Licona/Martin Debate

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Hey, good morning, good afternoon. Welcome to The Dividing Line, whatever time it is, wherever you are listening.

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For example, Monty in the United Kingdom, it would be evening, but he's not going to listen because it's time for dinner and he got married.

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And so, you know, his stats are start going down and, you know, channel participants. We've seen this many, many times.

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It's a sad thing to see, but in many ways, it's a good thing to see, it's actually. Well, thank you very much.

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And then we have one of our good friends down in Sydney is listening. We've got a worldwide audience today.

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And I wonder if it has any connection whatsoever to do with the fact that today is Election Day in the

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United States. But you know what? Someone just said this just in,

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Obama won Mexico. In fact, I did see a discussion that in the in Europe, it's 90 to 10 for Obama.

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So if Europe were to vote for the president, of course, they don't know anything about Mitt Romney and anything else.

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But I'm not sure if it's really a recommendation for Obama that Greece would.

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We want Obama. Yeah, there you go. I'll tell you something anyway. It is amazing how many people around the world are absolutely fascinated with the

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American elections. And it is an illustration of how important this nation is in the world scheme of things.

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Whether it will be honest with you, the outcome of today's election may tell us a lot as to whether that position of importance will last for a longer period of time or a much shorter period of time.

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That's my opinion of things. But be it as it may, sadly, there are many people outside the borders of the

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United States significantly more interested in the election than people within the borders of the

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United States. All you gotta do is follow some of these things where people walk down the street and stick a microphone in somebody's face and start asking them, you know, so what do you think about President Obama?

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You know, you support him because he's pro -life? Yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah. And, you know,

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Paul Ryan, you think he has a good pick, you know, another black man? Oh, yeah. You're just like, ah, wow, so much for the informed electorate concept, which is sort of important.

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But no, no, no, I'm sorry, today you cannot use the microphone.

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I just wanted to ask, you wonder why they always do that only in New York City? No, they do it in L .A.

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Well, okay, L .A. L .A. and New York City. Well, that's the only place where people are... People only live in those two cities that matter.

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Yeah, there you go. Yeah, every place else is irrelevant. So anyway, Obama won

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Hawaii, yeah, they haven't even started voting there yet. But anyways, but it is

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Election Day and I don't know about you, but the vast majority of folks who listen to this program are probably a little bit distracted today, thinking about things.

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I know as a very soon -to -be grandpa, I mean, you know,

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Summer's away for over a week, comes back, I'm like, oh, coming quick, oh, yeah. You know, she's now farther along than Kelly was when she had

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Josh. So of course, my wife always skipped the last month of pregnancy, is like, yeah, yeah, extra weight gain, forget it.

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I'm not going to do that. We're just going to skip this thing here. But anyway, as a soon -to -be grandfather,

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I really think about the fact that there are four Supreme Court justices who could retire over the next four years.

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And I just, you know, it's very easy for me to be distracted today.

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So what are we going to do? We are going to talk about something completely different than the elections.

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So as to help you at least have a small amount of time today where you turn your mind away from these things, possibly maybe even help you to not commit the sin of worry today.

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Because for Christians, we believe that God is sovereign over all things. He has a purpose.

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He is working out his plan in this world. We are to look to eternal things to recognize that nations rise and nations fall, and that we as finite, temporally bound creatures are in no position to be judging

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God and judging his purposes. And therefore, as a result, we are going to try to help to distract you from the distractions by actually talking about something with the eternal relevance.

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And that is, once again, I have fired up my awesome audio note -taker program. And I was listening,

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I forget which day last week, I listened to this while on a ride. But I listened to a very recent, and it really bugs me about this.

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They refused to call this a debate. It is a dialogue. Oh, please.

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You've got two people with differing views on one subject. It's a debate for crying out loud. Why do you need a dialogue?

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There's such a wimpiness in Western culture these days. You know, we don't want to offend anybody.

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I just about broke the rowing machine I was on in Detroit last week when

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I look up and on Fox News, they're talking about the fact that there are parents that want to ban

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Charlie Brown because Charlie Brown promotes bullying. And I want to go, you know,

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I was bullied when I was a kid. There were kids that were bigger. I was not very big when I was in school, especially in the primary grades.

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And I was bullied and I was chased around. And even in high school, I got stuffed in a trash can once. So I didn't enjoy those things.

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But you know what? If you live in a plastic bubble, you are not going to do well in life.

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We are just absolutely emasculating our young men.

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It's just, you know, I don't offend anybody, it's just that you grow a backbone.

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Anyways, that's not what we're talking about today. Sorry. That's that's that's rabbit trail number one.

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Anyway, they call it a dialogue. And this is a dialogue between Mike Licona, who is back in the debating realm, but not debating

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Norm Geisler. I probably might wanted that one. And a fellow by the name of Dale Martin, Dale Martin is a

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New Testament scholar from Yale University. And when you hear something like that, you automatically go, ooh, ah, you know, someone went to Princeton.

