July 3, 2003

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.

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

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

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

James White. And good evening and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is

James White. It is, oh, a cold front must have moved through in the past few minutes.

It's dropped from 112 degrees all the way down to a measly, a paltry 109 degrees, yes?

Look at that dew point. The dew point is sneaking upwards that, for those of you in the

Phoenix area, that means that we're only 10 degrees south of the monsoon level.

Yeah, yeah, here it comes. Those two and a half, three months of such joyous experiences,

I'll never forget that one year or a few years ago, average high for the entire month of July, 111 degrees.

That was a warm one. And since we had a few rolling blackouts, it wasn't due to lack of supply, but stuff like blowing up, which happens sometimes when it gets really, really, really warm.

You know, you never know. We could all of a sudden just disappear, just poof, gone. And that's because, you know, the lights went out.

And if that happens, boy, I'll tell you, man, that temperature starts going up so fast. Anyway, 877 -753 -3341, you better get in while the getting is good because, like I said, you know, the rolling blackouts could roll right on through here and that would be the end of the program for this evening.

So please feel free to join us on the program tonight, sort of open phones and various and sundry other things.

If I had been willing to completely readjust the time frame of the program and do it like what?

What were they looking for about four or five hours earlier than right now? If I'd been willing to do that, we would have had, maybe, had a

Roman Catholic scholar by his own profession, a teacher authorized by the

Magisterium to join us. Maybe he will do so next Tuesday, who knows.

But a gentleman that we know only as Aquinas, you may recall back in March, I think it was

March 13th or the 20th, we were going to do a debate on the Apocrypha and, well, last night we had the most interesting conversation in the

Apologetics channel. Now those of you who don't know about our channels, one of them is sort of just for debate and the other more for discussion and fellowship and things like that, even though we have debates in there too and we're sort of inconsistent as to what we do.

But anyway, last night Mr. Aquinas' person was in channel and started, there was that tempted discussion at dealing with the meaning of a few passages of Scripture, specifically

John chapter 10, verse 26, and the relationship between faith and regeneration and issues like that.

And John 10, verse 26 says, But you do not believe because you are not of my sheep. And of course, there's a relationship there.

The reason that you do not believe is because you are not of my sheep, not the other way around.

And there was an attempt to get that conversation going. Zeke, are you trying to get on the air here?

Is that the idea? I've got a huge, massive yellow lab. Is it a yellow lab?

Is that what it is? Yeah. And he's going nuts on the floor behind me. He's really excited and happy and things like that.

So and now he's rolling over on his back. If I'm dead weight, it's sort of like Operation Rescue.

They can't get rid of me. That's how Rich gets his workout, is picking

Zeke up because he doesn't want to leave my office. He's a big boy, isn't he? He's a big dog.

Big, big, big dog. Anyway, what in the world was I talking about? Very quickly, the conversation devolved into, well, how can we really know what

Scripture says anyway? And I've been hearing this so much. We all hear it. If you interact with almost anyone, you hear this, well, that's just your interpretation.

How do you know that you're right? And every group we talk to raises this issue.

The Roman Catholics raise this issue. The Mormons raise this issue. Of course, none of them can point to any allegedly infallible interpretation of a passage like John 10, 26 to begin with.

But that doesn't seem to stop them from being willing to question the ability of this passage to speak and to communicate truth.

And so there was this little bit of discussion. We had some philosophical discussion.

He claims to be trained as a philosopher and all this stuff. So it sort of died out because the older I get, the less time and the less patience

I have for people who just want to sit around and make up philosophical excuses for not listening to the obvious truths of the

Word of God. I don't know if I'm just becoming an angry old man or a grumpy old man or just what it is, but I just get tired of it.

And so the conversation sort of died for a few minutes. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue somewhere came this statement about the original languages from Mr.

Aquinas' person. And the conversation very quickly intensified into a discussion of whether we can know what the

New Testament originally said. He took the very unusual position, unusual in the sense that Roman Catholic scholars,

Roman Catholic scholarship is involved in doing textual critical studies.

The text that is used by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike as far as for scholarly study is the same

Greek text. And I know that Rome in the past has done its infallible version stuff, they did the

Latin Vulgate thing that is very embarrassing and has caused them no end of difficulties and all the rest of that stuff, but they've basically gotten past that stuff.

And here's a person saying, well you don't know what the originals said, you don't have any idea whatsoever.

And I'm like, excuse me, but have you ever studied textual criticism, do you have any idea of the manuscript evidence we have and things like that?

