what standard?

By what standard?

Hold on.

Did you prepare a bell?

I do actually have one.

I don't know if mine will pick it up.

No, I didn't prepare it.

Didn't do it.

Oh, there you go.

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

Yeah.

Those are the two big things I wanna know, so.

Let's do this.

We're gonna have Dr. Van Cleek actually state his position.

These are the three arguments that he said, Dr. White.

At the end, he claims himself the winner of the debate, which is quite a bit of Congress on

his part.

Again, Matthew's gonna, his beautiful face is gonna go away from us, and we're gonna actually see, sorry, yeah, we're gonna

see the debate participants as they come up on the screen in Matthew's window.

Yep.

We're gonna 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. White does not answer, and therefore makes him the winner of the

exchange.

So, Matthew.

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.

All right.

All right, here we go.

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

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

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.

I appreciate Dr. 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.

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.

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

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 received the words of God by faith.

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.

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

arguments.

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

Two, because God's word regards itself in autographic terms, the reformers historically regarded the TR as equal to the

autographic New Testament text.

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

Beginning now with my first argument.

God's word...

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

Let's talk a little...

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...

He used a lot of debate language.

He would accuse Dr. White of ad hominem and things like that.

He used a lot of logical fallacy arguments.

So you're using a post hoc or something.

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

argument.

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

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

I read from the English.

It's the one we purchased for the church.

That's the one we have in the seats.

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

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

So who gets to win in that case?

Because he says, when you read your Bibles, he's assuming that if you don't have a TR, you don't

have a Bible.

Yeah, yeah.

Like if I accept the premise that God in his wisdom

would have preserved one manuscript family forever, right?

Let's say I accept that premise.

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, 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.

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

So you're right.

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.

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.

Yeah, 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 overall problem.

And here's what people will say.

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

And what they're doing when they say that is they're assuming the preeminence and the

complete accuracy of the King James.

Therefore, if the ESV takes out the word blood or if the ESV takes out the word fasting,

they assume that that is the ESV's error, because there was

a standard.

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

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

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

Scrivener.

And Scrivener, so the text he's defending, the specific TR he is defending is

FHA Scrivener's construction.

And it's not a direct back translation from the King James

back into Greek.

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

And so Dr. Van Cleek will do a lot of work to try and distance himself from

King James onlyism.

The problem is the book he is using, the TR he is holding would not exist without the King James.

It couldn't.

It couldn't.

The King James became the ruler.

It's the 3D glasses, if you will, that make it, make Scrivener's work possible.

So -.

The word he uses is plumb line.

He says there has to be a plumb line.

And to him, the TR slash KJV is the plumb line.

I will give folks this, right?

It does look on its face like liberal creep.

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

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

They're intentionally trying to remove that stuff.

Now, I mean, that is very hurtful to the godly men who are really trying to do the work

of preserving the text.

Because if John didn't write that, if Mark didn't write that, I don't want it.

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

If John didn't write it, I don't want it, right?

And so there's a reason why, real quick.

I have a unicorn tattooed on my arm, right?

And underneath that is Latin for words mean things.

And this was my post seminary present to myself to remind

myself to never stop doing the hard work of translation.

Why?

Because the King James Bible has unicorns in it.

Why?

Because bad translation.

It's bad translation work.

I'm sorry, it just is.

There was a better word they could have used.

They chose unicorn, right?

And so you have to make that explanation.

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

Now, Dr. Van Cleek, I'm sorry, I don't have a PhD.

I only have one master's degree.

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.

Well, that's a category error.

That is a massive category error.

You believe, how would you know anything about David?

Well, by reading that Bible.

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

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

Dr. White makes that point later.

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

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

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

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

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

It was this.

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

No, no, it's not.

My wife said something and there is a problem in determining exactly what

this particular word meant.

I know the content of the note.

I know what it was trying to tell me.

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.

I know what it is.

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

That's utterly fallacious argument.

That's a category, Aaron.

Yeah.

All right, well, let's move on.

We've got several videos left.

Some of them are a little longer than others.

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

This is James White's framing the real issue.

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

Go listen to the whole debate.

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

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

What did the original authors write?

That will be the determiner of how this debate comes out and how benefited we

are by it.

Thank you very much for your attention.

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.

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

You want it here or next slide?

I want to see the slide.

I want to see, so I need you to remove your face.

I know, I'm working it, I'm working it.

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.

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

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 it says the

transmission of their transmission over time.

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

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.

Therefore, how they were preserved doesn't matter.

Therefore, their historical validity doesn't matter 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.

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

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

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

Dr. White, is there any text of the Bible that you would reconsider that you would

change if you found evidence to the contrary, right?

And I wanted to reverse that question and I wish Dr. 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, right?