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Ooh, all that means today is 98 percent chance of being a heretic.

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And unfortunately, that is the case. Dale Martin is also a homosexual. So we have a homosexual

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New Testament scholar and the subject of the debate, an interesting subject.

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Is one I've just I've not heard you would think this would have come up at some time in the past, maybe somebody has.

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I've not heard it before. But the subject of the debate was.

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Was Jesus aware of his own deity, did Jesus think himself to be

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God? And so I found it primarily interesting.

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In the fact that Dale Martin will begin this debate. And I'm going to call it a debate because that's what it was, whether they want to call that or not is irrelevant.

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After I skip past the first couple of minutes where he told a joke that I will not repeat on the air because it's inappropriate and blasphemous.

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Here you have a man who will stand in front of an audience and he will say. I confess the

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Nicene Creed in church, I am a high church Anglican Episcopalian, actually.

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The my my Anglican friends in Sydney will not want to admit him as being one of theirs.

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But I'm a high church Episcopalian. I confess the Nicene Creed. I believe in the doctrine of the

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Trinity. But I don't believe Jesus thought he was God. And he just comes straight out and says,

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I'm a postmodernist. I don't have to put those things together. Something can be true in one aspect and it's totally untrue in another.

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So I can believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. I just don't have to believe it has anything to do with the historical

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Jesus. And so you're just left shaking your head going, what?

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And yet this is the kind of stuff that's being taught at Yale. It's being taught in all these places where people all there's great scholarship is.

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And I simply say to you, if this is the state of scholarship, then we need to come up with another word for serious study of the

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Bible. Because this is just utterly incoherent.

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Utterly incoherent is what you're going to hear. Now, the man's obviously very intelligent. But there is a complete disconnection.

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And yes, I do think it has something to do with the overall worldview issue.

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That would also allow him to be a theologian of the New Testament who is gay and who is a homosexual.

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Sorry, I don't like using that term gay because it's been a not really a descriptive term. Who is a homosexual, who knows what the

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New Testament says about and basically says, don't worry about it. And people always ask me, why would anybody want to teach the

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New Testament if you don't actually believe what it says? Well, there are a lot of people who do that. And you know where that started?

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It started in state -sponsored churches. It started in state -sponsored churches where you have the state providing funding for, quote unquote,

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Christian education, where you end up with unregenerate people in a government educational system teaching religion.

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Those aren't the people you want teaching those things because they don't believe it anymore. But there's a lot of them out there, a lot of them out there.

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So I thought it'd be good if we listened to what Dale Martin had to say, comment on some things, but mainly just simply to hear what he has to say and to go, wow, we have some real challenges out there and how to even interact with things like this.

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This is what's being taught to our young people. We need to be aware of it. So I'm going to skip past Mike Licona's presentation.

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It was interesting, but once again, we will be commenting once we get to the cross -exam, well, not really cross -exam, but sort of discussion portion.

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That once again, as we have frequently criticized both William Lane Craig and Mike Licona for their evidentialism and for the non -presuppositional perspective they take and for basically saying, well, you know, our authority is the majority of scholars.

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Licona's argument was that it is more probable that Jesus believed in his own deity than not.

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And, you know, that's what they're limited to. They don't have the theological foundation to actually state, here's what

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God has said. And they don't believe that's an appropriate approach within quote unquote scholarship. So that's how they have to do things.

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But anyways, he's already made his presentation. As I said, Dale Martin started off with a joke, which

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I will not repeat on the air, and then we pick it up at that point. So let's listen to what

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Dale Martin had to say. A bit about myself. I grew up in a very fundamentalist church in Texas, but I am now an

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Episcopalian, an Anglican, and a very high Anglo -Catholic liturgical church in New Haven.

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Socially progressive on social issues, but very traditional liturgically. I get up every

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Sunday and say the Nicene Creed. When we have morning prayer, I say the Apostles' Creed. And sometimes we even say other creeds and confessions, all of which, of course, insist that Jesus is divine.

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I believe in the Trinity. I'm perfectly willing to confess that. So as a Christian, I believe in Jesus in those ways.

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I think it's an entirely different question to say as a historian, as a practicing historian, what can I say about what

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Jesus thought about himself during his own lifetime? Now, we have, again, to bring you up to speed here, you may recall, as we have reviewed debates between Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman, William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman, this issue has come up over and over again, and I would identify it as epistemological schizophrenia.

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I am a Christian, but I do my history as a non -Christian. I do not believe that's a possibility.

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And it results in epistemological schizophrenia. The assumption is that history is an objective science that has no starting point and can have objective, discernible meaning outside of an epistemology that deals with whether God exists or not.

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The result, when you accept that definition of history, is seen in Bart Ehrman and will be seen in Dale Martin as well.

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You have to begin with the assumption of no inspiration. There's no purpose in history. You cannot make connections between events in history.

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And in essence, there can be no evidence of the existence of God or the activities of God in history at all.

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Everything's random. You have to be a naturalistic materialist in your analysis of the causes and meanings of things.