And I started thinking about the article that we mentioned last week on the dividing line, right toward the end,

Mike from New Jersey called in and pointed out that article on FAIR, on the

FAIR website, which by the way I've been looking at and primarily draws from Clement of Alexandria, now there's a real solid source for textual studies.

But the assertion being, well there's this perversion, there's this destruction of the text and all the rest of the stuff.

And here I'm hearing it again. But this time in the context of seeking to undercut the ability for the

Word of God to speak the truth concerning the Gospel itself. And it just reminded me how all of this stuff is tied together and how apologists today cannot just simply sit around and do what they've done for a number of decades now and read up on some surface level stuff about the basic beliefs of other groups.

There needs to be meaningful study in our own background, in our own history, in our own disciplines first and foremost before anything else.

There's just no question about it. And the neat thing about doing study, like in let's say some textual criticism, is that when you're studying that, let's say to respond to such an assertion by Aquinas, this fellow named

Aquinas in a chat channel, he's challenged you maybe in a web board, something like that. And so you want to give a response.

Okay, the neat thing is that study that you do there will then put you in good stead to respond to the

Mormon who's reading the FAIR website and to the King James only person who tries to split your church with stuff like that.

In other words, the more you study positively your own faith, the wider the impact it has and the larger number of areas that you can use it in.

It's a really good, oh yeah, certainly for the atheists, that's the constant assertion that they're making. So, you know, teaching and Bible study, answering the questions of the kids in your

Bible study class, if you teach a children's Bible study or youth Bible study, they go off to college, they run into all this stuff, you know, this is all very, very important stuff.

But I also have to admit, the vast majority of folks probably could not have responded to Aquinas' argumentation.

Not that his argumentation was reflective of even the best of Roman Catholic scholarship by any means, but still the assertion being, well, you know, prove your point.

How do you know? And, you know, he had asked, well, how do I know that we have what was originally written?

I said, well, there's a number of things. First of all is the state of the text in its most primitive form that we can document is one that gives clear evidence of a non -corrupted stream of transmission.

In fact, I used the term, and it's a technical term, it's a term used by scholars in the field from every perspective,

I used the term the manuscript tradition. And he said, see, see, you're appealing to tradition! And I'm just like, oh my goodness, there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the technical use of the term manuscript tradition, which refers to the entirety of the manuscripts, and normally in all languages, and the

Roman Catholic concept of tradition. I mean, it was just amazing. This person did, as far as I could tell, well, they didn't want to do it positively.

They didn't want to say, oh, well, I have degrees in this area. But they basically said, well, you know, you don't know what

I've studied. You don't know what my degrees are in, therefore I may well be very studied in this area. Well, it was very clear from his comments that he wasn't.

But anyway, I answered the question, how do you know we have the originals, by referring to the state of the manuscript tradition, or the manuscript, the stream of the transmission of the text, once we can establish it, say, around the year 200.

The nature that it has at that time, in those earliest manuscripts, demonstrates a pure transmission stream.

What I mean by that is, let's think about this for a moment together, because I think this is important for people to understand.

One of the arguments that's made, for example, in that Fair article we mentioned last week, was since we don't have anything between 100 and 200 as far as absolute manuscripts.

Now, obviously we have writings of some of the early church fathers, but obviously citations by an early church father are not the same as having a manuscript.

You don't know whether they are paraphrasing, you don't know what they're quoting from necessarily, so you can't utilize them the same way.

And I point out, those sources themselves have had to been passed down to us over time.

And there are very few meaningful scholarly studies as far as the actual transmission of the text of the early church fathers.

And so, they're not quite as useful to us in that way. And so, aside from one little small manuscript,

P52, which is just a couple verses from John chapter 18, the first major manuscripts we have, like P66, P75, P46, come from around the year 200 in that area.

And I'm not getting into all the discussions of whether we've found anything at Qumran or anything like that. Just the stuff that everyone agrees on here, and that is being used as the foundation for modern texts.

Alright, so you've got 100 years there. How do we know that during that period of time, and let's start with the assumption that at least what the

New Testament says is true in regards to the means in which the New Testament writers wrote and sent letters.

You have Paul sending, for example, a letter to Ephesus and a letter to the church of Colossae at the same time.

And so, they send these letters to these churches. Well, we don't see a physical manuscript of Colossians until around a papyri manuscript known as P46.

So, how do we know that between the writing in around, let's use a round number, let's go with 60,

AD 60 for the writing of the letter, it could be obviously earlier than that, but let's go with that. AD 60, 140 years.

How do we know what took place between now and then? Because obviously we can establish from 200 onwards, we can establish the text very well.