Because the standard isn't what we can obviously see Mark wrote, the standard is this is

the authorized preserved text.

Yeah, and if Mark did say, yo, dog, this is what I wrote, I would be like amazed.

I would be in an Aramaic way, I don't know Aramaic slang.

Bring your face back, Matthew.

Well, what I was gonna say is, and this is very much in passing, Stanley Hauerwas would say, no, Mark

would have no right to do that.

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, now that's a matter of interpretation, not textual issues, those are two different

things, but I just find that interesting and frustrating.

All right, well, moving on to, I wanna look now at Dr. Van Cleek's rebuttal, and

this part is just for those who maybe aren't familiar with debate, they both had opening statements, then they both had a

rebuttal statement.

This is the rebuttal statement that is filled with sass.

That's the nicest way I can say.

I was gonna say, so in the opening statement, I'm willing to give this dude a chance.

I'm like, okay, he wrote a book, he's got a PhD, I'm in, he's got a weird math equation, I don't understand that, but I'm in.

As soon as the rebuttal starts,.

You just see all that attitude, and I'm like, oh, nevermind, nevermind.

I see, because this is just fundamentalism's ugly face, that's all this is, it's just

fundamentalist by another name, man.

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

sass, I call really bad attitude.

Yeah.

And I have a bad attitude.

I really am trying to be nice.

At some point, maybe Dr. Van Cleek will watch this, I doubt it.

Maybe he'd be interested in coming on and talking with me, I doubt it, but this

is sass.

Well, you know what's funny is we are bowtie groupies, like we watch James White debates

forever, and he's always the one getting the bad rap or being snarky and rude or whatever.

So it's like, when Dr. 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 gotta reconsider.

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

Because you're debating for normal people, right?

Like this wasn't necessarily a debate for a bunch of PhD students, this was for normal people

to watch and consider their position.

And there's no winsomeness, no gentlemanliness, like, it was ugly, sorry.

No, absolutely, let's see it.

Let's see it, Matthew.

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

No, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Go ahead, I'm sorry.

No, no, no, 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.

So here we go.

Oh, his mic is off for a second.

Over 1 ,500 minutes of Dr. White's material in preparation for this debate.

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

So why not Dr. Mueller?

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

He's not alone.

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

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 a standard.

Not one Greek text is identical to the TR.

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

So don't find that as even remotely problematic.

The critical text is based on everything we possess.

Everything we possess is not everything we've had, all right?

And if you listen to Dr. White, he's clear in bringing this out.

You've got fires in Alexandria, you've got wars, you've got bugs, as he says, and you've got

weather, it destroys manuscripts.

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

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.

It's simply inscrutable.

Every reading is a probability.

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

is a probability.

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

No one's gonna tell you that.

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

But this is simply false, all right?

To claim that somehow Bayes' theorem can't apply.

It absolutely does apply.

It just doesn't apply the way he would like it to, right?

Oldest, shortest, best internal, external evidence.

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

There's nothing wrong with that.

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

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay.

We need the papyri.

If you guys are into this, you need to read Myths and Mistakes.

It's a great book about textual criticism.

I really appreciate the work.

Had several conversations with Elijah Hickson.

Just consider this.

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.

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

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

And then my last one.

Two factors that are most important in determining the reliability of a historical document, the number of manuscripts copied as an existence and the time

between when it was first written and the oldest existing copy.

They say, don't make that argument.

Dr. White's making the argument right now.

The guys in Myths and Mistakes say, don't make that argument.

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.

That's conflating textual reliability and historical reliability.

Apart from that, such claims commit the logical fallacy of assuming that a larger number in an earlier date

necessarily equate to more reliability.

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

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.

None of these guys from Myths and Mistakes agree with me.

Not one of them.

But they're ready to say, let's be honest about the science, it's a bad argument, all right?

Right away, just the,.

He's quoting people, and then he's saying, but they don't agree with me.

But I'm gonna make use of bits and pieces of their argument.

And here's the thing, Dr. 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.

We do know what Erasmus had.

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

there.

That is documented.

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

And that's the, again, he's conflating two things.

But Matthew, you said you had some thoughts.

Yeah, so as, not that you guys haven't debated or enjoyed it, but as the resident

debate moderator nerd, it's kind of like,

especially like right after you got your MDiv and then you heard like a really bad youth pastor

sermon, like a bad one where they just butchered it.

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.

And you're just like cringing inside.

That's what I do 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.

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

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

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

If Dr. 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.

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

You can't do that.

You have to address the points that were actually made.

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

I'm sure he was taking notes during Dr. White's opening statement and that was snarky, but at least it was legal.

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

He starts saying, well, this is the, he starts going off against an argument that

had not yet been made from the stage.

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

And in fact, when James White and Michael Brown debated on the subject of predestination, James White, yeah, James

White makes his case.