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And so you basically have to do history as a secular humanist.

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And as a Christian or a Jew, or I'd have to throw in here as a Muslim, because I think most

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Muslims would agree that the Koran would not present this perspective either, that the

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Koran, drawing from its previous sources in the sense of Judaism and Christianity, saying that there is a continuation, that we worship the same

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God, et cetera, et cetera, would likewise say that God has been active in this world.

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There is such thing as fulfilled prophecy. And therefore you cannot be a consistent theist, monotheist.

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And yet be an atheist historian. God has a purpose in this world. He's working that purpose out.

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Now, that does not mean that to be a Christian historian means that you sit there and you go, oh, I know why this happened, because God wanted to do this.

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We can't always know that. But the point is that a Christian historian is going to allow for a much broader spectrum of input into purpose, meaning, origin and source than the atheist historian is going to.

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And that's going to come up here, because what you're going to get very clearly from Dale Martin is you cannot look at these texts that have been presented by Mike Licona.

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For example, he emphasized properly, and I thought fairly well, the son of man

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Christology that spans the synoptic Gospels. And knowing this fellow, he recognized that he would have to focus primarily upon the synoptics or he'd have to spend most of his time attempting to develop some kind of a historical defense for the

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Gospel of John. So you just basically the theory in the

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William Lane Craig, Mike Licona realm of apologetics here is take the path of least resistance.

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So you don't defend inerrancy. You don't defend these things that you're given.

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Give the opponent the smallest target to try to hit. And that's you're going to do better that way is we've all heard that we've heard it many, many times.

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So he developed, I thought pretty well, the son of man Christology, especially demonstrating this.

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Evidently, maybe I've not read his materials, but evidently in some of Dale Martin's materials, he actually denies that Jesus identifies himself as a son of man.

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Bart Ehrman does that. You might go, what? But, yeah, they say that he's referring to a an eschatological figure who's other than himself.

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And so he pretty much demonstrates Jesus clearly does use the son of man terminology of himself. Then he makes the application in Mark 14, where he does this before the

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Jewish leaders and their response is this is blasphemy and which obviously wouldn't make any sense if Jesus wasn't identifying himself as a son of man and, you know, goes from there.

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And all Dale Martin has to say to all of that is, yeah, but then you've got these over here where you've got subordination.

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And what you cannot do is assume or even attempt to see any level of harmonization between this.

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Jesus can't be big enough for that much to be said about him.

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He has to be much more one dimensional. And so if there are subordinationist texts, then that's it.

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You just choose those. Or you just simply say, well, it's just a bunch of contradiction. You cannot allow for harmonization.

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That is the fundamental assumption that you're going to hear in the argumentation once we get to it. But first and foremost, we're listening to a man who says, see,

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I get up and I say the Nicene Creed at church, but I don't think

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Jesus is God. And I just say to my my Muslim friends, listen to this when you when you quote these people and say, well,

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Christian scholar, this said that and Christian scholar, this said that, find out if it's this kind of quote unquote

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Christian scholar. Because. To be consistent. What would you think of a

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Muslim? Who says, oh, I, I, I say the I say the five daily prayers in Arabic.

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I I go to the mosque and I say the prayers, but I don't think Mohammed actually existed. He didn't really teach this stuff.

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And you'd go, then why are you saying the prayers? It makes me feel good.

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It's my tradition. It's the way I was raised. I mean, it's just it's just all, you know, it's all

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I know. And most of us in this audience anyways. Would say.

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Be honest and stop pretending. But for many people, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

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Religion is something makes you feel good and warm and go ahead and do that. And that's that's fine.

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Doesn't really matter if you actually believe it's true. Or be a good postmodernist, it's it's religiously true to me.

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But it's not really true historically. That's where these guys are coming from.

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That also means that and let me say also that last night we were talking about resurrection and that sort of issue.

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I think that it's that's much clearer issue that historians can come down on. I think did

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Jesus think he was divine is a much more difficult question for his story, even non -Christian historians to come to a decision about.

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So it's a muddy thing. But I also need to make the point that history is not the same thing as the past.

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It's also not the same thing as Jesus as he really was. History, in my view, is not the past or what happened.

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History is an account of the past that's constructed by modern professional historians. Using the regular tools of modernist professional historiography.

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And I teach in my historical Jesus class that there are in my mind anyway, at least three

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Jesus's. And you'll see why I'm a postmodernist. And there's one some ways that I don't think

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I could be a Christian if I weren't a postmodernist. Because I need to be able to talk this way about reality and knowledge.

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Now, that's very important to understand because it completely redefines

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Christianity. Postmodernism is anti -Christian. Postmodernism is a fundamental denial of the biblical worldview, of biblical epistemology.

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The centrality of Christ is Lord over all things, etc, etc. And so what he's saying is,

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I couldn't be the kind of Christian I claim that I am without being able to compartmentalize these aspects of my life.

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And so I've got, I'm an atheist historian over here. I'm a homosexual over here.