How do we know that between those two periods of time there weren't these massive changes? And that's the allegation being made by individuals like the

Mormons and things like that. How do we know? Well, let's think about it.

Let's say, let's go with the theoretical argumentation here, that there has been some major changes.

Let's go with the Book of Mormon here, it says many plain and precious truths have been removed and that the

Book of Colossians, actually when it was originally written, contained prophecies of Joseph Smith and directions on the building of temples and the establishment of the

Melchizedek priesthood. How's that? It had three extra chapters that just aren't there anymore. Now, let's say then that that letter arrives at Colossae.

What happens to that letter? Well, it is to be read publicly in the church.

And it was read publicly in the church. And copies were made and distributed to other churches.

Remember, it's even in Colossians, I believe it's 416, where Paul says, read the letter that's coming from Laodicea, which

I believe was Ephesians. And so, very quickly, there was a distribution of these letters.

And so, you don't just have one sitting in one place. And this is extremely important because if you're going to make changes, the more copies are running around, the harder it gets.

For example, if you write an email and you send it out to a BCC list of a hundred people at your place of employment.

And after you hit that dreaded send button, you realize that you messed up and you included in there all sorts of personal information you didn't want included in there.

You've got a problem. Because it may be possible for you to run over to your neighbor's desk and quickly delete the one copy you sent there or edit it, bring it up on the screen and edit it.

But it's pretty tough to do with 100 copies, especially that have gone all over the building or maybe even your business is transcontinental, international.

That email went to Japan. That email went to Russia. You're not going to get those emails back.

Okay? Not going to happen. And so as these manuscripts are being copied and are moving away from the original place where they were sent, so the letter to the

Colossians, eventually there's, in a very short period of time, there's a copy at Ephesus.

And then you have a man traveling through Ephesus to Rome. And he sees both the letter to the

Ephesians and the letter to the Colossians. And he happens to have a copy of Paul's letter to the church at Rome.

And so they copy these. And they, you know, can I bring what Paul wrote to you to our fellowship at Rome?

And you can copy what Paul wrote to us in Rome. And you can have it if you don't have it already. And so you get this distribution.

And very, very quickly, over a short period of time, no, they did not have photocopiers. But the words of the apostles and the directions of the apostles were considered very, very seriously.

And therefore, you have these copies going all over the known world. Not only that, but let's say you have persecution takes place.

A couple decades after the letter to the Colossians is sent to the church at Colossae.

Persecution breaks out locally in that area. And that's how most persecution in the early church was. It was localized only when we get into the third century did it become truly empire -wide fully.

And so you get local persecution. And one of the things that was a part of local persecution was finding the

Christian scriptures. They wanted to destroy the Christian scriptures. So what happens is the

Christians want to hide them. And so let's say persecution breaks out. And at Colossae they take that letter from Paul, which has already been copied.

There are now copies of this in Palestine and in Italy and Spain and North Africa.

It's all over the place by now. But they hide it away. But let's say they hide it away so well and the people who hid it are killed.

That manuscript could end up buried in the ground. It could end up, maybe they would bind it in together with something that was not clearly

Christian. And it becomes lost. And it doesn't become discovered for, well, for how long?

Sometimes many hundreds or even a thousand years or more later. That's what happens, for example, with some of the papyri manuscripts were found in Egypt or in Palestine itself.

Now what does all of this end up meaning? Well, if you have someone.

Let's go back to our theory here. That first epistle to the Colossians had all this stuff about Joseph Smith and temple ordinances and the

Melchizedek priesthood in it. And then for some reason, someone decided to remove many plain and precious truths.

Now, when did they do it? Well, if they removed them after the initial copying, you now have some copies of Colossians, let's say in Rome, that contain three more chapters.

But now you have these new copies in Colossae that have been altered. And when they're copied, they don't have them.

Or let's say, let's change the nature of the alteration. Let's say, what

Paul writes to Colossians, what a person doesn't like is certain elements of the teaching of Colossians.

Let's say they don't like the teaching of the deity of Christ in Colossians. And so they make a copy of it, but they take that stuff out.

And then they copy their copy. And they distribute their copy. Well, again, if the other existed and was copied at all, then now you're going to have all these conflicting copies of the one book.

And there's going to be certain similarities, but then in other places, there's going to be these massive, massive differences.

And remember, in some cases, you're going to have manuscripts that are simply lost.

They are no longer available to be altered or changed. Even if someone could gain the ecclesiastical or political authority over a certain area and gather up all these manuscripts, they wouldn't be able to get to those manuscripts that have already disappeared.

And so if they did, and this is a very, very common theory, that, for example, Roman Catholicism came along and altered the text.