Then Michael Brown makes his opening statement.

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

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

Now's the time for rebuttal.

And those two have a gentlemanly relationship.

They're experienced debaters.

That's how that should go.

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

That is not how that works.

It's very similar to counseling someone.

They come in and tell you what the problem is.

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

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

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

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

I haven't taken any classes from him.

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 gonna see that point later,

that Plantinga has made this idea that we could look at the TR this

way or we could look at scripture this certain way, but he never applies it to the TR, right?

And so he says, well, I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna apply it to the TR.

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.

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

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

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

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

I haven't had time because Jeremy's keeping me pretty busy right now.

But the idea that we're not going to apply to

historical texts, and that's what these are, right?

The Bible is not the golden plates of the Book of Mormon.

That is not what God gave us on purpose.

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

But it is still something that occurred in history by human hand 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.

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

bonkers.

Like you just want to do...

Probability is something that you do when you're dealing with science and

elements, but not when you're dealing with human beings.

These corruptions occurred through human error or through human intention.

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

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

I've heard Rome do this before.

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

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.

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

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

the Bible.

Therefore the inverse is 90%.

So the papacy is 90 % proven by that verse.

What?

Bayes' theorem works, but you have to have some kind of grounding for the

probabilities you're assigning things.

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.

Cause 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.

Well, what's the odds of Isaiah never existing?

And also we have all these manuscripts of it existing.

Will it be 0 %?

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.

But if we assume his premise that there is a Holy Spirit that's preserved

the text, well then Bayes' theorem, how does that still apply?

Because you're now dealing in probability with what your real argument is, this was intentionally given

by a supernatural all -powerful God.

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.

I wanna 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 and I would even say offensive.

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 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.

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

don't have evidence for anything we believe, therefore, why do we need evidence for the Bible?

That is the heart of his argument, is nothing we believe in the Bible has evidence 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, 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.

I don't have the man's name in my data bank 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, and this was back in the early 1900s, he set out to sort of

disprove that what Luke had written in Luke and Acts was wrong.

And by the time his archeology, who is it?

He's probably German, early 1900s, that just sounds like what a German.

Would be doing about that time.

Yeah, but I have his written documents and I use them in my New Testament class, he says very clearly, he

says that Luke is a historian of high regard and says that the things that

he wrote are actually testified by the evidence.

And through that, he became a believer.

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,

that sounds like independent fundamentalist ranking.

That is not how Christianity works.

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

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

And then he goes and he talks about the crucifixion.

He talks to an archeologist, he talks to a medical doctor.

Well, maybe Jesus didn't die on the cross and he just, whatever.

And at the end of it, he's convinced by the evidence.

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

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

contradict what God has said.

And so, again, there is a place to say that the scriptures have

supreme authority.

Of course they do.

And our musings on dug up pottery does not override the fact that God said.

But at the same time, what we find will never be incongruent with that because we live in God's world.

Yeah, yeah.

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

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

That's bad presuppositionalism because 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.

Presuppositionalism, and I am a presuppositionalist in generally, right?

But that isn't saying by what standard can I say that our John 1 is the correct

John 1 and your John 1 is the wrong John 1 because the Joseph Smith translation changes it.

By what standard are you determining that?

If your standard ultimately is the Holy Spirit, 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, that's the same

standard that the LDS are using.

So by what standard is this the one?

Is this TR the one?

I don't know.

I have no idea.

Other than he says, the church has always had it, right?

That's his big thing.

The church has always had it.

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

Oh, we do have that clip.

I'm sorry.

That's okay.

No, you're good.

You're good.

You wanna move to the next one, Keith?

What we're doing now is we're gonna move from, we've just left Van Cleek's rebuttal.

We're now gonna move to the first cross -examination where Dr. White is examining Van Cleek on

how he should come to a conclusion on Ephesians 3 .9.

Now, I said this in the first, there were two cross -examination periods, so I could be wrong.

This might be the second, but the question is, how do we determine the reading

at Ephesians 3 .9?

And we've got three different video clips to show from this.

This was 20 minutes, so we couldn't show the whole thing.

Yeah, this is clip five, I think.

Let's see.

Yeah.

So, Dr. White, you can't show me one person who preached a sermon

and gave your reading, quoted a verse and gave it your way.

But you are telling us that the church, by the Spirit of God, tells us this is

the reading.

Is that how you do textual criticism?

Is that how Erasmus derived this?

Everybody see this?

Everything is coming back to textual criticism, a bit of a Freudian slip there.

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

Again, this is a straight up Bart Ehrman, unchristian, atheistic argument.

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

He could make an argument from philosophy if he wanted.

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

All right?

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.

Because James White, Dr. White says, you know what?

The evidence says it should be a different word.