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But then I go to church and I say and do things that historically were completely contradictory to everything else

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I do in my life. But since I don't think that what I do over there has any impact of what

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I do over here and what I do over there, then I can get away with it. So it is a self -imposed, epistemological, philosophical schizophrenia in worldview.

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It's a fracturing. Rather than what you have in scripture, a whole worldview where what is true is true and you make application across the entire range of human knowledge.

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Here, you can't do that. Can't do that. So that's why he doesn't have any problem fracturing the text of the

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Bible and cutting up into pieces and feels no compulsion whatsoever to put these things together and to be consistent.

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It doesn't have any way at all to even understand these things.

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It is truly amazing. The real Jesus is not the same thing as the historical Jesus. The real

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Jesus is also not the same thing as the Jesus who existed in the past. The real Jesus, in my view as a

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Christian, is the second person of the Trinity, 100 % human, 100 % divine, the

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Jesus we worship in church. Even if that real Jesus did not exist historically.

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Even if there is a complete disconnection between the Jesus of history and the real

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Jesus of my... Well, I hesitate to even use the word worship here because this isn't even a meaningful definition of worship.

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Because pagans worship that which they do not know. So if there is a difference between what we claim to know and the historical reality of that person,

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Jesus, then that's not really even true worship. But that's the mindset.

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And you say, how can anyone maintain something like this? Well, you're listening to it.

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And this is what's out there. This is a standard kind of stuff that's there. And this is what is seen as the scholarship that the world trumpets.

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These are the people that the world looks to as great Christian scholars. And they look at us and go, you're nothing if you do not speak like these people.

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Amazing. That's the real Jesus for me. The ultimate Jesus. Sounds like a rock band or something.

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Then there's the historical Jesus, which is that Jesus that professional historians construct.

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Notice I didn't say reconstruct. It's not like the Titanic. If the Titanic, we could get all the pieces of the

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Titanic off the ocean, haul them to land and put those actual physical pieces back together.

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And then we've reconstructed the Titanic. That's not what historians do. Historians have never reconstructed anything in their lives.

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They construct it. And they construct it using whatever evidence they can find for historiography.

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That's the historical Jesus. It's a construction of modern historians. It's not the same thing as the real Jesus. But it's also not the same thing as the

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Jesus existed in the past. That Jesus, the human Jesus who existed in the past, is completely lost to us as all the past is lost to us.

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The past does not exist anywhere. So here you have the foundation for the kind of radical skepticism that you see in a

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Bart Ehrman, where you turn history into a mere theoretical construction or reconstruction of past events.

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But the past is gone. We really can't know anything about it. We can only make guesses.

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We can't really say anything more than that. And you wonder why so many people today have so little connection to the past.

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Well, you know, I especially find this, and I keep bringing this up and I apologize, I'm sorry, but it just, the older I get, the more it strikes me that the next generation sees no connection between themselves and those who've gone before them.

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You know, maybe a slight connection to their parents, but only in the sense of having similar likes or dislikes.

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But the idea of really recognizing the people who've come before them and seeing a connection and honoring the memory of those people and being fascinated with history.

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And, you know, I was raised going to, my mom would take me out of school, call in sick, and we'd drive the half hour or 45 minutes to Gettysburg and we'd walk the battlefield at Gettysburg and go into the diorama there where they had the huge painting of the battle and pickets charge and all that stuff.

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And man, I felt a connection. I was only given half the story, but I felt a connection to what had happened in those places.

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And it was real to me. And yet, sadly, you can ask so many in the modern young generation and they don't see why their lives would be enriched if they saw themselves standing in a long line of people who had held to the same kinds of convictions and beliefs and values.

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It's all up in the air now. It's all up to you. Make it up as you go along. It becomes a plastic, cheap, easily replaced world in that way of thinking.

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It really does. Okay, it's the second time I chased a rabbit. Sorry. So we can't take our constructions to the past event, hold them next to it and say, does it meet?

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What counts as a historical construction of Jesus is what professional historians will accept as a likely historical construction of Jesus.

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Now, did you catch that? What professional historians will accept. So in other words, the Guild, the

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Academy, we get to decide. Now, the fact that they keep changing their opinions over time, that's okay because we're postmodernists.

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There is an objective truth anyways. So, you know, how can that be?

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Boy, LaShawn just now said, you're doing a DL today, right? I think she forgot the time change.

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Somebody needs to let LaShawn know on Twitter that actually we've been at it for 29 minutes and she's late.

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So anyways, the Guild, the Academy, the standard.

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But it's not an objective standard. It's always a changing standard. And they're fine with that. They're fine with that.

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And once you accept that, then changing values, ethics, morals, everything, it's all part of the same issue.

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So I think no responsible, non -apologetic Christian historian would claim that Jesus thought of himself as divine in anything like the

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Christian sense. That is, the second person of the Trinity, fully and fully equal to Yahweh, as you put it.