That's a favorite argument that a lot of cult groups will use. Is that Rome came along and altered the text.

Or you've got Shirley MacLaine running around saying, you know, the Bible used to teach reincarnation. But they took it out. That kind of stuff.

The problem is, even if a person gathered up all of the manuscripts that they could get hold of at their particular time, they could not get to those ones that have already been hidden away and lost.

What's the result of all this? Well, in hindsight, looking from where we are, if that is what happened, if there were these massive changes in the earliest manuscripts during that first hundred years, then when we first are able to establish a manuscript tradition, when we're first able to see more than one manuscript from more than one area, the papyri manuscripts that we have today,

P66, P75, P46, P52, etc., etc. The P standing for papyri, of course.

Once we establish that, what are we going to see? If there has been substantial disruption of that transmission in the form of editing, removal of massive chunks of material, insertion of massive chunks of material, that initial text that we see is going to demonstrate this clearly.

We're going to have manuscripts of Colossians that are going to be fundamentally and foundationally different than other manuscripts of Colossians.

And anyone who knows anything about the study of textual criticism and about those manuscripts that we have today, those papyri manuscripts, the first unsealed manuscripts, knows one thing.

And that is, the earliest text that we can establish shows no evidence of that kind of tampering at all.

The only way to explain the form and character of the earliest obtainable manuscript tradition, the text of the

New Testament, is to recognize that it was not the subject of that kind of massive alteration.

The only differences between the manuscripts are those that are explainable and understandable upon the basis of simple copyist error.

That's it. And I'm talking there about the deletion of the word and, the deletion of a phrase due to what's called homoiteleuton, where you have, if you're copying along and everyone who has ever worked on a book report or written a paper, even today on computers, has done the same thing.

You've got your thing over here you're typing off of. You printed something out and you're quoting from it. And so you go over and you're typing away and you type the word, well,

I'll just look at the screen here, and Mr. Skyman just said, entertaining. How non -entertaining of him.

So you just type the word, entertaining. And so you go, I -N -G. Your eye goes back and the sentence that you were reading said entertaining and then disciplining them.

Now disciplining also ends with I -N -G. When your eye goes back, instead of catching the I -N -G at the end of entertaining, you catch the

I -N -G at the end of disciplining and you continue going from there. As a result, inadvertently, you delete an entire phrase.

It's not that you disagreed with the phrase or anything like it. The simple fact of the matter is, it's a common error of sight.

I can give you numerous examples. 1 John 3 .1 contains a clear example of homoeoteluton, where certain manuscripts, later manuscripts, accidentally delete a phrase and it's purely accidental.

That's called an error of sight. That happens in every single handwritten manuscript tradition of every book of antiquity that there is.

It is easily detected and it does not affect the final outcome because you can recognize when it has taken place.

The manuscript tradition, as we establish it, when we get the first documentary evidence, and remember, over the past couple of hundred years, we have seen the earliest text of the

New Testament pushed back and back and back and back. In the late 1800s, we saw the date pushed back to the time of the

Council of Nicaea. Then in the 1930s, pushed back to the beginning of the 3rd century, around the year 200.

And so, when that has happened, that has not resulted in some

Copernican revolution concerning the text of the New Testament. All it has done has been, in fact, to increase our confidence in the text of the

New Testament. Now, these are basic things. This is not rocket science in any way, shape, or form.

But it is stuff that I think folks need to know. I've addressed a lot of this in the

King James Only controversy. One of the books I'm going to be writing before the end of the year will have a whole section on this.

I'm going to expand on some of the thoughts I had in the King James Only controversy. I'm going to expand on what we're talking about right now, during this period, so that people will understand how we got hold of the text of the

Bible as we have it today. And so, this isn't rocket science, but it is something that we need to understand, because so many people attack the sufficiency of Scripture on this basis.

There's another way in which they attack the sufficiency of Scripture. We'll talk about that, possibly. And take your phone calls at 877 -753 -3341.

We'll be right back after this break. Millions of petitioners from around the world are imploring

Pope John Paul II to recognize the Virgin Mary as co -redeemer with Christ. Elevating the topic of Roman Catholic views of Mary to national headlines and widespread discussion.

In his book, Mary, Another Redeemer, James White sidesteps hostile rhetoric and cites directly from Roman Catholic sources to explore this volatile topic.

He traces how Mary of the Bible, esteemed mother of the Lord, obedient servant and chosen vessel of God, has become the immaculately conceived, bodily assumed

Queen of Heaven, viewed as co -mediator with Christ, and now recognized as co -redeemer by many in the

Roman Catholic Church. Mary, Another Redeemer is fresh insight into the woman the

Bible calls blessed among women, and an invitation to single -minded devotion to God's truth.