So that's how -.

You on the next clip?

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

Yeah, well, let's keep going because he stays on the same topic.

Okay, all right.

You cannot give us any instance where the church has spoken

about the proper reading of Ephesians 3 .9, can you?

Well, right here.

There it is.

So -.

It's been this way for hundreds of years.

Hundreds of years, okay.

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.

So which was the Holy Spirit?

Well, we would say that just like normal church, this is a great thing.

Everybody know about federal vision?

Big fight among Presbyterians about whether who's -.

Absolute canard, has nothing to do with this.

Great fight right now.

All we're saying is that in the end, yes, sometimes the church can make a mistake.

But saying that does not all of a sudden say, well, then we got to get rid of the church in making the decision because it makes mistakes.

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

You come to your conclusion by the Holy Spirit speaking through his words to your heart and you submit to those words by faith.

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

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

Certainly can.

But does that recuse the church from its responsibility?

No, same thing.

Your husband can make mistakes.

Your wife can make mistakes.

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

It's a ridiculous idea.

Do you -.

Yes, it is.

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 and we ask you, where did

this come from?

And your answer is, we pray about it.

Is that how you answer?

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.

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

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.

You know how you believe in a reading in your Bible?

Like you believe in everything else.

And now I have to defend that though.

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

You can't believe in the Bible like you believe in everything else because -.

Please pause it.

Please pause it.

I can't -.

I'm dying here.

I can't not say what I have to say right now.

But what if it's my Bible?

Right.

That's the whole thing.

Joseph Smith's Bible.

Yeah.

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

Okay.

There you go.

Now we're done.

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

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.

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 the church has held this for 400 years.

Not exactly.

Not in that form.

It hasn't been in that form in that way.

The Scrivener's edition and all these different things.

Okay.

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

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

The church.

Well, who of the church?

Obviously not Rome, right?

The whole point of us being reformed is Rome messed it up.

That was the whole point.

So 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, Tobit?

Yeah.

Where are we with those?

Why?

Because the church spoke, right?

Well, we did a whole reformation, bro.

Welcome.

You're in it.

Yeah.

You just became a cartoon character when you went, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo.

I just, sorry.

So to the audience, Ephesians chapter three, verse nine, the variant is between the Greek word koinonia and

oikonomia, which is administration in one translation and mystery in

the other translation.

It affects that verse.

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.

Yeah.

Versus not 5 ,000, because 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.

So you make a great point that I want to rant on for just a tiny sec, right?

Sure, go for it.

Is in our world, we're very comfortable with saying, look, for this verse,

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.

We and the ancient world are okay with that.

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

Can I make a point by your tag groups?

Yeah.

You have two tag groups.

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

Yes, my favorite.

And then you have another one.

Just say that you don't believe the Bible's authoritative and move along.

Oh yeah, they're slightly different.

Yeah.

But if you said, just say that you don't understand reformed theology and move along, you have not tampered with the meaning of

the statement.

Right, right.

In one, you have a that, in the other one, you don't.

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

They don't understand.

They can't even comprehend the difference in a different language.

So Van Cleef will say, no, God inspired every single word

exactly the same.

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

So when we go, no major doctrine is impacted by variants, because none is.

Correct.

He'll go insufficient.

God did the words.

And when we say, yes, he did.

You're absolutely right.

But we have 10 ,000 of them, and we're not just gonna go by your word, and

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

the same standard by which we do everything else.

Yep.

All right, sorry.

No, no, absolutely.

All right.

So we have one more.

Do we have one more clip from that cross -examination?

Yes, we do.

It skips about a minute.

So this is one minute later than what we just were.

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

This is clip seven, Keith?

Yep.

Okay.

For example,.

Dr. White said he read my books.

Yes, I did.

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

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 so aimed.

That's not prayer.

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

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

But to his question, Alvin Plantinga 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 so aimed.

Okay.

So yeah, I guess the answer is yes.

I can point you to Calvin.

Okay.

It's Calvin's theology.

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

You do.

Incorrect.

It's incorrect actually.

Then can you now give me the example where Calvin gave that in regards to how we are supposed to do technical criticism?

No, you said Plantinga.

And so Plantinga makes an argument when he gets to making his Aquinas -Calvin model.

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.

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.

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

argument.

My argument is for the doctrine of God.

And that's what my PhD was about because I watched Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher alive,

say, this is something we could talk about, but I'm gonna set that to the side.

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

You pick up something that somebody put down.

So again, this is incorrect.

And that's partly because I don't think Dr. White has read Plantinga on this point.

Does Alvin Plantinga use the Texas Receptus only position?

I don't think so.

So he didn't make that point.

Exactly.

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?

Well, he hasn't done a lot of things.

Okay.

All right.

So -.

Okay, I just have to -.