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Fully divine as God the Father, in any way equal to God the Father, as one person of the

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Trinity, as the second person of the Trinity in which the Holy Spirit is the third person, as not created but generated by God, et cetera.

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All those creedal statements, which I believe are true creedally, I don't think any responsible historian would say that historical

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Jesus considered himself any of those things. Now, catch this. So creedal truth is one thing.

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Historical truth is another thing. And even though the creed claims to be historical, it's not. But it's still true.

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That's absurd, of course. But that's postmodernism, because postmodernism is absurdity. It is epistemological suicide.

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I just saw a comment in the channel. Did you see a comment in the channel?

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This guy clearly voted Democrat in 2008. I'm sorry.

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That just really struck me as funny, especially given some of the other background that everybody else doesn't know.

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But anyways, so you can have creedal truth and historical truth, and they can be completely contradictory, but they're still both true in their realms.

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But then notice the other thing. It's not subtle, and it's going to be repeated so many times, you actually get tired of it after a while.

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And as but no responsible professional historian would disagree with me.

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Now, you hear this from Bart Ehrman. Now you're hearing it from Dale Martin. So if you disagree with me, you're not a responsible historian.

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So it's winning by definition. It's argument by definition rather than by interaction on a meaningful level.

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And I just find it, well, on any logical or scholarly level, it's offensive.

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And it's reprehensible. But it is just exactly how people work. If the historical

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Jesus considered himself divine in any possible sense, it would not have been in the Orthodox Christian sense.

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That's my first point. So Orthodox Christianity is historically false. Here's what he's saying.

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But I embrace it and practice it in another part of me. This other part of me does this stuff.

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That's what you've got. But could the historical Jesus have considered himself divine in some kind of sense?

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Since there were many people who did claim divine status for themselves or other human beings they knew, it's not as unlikely as some apologists have claimed.

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As some people have said that, you know, if Jesus didn't actually claim to be divine, then he was a liar or he was a lunatic if he's a human being who did this.

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Jesus, I think, for example, Alexander the Great really believed himself to be divine in his lifetime.

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I think it's quite possible that some of the Roman emperors thought that they were divine also in some sense and a fairly high sense.

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Now, what would be the huge, major difference here?

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Jesus was a monotheist. And in fact, he would have to.

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I am sure he would agree that Jesus was a part of Second Temple Judaism.

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He was a Jew of that period and hence was a pure monotheist in all ways, right?

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So there's not even a parallel. And yet you will hear this over and over. Well, Alexander the

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Great. Well, some of the Romans, they were not monotheists. They believed that gods came down and had sex with women and created demigods and that it happened many times before and would happen again in the future.

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And because they were given this great power and authority, well, it must have happened with me. But there is a fundamental roadblock in making that assertion of Jesus.

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The parallel doesn't exist in worldview. But they just sort of skip over that little part.

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There may have been religious figures who claimed some kind of divine status for themselves. But do we have evidence that Jesus looked like these kinds of figures?

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And I don't think so. First, I think it is unlikely, simply from the beginning in the first place, that Jesus thought he was divine for the following reasons.

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I assume that whatever Jesus was, he was a pious Jew, uneducated for the most part, and at home in rural and village settings.

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Now, what you got here, again, this is why

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I ended up at Fuller Seminary. It really is. I mean, I didn't know at the time. I mean, you know,

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I look back now and I see more and more of the hand of God keeping me right here, forcing me to take those classes, to study under those professors, read those books as unpleasant as it was at the time, as how completely different it was in my thinking at the time.

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Now I know why. Because I understand this. I understand this type of presentation and theological liberalism and how it manifests itself and everything else.

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And what you've got, and these folks don't even realize it, but what you've got is you've got people coming up with a particular, this is my, my

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Jesus looks like this. Remember my debate with John Dominic Crossan? This came out in that situation.

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He, I remember reading the quotation. I forget who it was that said it. It may have been

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Crossan himself. I'm not sure. Or it may have been said about Crossan. I'd have to go back and listen.

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It's been, what, seven, seven years now? Coming up on eight. The problem with the modern search for the historical

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Jesus is that when these folks stare down into the well, they end up seeing a mirror image of themselves staring back at them.

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In other words, they form Jesus in their own image and likeness. And so Crossan comes up with a

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Jesus who represents his worldview and is a apocalyptic Jewish prophet and, and is opposing imperialism and, and, you know, all this kind of stuff.

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And all of these guys end up picking and choosing from the data what they think fits the

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Jesus that they want to have. Well, here you've got Dale Martin. And Dale Martin is just honestly telling us, I think

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Jesus was like this and therefore that's the information that I will accept. That's, that's just it.

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And any information that goes beyond the image of Jesus that I want to have,

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I don't have to accept it. Because as a postmodernist, I'm making this stuff up to go along anyways.

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But, you know, that's just the way it is. And so I think

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Jesus was an uneducated Jew. I couldn't read because, well, most

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Jews back then couldn't. Well, how do you know that? I mean, of all the people, one of their commands was to write these things.

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They were people of those scriptures. They, they, they established synagogue schools.