You can order your copy of James White's book, Mary, Another Redeemer, at aomen .org.

What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book, Chosen But Free? A new cult?

Secularism? False prophecy scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called

Calvinism. He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant.

In his book, The Potter's Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler, that The Potter's Freedom is much more than just a reply.

It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself, in a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate.

James White masterfully counters the evidence against so -called extreme Calvinism, defines what the

Reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the gospel preached by the Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture.

The Potter's Freedom, a defense of the Reformation, and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the

Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at aomen .org. Doo -doo -doo -doo -doo -doo -doo -doo -doo -doo.

The software crashed. The software crashed, huh? I just was like, hey, you know,

I think I've just said just about enough, and that's it. I'm just done. Didn't that happen last time?

That happened, well, actually, last time it was my fault, this time it just kind of went, you know, I've had enough, goodnight, bye.

And what test did you run on it since Tuesday? Hello?

Hello? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Well, you know, every program, we have to demonstrate our professional skills and capacities in some way, shape, or form.

877 -753 -3341. I can guarantee you one thing. Even though someone didn't have time to check the software, someone had time to play with the phones.

I can guarantee you that that is a reality. Let's go ahead and see if those same phones are still working and can let us talk to Steve in the great liberal bastion, that home of socialism and all sorts of other social experimentation known as New Jersey.

Hello, Steve. How are you, Dr. White? I'm doing well. I'm doing well, too.

It's 80 degrees, low humidity, sunny. Just enjoying New Jersey right now.

It's 110. You said that it's low humidity there right now? Yeah, not too bad.

That will change. Oh, I'm sure it will. I'm sure it will. Yes, sir.

What can we do for you? Well, just a couple of things. First, a question on just contextual criticism of ancient documents.

Isn't there, first of all, sort of a generally accepted methodology for doing that?

And when you apply that methodology, scholars, whether they're liberal or not, would accept ancient documents that have, let's say, copies 800, 1 ,000 years from the event.

I think it's Homer and some of the others. And yet, don't apply that same standard to the ancient documents of the scriptures.

Well, yes, certainly there's no question that secular scholars look at New Testament scholars and scoff in the sense that we have such a huge amount of documentary evidence that goes to such a period so close to the original that in comparison to most secular scholars who are working on secular sources and secular texts, that we have an embarrassingly large amount of information from which to draw.

But, of course, since we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, obviously there's a little higher standard that we have to live up to in that particular context.

But you're exactly right. I've heard many atheists utilize argumentation that from any secular standpoint would be considered absolutely ridiculous, but they apply a separate standard to the

New Testament. So anyway, even if you said, well, let's forget about the miracles and let's forget about whether you believe what it says, it did say it, it was written at that time, based on your own standards.

Exactly. The other thing is I'd like you to comment on those famous six verses,

I guess it's at the end of Mark, picking up snakes and all that other stuff. Right. Because that's the one which, in my opinion,

I don't think was ever part of the Scripture. Yeah, actually, I just got back from doing a little snake handling myself.

No. You need tambourines. You've got to bounce around. The tambourines and the poison stuff, yeah, it's great.

Yeah, I addressed what's called the longer ending of Mark fairly fully in the...

I was just informed we use scorpions here in the desert and rattlesnakes. But the longer ending of Mark, I addressed rather fully in the

King James Only controversy. There's a whole section discussing the textual evidence and issues related to it.

To make a long story short, I would agree with you. Certainly the vast majority of manuscripts contain the longer ending of Mark.

However, the fact that there are a number of the most ancient manuscripts that, and here's the key issue, either do not contain it or, and here's where I focus my attention, contain it with marks indicating that it is an insertion or contain it and other endings.

There's a middle length ending to the Gospel of Mark as well. There would be no reason for the development of a middle length ending if the longer ending was original with the

Gospel of Mark. Now, we're talking here about the largest textual variance in the New Testament as far as number of words go.

The second one would be John 7 .53 through 8 .11 and the last one would probably be, well, probably not 1

John 5 .7, but maybe in Acts 8 or something like that. But this is the largest textual variance, the ending of Mark.

And from my perspective, the most telling arguments, and this is the argument that A .T.

Robertson presented as well, the most telling argument against the longer ending is the existence of manuscripts that either contain the longer ending and the middle ending, the existence of markings indicating this is not original in ancient manuscripts, which is extremely unusual, as well as the nature of the longer ending being very different than the rest of the

Gospel of Mark itself, seemingly drawing from apocryphal stories that were prevalent during the 2nd century.