I love it.

Real quick, my wife is listening.

Hey, honey.

And she just posted, he's so angry.

He is.

He is the worst kind of Calvinist.

I love the Aquinas -Calvin model, right?

I read about it.

I agree with him.

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

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.

We're doing text criticism with that.

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

And like I said before, the Plantinga thing, Plantinga said you could do this, but he didn't apply it in his

life to the TR.

So you did.

You're just cannibalizing him.

Because who would other than someone with an a priori commitment to the TR?

No one would get to where he's getting unless they start there.

You don't arrive at this.

You have to start with this.

It's important to note that the King James editors especially said

this is not an authorized Holy Spirit preserved single

text.

They specifically said that.

Now I've never read that Erasmus said that, but from everything I do know about Erasmus, he would agree it was the

work of a faithful saint.

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

He debated Luther actually.

He just dropped a hard bow on Erasmus.

When he got fired as an army chaplain.

But I love my Catholic brothers.

But they would not have said that.

So we know the TR began at a specific time,

but those guys would have said we're using text criticism.

And before that, it just existed.

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

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 gonna 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.

Then by what standard have we thrown out Maccabees?

Yeah.

By what standard?

Yeah.

Well, guys, this leads us, this leads, or go ahead, I'm sorry, Matthew, you didn't get to speak, I'm sorry.

No, it's okay.

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

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.

In fact, the United States confrontation rights in trials and the fact that you have the right to confront

your witnesses is a biblical idea.

That's God's law.

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

and you're looking directly at the person.

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

You can rehearse a good fiery opening statement.

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.

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

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 nailed it on all the other ones and then he filibustered cross X.

He ate as much cross X time as he could by just chewing up time because he knew that's where he was gonna get killed.

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

not understand how to answer the question being presented.

This is the part where arguments melt.

And I think that's what you saw.

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

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

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.

Right.

Yeah.

The next part is what I call the epic moment.

And I know Matthew about climbed out of his skin over this particular section,

but I loved it.

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

And I, the moderator is going to get involved.

I'm not gonna say any more.

Go ahead and play.

I instantly thought of Matthew.

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

I would never.

I just, is this clip eight, Keith?

Yeah.

Okay, coming up.

The fallible activities and fallible readings into the infallible readings that actually

represent the autographs that you can't show us down through history at all.

Yeah.

When did it happen?

Yeah.

So you just move, talk about a category error.

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

The point is, is that the way we get from Erasmus and Stephanas and Beza until we get to the Trinitarians.

I have to.

Can I not answer that question?

Go ahead.

Go ahead, please.

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

And so the church grows.

We would say that the church grew out of the first century.

We get into the middle ages, right?

And then we would say, in a lot of ways, the church didn't grow.

In a lot of ways, it did.

But in a lot of ways, it didn't.

Made some really wrong turn.

And then the Reformation happens and we see the church grow.

I'm not talking about just individuals.

Though individuals are growing because the church is growing.

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

Same thing happens with each one of your individual beliefs.

You grow, it's called sanctification.

And so the church had Erasmus.

So we got away from the Latin, we went to Greek, which is a huge change.

And then we get Beza and Stephanas.

And then we get the TR.

Each one of these iterations is a growth.

Not because the men, of course the men are fallible.

Yeah, I'll give that to you.

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

words.

So it's like he believes in everything else.

Paul's just, I know I'm not supposed to do this.

Oh, no.

So then could the advancement of the critical texts and the addition of the other texts be a growth in that same thing?

Operator just asked me a question.

I'm sorry, I'm new at this.

I'll say, this is the hardest part of this job is to

keep my mouth shut.

I'm going to stop us now.

Anyway, we do have a next section.

Dr. White was pretty gracious.

Yeah.

Because I know how he feels about this issue.

When we were setting up our debate at Switzerland, he grilled me on,

are you sure your guy understands?

This guy better understand.

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

And then Rich Pierce, hey, are you sure this is the guy?

I'm like, he's got it, he's fine.

And this is why.

And my guy, my guy was awesome.

But this guy, when I re -watch this debate twice, I have to skip it.

I cannot sit through it.

Can't do that part, yeah.

See, here's the thing though.

And as I agree, it was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong.

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

I actually sent him a message through Chris Arnton.

I'm not defending his error.

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

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?

Because 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 and that's when it ends.

And the dude nailed him because he could, and of course it was wrong.

I'm not defending him.

I'm just saying that, I wish Dr. White would have said it.

Well, Dr. White said, hey, that's what we're all thinking, man.

That's right.

He did, he did.

Yeah, so during their debate at our church and I'm contractually obligated because I was asked to by the pastor in

chat at Switzerland Community Church in 2018, Jake?

Yes.

Is it September of 18?