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And yet the assumption is, yeah, I believe they couldn't read. And so Jesus couldn't read.

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He was just some, some, you know, guy that did some preaching. And then some people took his preaching and expanded it all out.

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And, and, and yet I'm a Trinitarian. No, you're not. May I say something, especially to my

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Muslim friends? This man is not a Trinitarian. I mean,

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I, there's no more meaningful way of describing this man as a

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Trinitarian than if you were to describe as a Muslim, someone who denies that Muhammad existed and the

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Quran is the word of God. Now, there may be some postmodernists out there who call themselves

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Muslims and say the prayers, but don't believe that the

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Quran is the word of God or that Muhammad existed or that there was ever, that the Hijra never happened and, and et cetera, et cetera.

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Right? It makes no sense. It's absurd. And the same way I say to you, it is absurd for a person to claim to be a

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Christian, to claim to be a Trinitarian who speaks in this way. And yet so often

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I find, especially my Muslim friends quoting these people say, well, they're Trinitarians and holding me accountable for what they say without looking at the worldview that they're actually bearing.

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I think worldview issues are extremely important. He was a Jewish peasant from Galilee. He may have seen himself as a prophet.

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If Jesus thought of himself as a Messiah in his present state, that is not that he would become a

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Messiah later, but that he already was right then while he's walking around the sea of Galilee, divine, that could have entailed some kind of divinity.

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Contrary to what some common opinion, even among many scholars, we do have Jewish texts from before and around Jesus time that depict the

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Jewish king or a son of man or Messiah figure as a son of God, as even begotten of God, and even addressed as God.

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So we have Jewish texts, not a lot that talk about both the son of God, begotten of God, God, and they use this for a

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Jewish king, a son of man, or a Messiah figure. All those things you find. Now notice this is not on any package.

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Some texts have some of these things together, other texts have some of the others together, but it's at least possible. Certain Psalms, later

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Greek translations of those Psalms, a text or two from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other

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Second Temple Jewish literature rarely, but do indeed depict a divine

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Messiah, though one certainly subordinate to God himself. And I'm taking a lot of this,

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I'm talking about Messiah figures and their divine status from a fairly recent book from 2008 by my

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Yale colleagues Adella Yarbrough Collins and John Collins. It's called King and Messiah as Son of God, Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature.

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I think it's the most thorough examination to date of all the different possibilities that there are in Second Temple Jewish literature of this period.

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It used to be said by people that calling someone a Messiah didn't make them divine, and for the most part that's true. You can have a Messiah that doesn't have divine status.

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Most Messiahs, I think, in the ancient world were not thought by other Jews to have divine status, but we have a few texts that do. And by the way, if you notice that it started going faster,

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I picked it up just a slight bit here because we can cover more ground and sometimes there's spaces between, you know, that we don't need to.

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So it is going a little, it's at 1 .2 instead of just 1 .0, so I did pick it up a little bit so we can get through it a little bit quicker.

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But the picture of Jesus we get from our best sources, which I take to be for his life, the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, don't seem to depict him as claiming that kind of royal messianic status for himself during his lifetime.

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And Collins and Collins also believe this. And I think because he was an illiterate Jewish peasant from rural and village

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Galilee... How does he know that? It's his presupposition. That's the Jesus I'll accept.

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Therefore, I will fit the facts to my... I will not derive my perception from the facts.

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I will fit the facts to my perception. He would have appeared blasphemous and crazy to have made such claims during his lifetime.

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And I don't believe we have evidence that he did so besides his crucifixion.

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So even if he claimed messianic status for himself, it does not seem that he added divine status to it.

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In other words, I think it's more likely that Jesus may have thought of himself as a messiah than that he thought himself as a divine messiah.

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I think it would have been more like a human or angelic form of messiahship than divine messiahship.

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And those were also possible. But these other contemporary Jewish texts do hint at how his disciples later elevated him to divine status by connecting him to that kind of divine messianic tradition.

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So I believe that his disciples, when they believed he was a messiah and then they believed he was raised from the dead,

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I think they put that together and said, oh, he is a divine messiah. And therefore he is not the son of God but can be thought of as God himself.

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The synoptic gospels do not portray Jesus as preexistent. I don't think so. And Adelaide and John Collins don't think so either.

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Now, it's interesting. Simon Gatherick Hall has addressed this in his work on asynoptic

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Christology and has given all sorts of evidence that these synoptic writers do see

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Jesus as preexistent. The Son of Man material is part of that, but I Have Come is another part of it.

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And that will come up briefly in one of Laikona's discussions. I'm not sure if it's one of the things that we're going to get to, but it will come up.

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But again, assumption made here as synoptics don't do this and these people agree with me and therefore for a postmodernist, that's all you've got.

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You can't say, and therefore it's true as a postmodernist. You simply say, yeah, I've got some friends who think like me.

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That's as close to objective truth as a postmodernist can get. I do admit that both

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Paul and the writer of the Gospel of John portray Jesus as preexistent, but I think it's telling that Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not.