So this is actually an example of what I was talking about. And that is when we can establish the text of the

Gospel of Mark there at the beginning of the 3rd century, in the early 200s, we are immediately able to detect the largest variance in the

Gospels at the end of the Gospel of Mark. And we have a number of different ways of doing it.

It's not just one manuscript someplace, or something like that. There are a number of things that leap up and grab our attention.

There's a preponderance of evidence, a preponderance of things you can use to deduce what you need to deduce from it.

Well, unless of course you end up giving to a particular form of the text a kind of religious authority, which is what many people do, with what's called the

Textus Receptus, the TR, which is the basis of the King James Version, and the New King James Version, for that matter.

And so you're King James only advocates, you're TR only advocates, those who promote what's called the

Ecclesiastical Text. We'll all have to, in essence, accept this. Certainly majority text people will have to accept it as well.

But it does illustrate, I think, very well the fact that modern textual critical work is very much on target in considering all the facts of each issue as they arise.

All right? Okay. Okay, thank you very much, sir. You take care. You enjoy that nice, cool weather out there for a while.

Will do. All righty. Bye -bye. Bye -bye. Ah, Steve in New Jersey, remember, Steve, it's going to snow on you someday.

And it's not ever, ever, ever going to snow. Well, okay, all right, I'll take that back.

I have seen some little teeny, tiny snowflakes in my headlights in Phoenix, but they didn't stick.

Once they hit the ground, they're gone. You know, that reminds me, as we are waiting for the phones to explode with all of you callers who've just been waiting to get in,

I was listening to the Bible Answer Man broadcast in the hour before we did this, and I was driving around.

I had to go get some dog food, actually. My dog, well, she's hungry. And so I had to go get some, one of those big old 60 -pound bags of dog food because she's a big dog.

And so I was coming back, and I was listening, and I was pretty amazed that, yeah, it does hail in Phoenix, doesn't it,

Theo? That the call, I heard this guy call in, and you know what?

You listen to these programs long enough, and I've been on the Bible Answer Man a number of times, you listen to these programs long enough, and you can sort of tell when someone calls in, and they're trying to sound like they've got a question, but they really don't have a question.

The question is an objection. The question is a means of getting to preach their peculiar doctrine on your program, see.

And when I heard this guy, I was on my way to PetSmart, I heard this guy come on, and almost the first thing out of his mouth was something along the lines of, well, my question is, was

Satan, no, was Cain the offspring of Satan? You know, this serpent seed stuff.

And I'll admit, this is one of the reasons that I do not try to do and do not pretend to do what

Hank Hanegraaff does. Because I, the serpent seed doctrine weirdness stuff,

I don't even get into it, okay? I mean, I don't have the patience for it, and I do not claim to be that kind of general practitioner so as to be able to address stuff like that.

And so I'm listening to Hank responding to this, and he's saying pretty much what

I would have said as far as the biblical stuff goes. And I go in, and I get the dog food and cat food too.

I figured I was there, you might as well. And I throw it in the back of the car, and I get back in, turn the radio on, and he's still at it.

He's still at it. And this call went, this call must have gone for at least 20 minutes. And, you know, after those first few seconds of sounding like you're asking a question, then you drop the pretense, and you just start arguing.

And I've got to give Hank credit. You know, there are certain topics that come up, you know, sometimes we'll be in the chat channel, and somebody will come in, and I will spend a long time dealing with somebody on something.

But then other topics come up, and I have to let somebody else do that, because there are just certain viewpoints, and maybe this is a character flaw of mine, but I just can't even begin to respect anyone who would even believe such a thing, and it's very difficult for me to spend a whole lot of time and exercise patience in trying to explain something like that.

And it's been interesting. I've watched and channeled, and sometimes when I just, you know, I have no patience for it, somebody else will step forward, and somebody else will minister to that person, and they'll be patient with that person, and I just simply can't do it.

But anyways, Hank was, you know, still being patient with the guy, even though the guy kept cutting

Hank off, cutting him off, cutting him off. You could tell he could only get, and you could even tell he knew he was only going to get about three quarters of a sentence in.

Once the verb came out, and the direct object came out, he wasn't going to get past that. And so he's dealing with this guy, and man,

I had not heard this stuff. This serpent seed stuff, and spiritual bodies, and oh, it was weird, weird, weird, weird stuff.

I thought Hank handled it real well, and he remained patient, even though, you know, the speed of conversation starts getting a little faster, a little faster, give and take, give and take, but that's what makes for good radio.