Yeah, I think so.

Okay.

Yeah.

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

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

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

I mean, like, yeah, we're in Ruby Red, Northwest St. John's County, but still like,

you know, we didn't know.

And so we were super strict about it.

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

The only thing we want to hear is pages turning.

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

That issue right there was a powder keg.

And as moderator, so my job, as I said, was to be relentlessly neutral, right?

You shouldn't know what side of the debate I was on.

And I think rewatching it, you wouldn't.

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.

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

And I kept calling Dr. White and Dr. Brown the negative side because they were, they were attempting to negate the statement and not attempting

in my own opinion, they did so.

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 levity there and that was funny, but that was not interrupting

a person's time.

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

It was a chuckle the whole room got to have.

You don't do that as a moderator.

I don't care.

Here's, okay, here's the thing.

Have you seen some of Dr. White's other debates where the opponent face plants?

The face plant is a face plant because the guy did it by himself.

Yeah, the Steve Cassies for example.

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

Okay, unfortunately I have to grant in this moment, perhaps.

Yeah.

But throughout the rest of the debate, he was a simple timekeeper.

It undermines the truth.

It does, it takes away the neutrality of the moderator position.

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

Don't, you don't do that.

To the brother who was the mod, I understand, I love you.

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

I'm not trying to hate on you.

I'm just saying like big no -no.

We felt that tension in the room and a good pastoral move is to undo the

tension, man.

Yeah.

But 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.

And I mean, that always hurts the debate.

When it comes to that.

As a moderator in college politics debates, I got called biased by both sides

on two different debates because we got to call infractions.

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.

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

And so you can't do that.

Well, one debate, 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.

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

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.

So anyway.

Yeah.

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

This next one is I think one of the longer ones.

It's four minutes and some change, but this is again, Dr. White cross -examining

Van Cleek on the last verses of Revelation.

And I want to say this, I'm the one who chose these video clips.

So if anybody wants to say I was biased and I only chose James White cross -examining Van Cleek and I did

not choose any of Van Cleek cross -examining Dr. White, that is true.

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

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

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

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

Obviously I have a position.

Yeah, I'm not neutral.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not.

Yeah.

But just to be clear, you know, there was, and it was also done with a

little bit of, you know, a little bit of haste.

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

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. White says.

Okay, here it comes.

Dr. 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.

Indeed.

Did the Holy Spirit bless those non -autographic readings.

To those people when they preached them?

No, the Holy Spirit only speaks through his own words.

Okay, so when Erasmus asked his

printer to change Revelation, just tear out what he did

and use the Align reading.

If the Align had used almost any Greek manuscript, the book of Revelation

would be completely different in here than it is now.

Would that be the autograph or not the autograph?

It's hypothetical.

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

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.

That was the autograph that no Christian had ever seen.

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 a false choice.

In the end, Erasmus, this is one thing.

When you quote from, say, the Patristics, right?

When he put it up on the board, he talked about all the Patristics and Patristic citations, right?

But Erasmus, he can't get it right.

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

But Erasmus, he can't do it, right?

No, that doesn't fly.

Yes, Erasmus can do that.

I have a quote right here.

Hold on, let me add to my answer to that question.

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

I said - You were using language like being inspired or that he had it right.

It was in his head and on one manuscript.

For his commentary.

Maybe you don't understand.

Let me try it again.

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

22.

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.

So if that is the autograph, then the autograph had disappeared for

the entire history of the church that we are aware of.

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,

was just wrong.

Is that what you're telling us?

It was like five questions.

Like, what do you want me to answer?

Okay, I think everyone understands exactly what I was asking you.

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

So I'll make it very, very clear.

Are you telling us that the end of Revelation in here is what John wrote

autographically.

It disappeared from every bit of history.

All right, I gotta answer that one first.

For him to say it disappeared is for him to say, no, we don't have it now.

Yes.

This is a horrible argument.

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

So what you are saying then is that it was there, it's disappeared from

history.

No, it's just disappeared from our history.

Okay.

But the church has had the original word.

What other history do we have, sir?

Because history has fallen along a course of human existence.

Okay.

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 it.

But you don't have any evidence whatsoever.

I do, I just explained to you.

There's three kinds of evidence,.

Posterior, prior, and background.

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.

Thank you.

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

I don't even want to confuse anything more.

I will yield my time.

That's a moment.

I know it's happened before.

I can't claim to know exactly when.

But it's very few times when Dr. White will yield his time.

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

He is not rational.

Yeah, it's the same as when he walked out of the Steven Anderson conversation.

It's done.

We're good.

We're good here.

We've accomplished everything that's gonna get done.

I mean, 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, did you?

No, did you?

No.

Okay, who had it?