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Their references to Jesus as Son of God and Son of Man seem to be messianic titles. But again, that need not imply preexistence.

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The Book of Revelation calls Jesus Christ and once calls him Son of God in Revelation 2 .18.

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But that seems to mean that the author is taking Jesus to be an angelic heavenly

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Messiah In fact, in Revelation, Jesus is, I think, and I think this following the

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Collins' presentation again, presented as God's first creation. Making a great

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Jehovah's Witness. Of course, the fact that Jesus is worshiped by all creatures and angels refuse worship, you go, yeah, why doesn't he see that?

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Because he doesn't have to interpret the Book of Revelation consistently with itself. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

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Once you're a postmodernist, inconsistency is a wonderful thing. You know, you can see things.

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Now you don't have to worry about actually deriving your conclusions from facts and things like that.

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It's just for the boring old way of doing it. You can see things, feel things in the text. It's a wonderful way of doing scholarship.

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He might be the Christ, but he is a created Messiah. Jesus makes no explicit claim to actual divine status in the synoptics.

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And this is where Mike and I will, probably in our discussion, I just believe that when he's taking son of man to necessarily imply divine status, he's going too far.

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Even if he was believed he was the Messiah, that would not usually denote divinity, although in rare cases it could.

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Even if he called himself the son of God, that also would not have meant that he himself was divine. The only gospel that makes that kind of open claim to divine status for Jesus is the

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Gospel of John. And it's hard for me to see the historical Jesus in the Gospel of John.

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It's hard for me. Why? Because I've already created the Jesus that I'm willing to accept.

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And anything beyond that, I just don't accept that. Second, son of God itself need not mean divine status.

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Jewish readers of the Psalms would have seen the human king called son of God without necessarily taking that to mean those kings were actually divine the way

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Zeus or Augustus were said to be gods. Luke 20, 36 has Jesus...

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Ah, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, if that's the case, then why did you ignore the

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Jewish context to the statements about Jesus earlier that didn't fit in with your parameters, where you were talking about, you know,

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Jesus is just this, you know, just a... You limited what his self -understanding could be.

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and ignored the Jewish context. But now the Jewish context becomes definitive?

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It doesn't make much sense. Saying that people who will have experienced the resurrection are sons of God. But in that context it does not likely mean that they are truly gods themselves.

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Next, the Son of Man. Jesus in the Gospels does seem to speak of himself as the

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Son of Man, but that can mean different things, and it need not mean divinity. And there are passages that make it sound as if Jesus meant someone else, a future figure, as the

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Son of Man. In other words, some of the passages sound more like Jesus is talking to a future coming

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Son of Man that's a different person from him. And I think that what you have to do is sift through all of these sayings and try your best to figure out which ones are likely historical and which ones reflect later church invention.

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For example, this from Mark 838. This is the NRSV translation. Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the

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Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. Notice, according to this quotation,

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Jesus says those who are ashamed of me, the Son of Man, will be ashamed. Now of course those could be the same thing.

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He could be using the words, meaning himself in both cases. But you could just as easily interpret it to say that he's talking about two different people, himself and a future

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Son of Man. Next, Adoptionist Christologies. Now, there's what was somewhat disappointing was that Michael Icona had already demonstrated that Jesus uses

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Son of Man language of himself. But again, for the postmodernist, that's irrelevant. Okay, so Jesus calls himself

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Son of Man over there. That doesn't mean over here. Why? Because there's no consistency in these texts.

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You can interpret one text one way and another text another way. It doesn't matter. Context, consistency, hobgoblins of the small mind for the postmodernists.

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You just don't have to worry about these things. I think it's also unlikely that Jesus taught that he was divine to his disciples, because different followers of Jesus, after his death, had quite different ideas about whether or not

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Jesus was divine. And even if they believed he was divine, they differed about in what sense or to what degree he was divine and when he became divine.

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In other words, there is not a unified Christology, even in the New Testament, much less if we consider what other followers of Jesus, who didn't make it into the canon, were believing at the time.

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So this is the many, many different kinds of Christianity theory that has been debunked over and over again, but it's just become religious orthodoxy for liberalism, despite the fact that the evidence for it just simply doesn't exist.

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So you go, okay, so there's all these different views about who Jesus was, right?

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And where do you get that? From the New Testament. Okay, so when we look at the New Testament and Paul says this, oh, but Paul also said that, so you mean

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Paul believed two different things, and they transport their own schizophrenia, their own lack of consistency, their own willingness to believe contradictory things back into the ancient world.

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Men back then didn't think like this. Especially Jewish people didn't think like this.

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There were no Jewish postmodernists in the first century, but that's what they do. And so they're willing to ignore the big question, which is, okay, what is

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Paul's Christology by saying there is no Pauline Christology. You have

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Paul giving subordination statements, and you have Paul giving deity statements, and that means that Paul was schizophrenic, and that's okay because I am too.