Let's admit it. That's what people like to listen to. You're not going to sleep. If each side had five minutes to make their point, most folks wouldn't be listening to all this, and in fact, most of the callers couldn't go for five minutes to present anything of their life to Panadot, but of course,

I'm accepting the people who call the dividing line who are, of course, the most intelligent people who call into any kind of talk broadcast across the nation, which is why we've only had one caller today.

All of a sudden, the lines light up. Hey, I want to get some of that. I want to be called one of the intelligent ones.

Anyway, you know, it gets going a little faster, but Hank stayed very focused and very calm, and, you know, he never said, look, you idiot, listen to what

I'm saying, even though I'm pretty certain somewhere back in the back of his mind that that was the voice that was screaming out.

He suppressed it and did a really good job, but man, I'll tell you, there are some weird, weird views out there, and you can tell, you know, right as I got back to the office here and was getting ready to get out of the car, the guy made some statement along the lines of, well,

I know the Bible says, and I forget what the phrase was. He came up with some phrase.

I did recognize it was somewhere, and, you know, it was a sort of paraphrase of something out of John, but I do know the

Bible says this. I'm not really sure where it is. I need to do more study, and that he's been so confident to get on a national radio program and spew this stuff, this weird, wacky, cultic stuff, and then when he's challenged, well, you know,

I need to do a little more work on this stuff. It is absolutely positively amazing.

There's just no two ways about it. What people are willing to do in regards to demonstrating their abject ignorance of Scripture, it is beyond imagination.

Well, I don't see any, well, of course, with our new phone system, I wouldn't know one way or the other, but I don't see any lights flashing or beeps beeping, or I don't even know when anybody calls me anymore, for that matter, so I'm going to assume nothing.

Yeah, no, see, it's the phone system's fault. There are probably a thousand people trying to call in right now, but the phone is ringing in Zeke's doghouse.

That's probably what's going on. But that's good, because right before the break, right before we took

Steve's phone call, I was mentioning this attack upon the sufficiency of Scripture.

There's the one thing to say, well, you don't know what the text originally said.

But the other aspect of it that is so common today is, well, you might know what it originally said, but you don't know what it originally meant.

Now, this can take a very philosophical bent, and in essence say, look, you can't communicate in language.

Language is insufficient to communicate God's truth to mankind.

Even though God made us as communicative beings, it is insufficient to function in the way that you're saying.

And that may be what some people are saying, but they generally don't want to take it that far, because they would have to tell that to you.

They'd have to communicate that to you. And you could always just sit there and look at them and say, I don't understand what you're saying, and sort of end the conversation that way.

But, what is, did a caller already call in and ask my Alexandrian cult question? I have no idea.

Someone will have to tell me what the Alexandrian cult question is, and I'll try to address the Alexandrian cult question.

I didn't see it go by, so I'm unaware of it. The more subtle way

I encountered today in talking with, posting on a web board, everybody in the channel knows what

I'm talking about and who I'm talking about, but I was very disappointed to see someone, in essence

I was talking about Paul's relationship with the Judaizers in Galatia, and how that gives us an apostolic example of how we should respond in regards to denials of the

Gospel. And the fact that the Gospel is clearly explained to us in Scripture.

I mean, Paul talks about the truth of the Gospel in Galatians twice. That means it's something that can be known, you can tell the difference between a true

Gospel and a false Gospel, and so on and so forth. And in the response that was offered to me, one of the statements that was made was, well, and how could you really demonstrate what you're saying in light of the state of Pauline's studies today?

And immediately, I start thinking about, is this person indicating that because of the rise of, for example, new perspectivism, that this somehow is, is this what he's talking about?

Something along those lines. I think that is what he was trying to say, is because there are differences of opinion concerning the nature of the works of the law or something like that, then we can't really know what

Paul was saying. We can't really know the Gospel with that level of clarity.

And it was really sad. This is a person who has in the past defended the truth, and with now embracing that perspective, a very, very sad thing to observe.

But it is very, very common. It does require us to understand what we believe, why we believe it.

Now, someone in channel did ask a question prior to the program starting, and I haven't seen anyone post the question in regards to the

Alexandrian cult. I don't know that, oh, we have some lines coming in.

Oh. Okay. Let's try to go from coast to coast here.

We've already had one call from New Jersey, so let's try California. Let's talk with John in California if we could.

John, are you there? Yes, I am, Dr. White. How are you, sir? Good. I enjoy your books and all the good work that you do.

It's a great benefit to the body of believers. Your voice sounds very familiar.

It does. Yes, well, you should be in radio. No, I'm not in radio.

I've never called or talked to you before. Oh, well, your voice sounds like a pastor that I know from, boy, where was it?