He just says the church, but can't point to anyone in the church until Erasmus literally, and we

know this by his notes, which by the way, he says, he did not read Erasmus' annotations,

right?

It's really important.

Erasmus says how he came up with this rendering of Revelation 22,

which is essentially just pull it up the bum, right?

Okay, I now know what part's gonna start the show.

There we go.

That's the tag clip.

It's always been, it's always been, right?

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

thin air.

So 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 picture.

But the meme is faithful Pastor Jim hiding the original King James in

the year 361 before the Catholics come and destroy him.

You know what I mean?

Like it's this idea that there's this like faithful invisible group of

independent fundamental Baptists who are holding onto the TR through time, but never come up for

air and show up on recorded history.

It's insane, man.

It's crazy insane.

That's the one.

Thank you.

We, Pastor Jim.

But that's it, right?

That's his, the church.

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 and hopes

that one day a true believer will find the scriptures and restore the one true faith.

So if you watch this, this is your argument right here.

This is your, the church that held it.

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

There's no testimony of the church.

How about that word?

There is no testimony of faithful elders in the church who have your reading of Ephesians three or

who have your reading of Revelation 22.

There are no Christian testimonies of it, but yours, my man,

doesn't exist.

To the reader, what we're talking about here is that Erasmus is translating, it's not translating rather, he's compiling a

Greek edition of the New Testament.

He's doing textual criticism.

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

Erasmus is looking at a bunch of different papers, that are copies that are hundreds of years old that are treasures.

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.

How do I come up with a consistent Greek text when all of these differ?

So he has to make choices.

So he gets to Revelation and he didn't really care about Revelation that much because it's pretty

evident Erasmus didn't even really think it was scripture.

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

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 it, and then a sentence in Greek, which is kind of how our English commentaries work today.

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

Not knowing where that commentary got its Greek from.

Then he gets to the end, the last pages of the commentary have fallen out.

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

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

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

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

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

That became what's in the Textus Receptus.

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.

I didn't really care about it.

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.

So his printer goes and does that.

Here's the problem.

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

So Erasmus makes a faulty Greek ending to Revelation.

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.

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.

Am I saying your King James Bible is broken, decrepit, doesn't contain the gospel?

I am saying none of those things.

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.

And when Dr. Van Cleek is asked, hey, Erasmus has new readings in here that made it into the TR that no

one had ever seen before.

Where did they come from?

Well, the church confirmed them.

Always had it.

That's all we had.

That's all we got.

The church has always had that.

Yep, that's it.

No Christian ever can attest to that.

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

always had it.

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

So clearly he didn't have the gospel.

And that's it.

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

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

You are not reformed, my man.

You are not reformed in any capacity.

There is nothing.

The Reformation was built on Luther looking at scripture and saying, I want what

the apostle Paul wrote.

I don't want anything else.

I want that.

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.

Kill me if I accept anything else.

That is what the Reformation was built on.

He is not reformed.

Yep.

It might be Calvinist, I have no idea.

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

Yeah, 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, this will be the last thing that we do.

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

I wasn't trying to be ugly, but I mean, look at me.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't listen to this part of the debate.

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

So this will be new to me.

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

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

please play it.

All right, coming up.

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

Here we go.

All right.

We do pick up Dr. Van Cleek back to it.

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

So which TR is the real one?

Which TR has the autographs and how can you be sure you have the correct TR?

Yeah, 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.

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

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.

And so before the TR, you got a Beza, for example, or a Stephanos or an Erasmus' TR, but

that was in time.

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

Therefore, there's gotta be a contradiction.

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

It's that God was working through Erasmus and then Beza and Stephanos.

And now he has worked through the TR.

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

Okay.

I have to say it.

He just destroyed his own argument.

He just argued for text criticism.

That's exactly right.

He's the dumbest answer I've ever heard because what he did is he undid everything that he said prior to that.

Everything he said prior to that is a TR, is unquestionable, is this.

But when asked, well, which TR is right?

He says, well, there's obviously several of them that are called the TR and it's the one that I'm holding that's right.

And all of these other, yeah.

And is there another TR coming?

Yeah, it's the eclectic text.

It's just from a smaller sample.

It's from a smaller pool.

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 did fine.

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

Yeah, that one, Keith, you're right.

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

We have what God gave us.

And so then get the bell ready.

By what standard would we accept a new TR?

If, right, if FHA Scribner, which did his in I think the 1800s, this is it.

That's where we're stopping.

Well, what if we did the Matthew, Keith, and Jake TR?

What if us three got together, picked some manuscripts, put it together, bound

it in a hard bound and say, instead of the FHA Scribner, this is the MKJ version.

Ooh, there we go.

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

Yeah.

That's the only standard, right?

Is that we're committed to, because that's what it is the other day.

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

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

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.

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

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

I appreciate that.