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That's what you're counting here, literally. And you go, then why are we wasting our time on this? Because this guy teaches at Yale for crying out loud.

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And that means when CNN wants insight into the New Testament, this is where they go. And you get frustrated when you hear people saying things, you go, where did they get that?

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Well, this is where they got that. Luke 322 says that at Jesus' baptism, besides the saying, this is my beloved son, some ancient manuscripts add, today

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I have begotten you, quotation from the psalm. And I, following Bart Ehrman, I think that's the better reading of what was actually in the text.

51:49

Following Bart Ehrman. I don't get the feeling that Dale Martin is really a textual expert at all, but here's, again, what happens when you have a book that is published and it has this huge impact, and sadly, most of these folks, again, especially postmodernists, is not going to be in a position to do much in the way of critique, internal critique, of the

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Orthodox Scripture and Scripture by Bart Ehrman. Because consistency in use of sources, things like that, again, that's just not a part of their worldview.

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So you can be inconsistent in your use of sources, and he's just following him at this point.

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Now the fact that what you have here is a quotation from the Psalter, and therefore it's very understandable why scribes would include the full citation of it.

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All that stuff, it doesn't matter. We just accept the idea that what the scribes are doing is they're playing with the text for theological reasons.

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And we can discern what these theological reasons are from afar. We know exactly what controversies would have been in the forefront of the minds of every scribe of Scripture.

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No, we don't. You see, what

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Ehrman argues in the Orthodox Corruption Scripture is that you can look at the

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Adoptionist Controversy and you can find textual variants that look like they're related to the subject of the

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Adoptionist Controversy. What he fails to recognize, and what has been brought up by many, many people, is you cannot know what level of knowledge would exist in the mind of any scribe, because they're all anonymous.

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We don't know who they are. We don't know where they were. We don't know exactly when they were writing. I mean, how many

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Christians do you know today that you'll sit down, you know, we've got the holidays coming up, and we're looking forward to the holidays.

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And let's say sometimes you get together with some of your family, maybe sometimes some of your extended family that you haven't seen for a long time.

54:08

And so certain conversations come up and you start talking about things, and you just make an offhanded comment about Rob Bell.

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The Rob Bell stuff wasn't that long ago, was it? And they just look at you like, huh?

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Who's Rob Bell? I have no idea. Absolutely, positively, no idea.

54:37

There are times when stuff will be discussed in our chat channel that has to do with something from a currently released movie, and then

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I have no idea. Or from pop music today. And again, I have no idea.

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You know, someone's name will be mentioned. And I'm like, who's that? They're only like in the top ten.

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They've sold millions of records. Well, it's not even records anymore. And I'm like, never heard of them.

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Man, you're really out of touch. Well, I'm not out of touch, actually. There's all sorts of stuff

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I'm in touch with that they're not. But the point is, just because there is a theological controversy raging doesn't mean that everybody, including someone who would be having...

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I mean, there sometimes were people who made copies of Scripture that weren't Christians. When persecution wasn't going on in an area, you could actually hire somebody to make a copy of the

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Scriptures for you. What if they're not a Christian? They're not going to know what the theological arguments going on are.

55:50

So how do you know? You can't know. To claim that you do, it's a lie.

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It's real popular today. And sadly, many people today, leaders in textual criticism, leaders in textual criticism, pretend that they can read minds from the distance of thousands of miles and thousands of years.

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But they can't. And they're going the wrong direction. They're addressing silly things.

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They're exegeting the minds of scribes via textual variation, rather than working on the original text, which they say we now can't know anyway.

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And the result is a mishmash. But, as we heard him say earlier, no responsible historian would come to this conclusion.

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Therefore, if you do not track with these folks, you're not going to be considered a responsible scholar or responsible historian or anything else.

56:59

They've bought the farm. Sort of like, if you want to do genealogical research, you've got to go to the

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Mormons. If you want to do scholarship, you've got to come to us. And don't question us. Don't challenge us.

57:11

That's just the way it is. And the result is, well, what we're listening to right now. We're going to pick up at that point when we continue our...

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Because I want to get into, especially the conversation, because I want to demonstrate that there is a much stronger critique that can be made of Dale Martin's position than was made in this situation.

57:31

Again, because you can address it on a worldview basis, presuppositional basis, and you don't have to embrace the mere idea that, well, the majority of scholars agree with me.

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Well, the majority of scholars really agree with me on this. Well, throwing that kind of thing back and forth accomplishes absolutely, positively nothing.

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So hopefully for the past at least 50 minutes or so, you're actually thinking about something other than what's going on in our culture today.

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Hopefully that was a nice, brief vacation for you. We'll be back on Thursday. And who knows what the situation in the world will be?

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You know, the possibility exists. We may not know who won on Thursday. Or we may.

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I don't know. Only God knows. He's still in charge. That's a good thing to know. We'll see you then.

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God bless. I stand up for the truth, and won't you live for the

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Lord. Cause we're pounding on, pounding on, waiting by the door.

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The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

59:26

Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

59:32

World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.