Here's the saddest part.

We, again, we're an hour and 42 minutes into our review of this

debate.

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

I know we got people still listening to us.

I see people posting and liking.

I'm thankful for that.

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

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

He just robbed himself of any validity that his position had, because when asked which TR is it, it's

mine because that's where we're at right now.

It was Stephanus.

It was Baze.

It was Erasmus.

Now it's mine.

And it's mine, mine, mine.

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

mine.

It's mine.

It's not about the church.

It's about him.

And again, I don't wanna make this personal, but it really is.

It's about him and his cronies who hold this very unique position and a

historical one.

And I hate to be a jerk, but.

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

But he said, I won the debate.

Reminds me of a Margaret Thatcher quote.

She said, being a leader is like being a woman.

If you have to tell people you are, then you aren't.

And winning a debate like that, if you have to tell people you won, buddy,

like.

He uses this phrase over and over again.

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

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

You're just doing it poorly.

Yeah.

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.

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

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

Yeah.

And so you're just doing bad science.

So you're still doing it.

You're doing the same thing.

You're just doing it poorly.

And everybody can tell.

There was a moment in the debate where Sylvain Clique mocks Dr. White for not changing up his PowerPoint.

Oh, they're stale.

The slides, I've seen them, whatever.

And Dr. White's like, well, Erasmus hasn't done anything since I made this PowerPoint.

Like, he's, I mean, the fact, the historical facts of who he

was and what he did have not changed.

So like.

Why would I?

Yeah, you're right.

I didn't change it.

And it hasn't been refuted yet.

So.

Yeah, and he sort of alludes to Dr. White being old and like his arguments being old.

Crusty, he used the word crusty.

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

Yeah.

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.

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

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

This is what the church has always done.

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

Also at the same time, I got all these great new ideas of how I'm gonna defeat you crusty old, you know, old

wizened men.

And it's like, bro, I mean, you gotta pick one.

Like, which is it?

You have new ideas or do you have old ideas?

And frankly, James White is doing the same thing Erasmus is doing.

He's doing the same thing.

Yeah, just better.

With more data.

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

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.

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.

And so Dan Wallace has added, and others like him, Adolf Deismann was the first one that

brought up the papyri in the early 1900s, has added to

the mountain of evidence we have for the veracity of the New Testament, 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.

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

That there's no point, there is no point whatsoever.

There's no point to archeology.

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 TR position, completely irrelevant, doesn't increase anything whatsoever.

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

Why is Dan Wallace is wasting his money.

Everyone, as soon as Erasmus was done, well, actually be Beza in 1598 was done, or I guess

you could say by extension, Scrivener, when Scrivener was done, that's it, that

we're done here.

We're not doing this anymore.

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.

Okay.

Okay.

I know many New Testament readings 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.

You have the resurrection.

You will have the Trinity.

You will have atonement.

You have all the doctrines that we define Christianity as.

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.

No, you do not.

Okay.

You just have the gospel plus unicorns.

The gospel plus unicorns.

That is true.

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.

This is not grounds for calling one person a Christian and the other one not.

In spite of the hostility you saw in this debate, if you have a Bible,

it was produced by a major committee produced translation, doing textual

critical work, not the Watchtower garbage or any of that stuff, you have a good translation.

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.

But this is not a matter of this translation is defective and this one is not, unless it's

the Watchtower Bible.

Theirs is just garbage.

But anyway, that's kind of my close out to the listener.

All right, brother.

Brother Jake, finish out.

Yeah, look, this stuff matters a lot.

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

Some of them like Tyndale have died for this issue.

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

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

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

It's not a position Scrivener held.

It's a position that existed, that came about at the beginning of the 20th century, maybe end of the 19th century,

because the fundamentalists in America felt like the church was becoming too liberal.

And so we got to hold the ground on something.

Do your history.

This position didn't exist.

And so this is a problem.

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

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

And that's what the textual criticism has done.

And this matters a lot to me personally.

I am a Calvinist today because I watched the Stephen Anderson pisseth on the wall

video and thought it was funny.

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

I'm like, who's this bald guy?

He's pretty cool.

And then I watched 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.

So like the Reformation and how it is intrinsically tied to

where is my Bible, right?

Is so important to our Christian faith.

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

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

There are people who are corrupting the text.

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

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 gonna make these definitive claims by what standard do you make them?

Like this stuff really matters.

I'm done.

All right, brother, thank you so much.

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

I know that our listeners appreciate it and so do I.

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

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

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

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

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

It is available.

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.

We offer a certificate of completion.

When you finish these courses through Sovereign Grace Academy.

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

So if you wanna know more about this subject and you wanna be in an opportunity where there is 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.

And again, I wanna thank you for listening to conversations with a Calvinist.

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

May God bless you.