Well, anyways, if I remember, I'll let you know. So what's your question today? How do we know the canon of Scripture?

How did that come about? You know, we believe that the

Bible is the Bible. And, you know, most evangelicals just take that on face value.

That's the Bible, of course. That's the Word of God. You know, these are obviously letters that were written. There were other letters that were written that are not considered

God -breathed. And I believe there was a council early on that pretty much set that in stone as to what was considered

Scripture. But I certainly would like to hear from you on that point. Well, that is obviously a topic that we have addressed in the past.

In fact, if I could direct you first to the program we did.

In fact, I mentioned this on our last program. It was either March 13th or March 20th. And by the way,

Stephen Luker, who runs straightgate .com, where our archives are, has been showing me the upgrading that he's doing.

It's not online yet, but the upgrading he's doing of our programs. And it's just going to be absolutely fantastic.

It's so much easier to find things and people will be able to surf through the archives in a much nicer way.

So it's going to be really beautiful. So I really thank him for doing that large amount of work. But if you'll look at that program, there at least we addressed the issue of the canon of the

Old Testament. We also have addressed the issue of the canon of the New Testament. There is an article on our website in the

Roman Catholic section, a dialogue on Sola Scriptura that would help you on this as well.

But to be very brief about it, we need to recognize that these alleged councils, and when we talk about these alleged books that were floating around, in reality there was almost nothing from the first century itself that was at all relevant as far as any issues of being canonical.

There were a small number of books that would be accepted by some Christians in a small geographical area, but they were all post -apostolic.

And in fact, when you see these lost books of Eden, Eden books and things like that, what they're giving you there are things that were written not in the first century, but primarily in the second century, second century

Gnostic Gospels, and things like that that tried to fill in and answer questions that the canonical

Gospels did not, and are very clearly tinged with what's called Gnosticism, various forms of Gnosticism like Valentinian Gnosticism.

As to the recognition of the canon, the creation of the canon, those are two different things. The canon is not something that the church creates.

The canon is an artifact of revelation. Since God inspires only a certain number of books, the canon comes into existence of necessity.

God knows exactly what the canon is, because God knows what he wrote and what he didn't. Just as there is a canon of the books that I've written, and I know what

I have written, and what I didn't write, and no one else knows that with the same level of certainty that I do.

No one else has been with me during the entirety of that period of time when I was writing all that stuff. So God, the canon itself, is not something that is like the 28th book of the

New Testament. And it's important to emphasize that, because if a person believes that it is, that it itself is an object of revelation, then it comes outside of Scripture and comes through a means of councils and things like that, to where you have revelation, in essence, now being under the control of the

Church. That is an important differentiation to make. The early councils that did address this issue did not do so with the idea that they were creating a canon.

In fact, the councils of Hippo and Carthage at the end of the 4th century, they did not believe that they had some authority to determine what was and what was not

Scripture. They were simply passing on what they had already received in regards to what was and what was not

Scripture. In fact, Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, 30 years before that, had created the same list of the

New Testament. And so it wasn't like they were going, well, we're going to create this thing and therefore, by our authority, we are creating the canon of Scripture.

No, they were passively recognizing, in fact, that's terminology that Augustine uses in one of his letters, that the

Holy Spirit gave the canon to the Church. It was something the Church recognizes, not creates.

And that same process had taken place in regards to the Old Testament, resulting in the fact that during the time of the writing of the

New Testament, you don't find Jesus and the Jews, the Pharisees specifically, disagreeing over the extent of the canon of the

Old Testament. So, there's a lot to this. I would recommend the articles that I mentioned before.

I would also recommend Volume 1 and Volume 2, specifically of the Holy Scripture series that we offer on the website by David King and Bill Webster, because they go into much more discussion of this particular subject, give you the biblical backgrounds, issues like that, that would help you to really get a better grasp on what took place, both historically, as well as the, say, the logical or philosophical issues that one must deal with in asking the question, how did the canon develop?

What is its nature? What is the difference between passive recognition and actively creating a canon and issues like that?

Those are things, unfortunately, don't get discussed a whole lot within most evangelical churches today.

Oh, yeah, and I've just been reminded that we have a tape, number 476, on the website,

How We Got the Bible. I think that's a very old tape. Not that the truth changes a whole lot, but I will just sound like I'm about 26 years older, and maybe even earlier than that now, but I think about 24.

So, that's available, too. So, that's a very brief answer, because we're almost out of time. In fact, we have two other callers online that we're never going to be able to get to today, unfortunately, but that's a very brief sort of overview of some of the issues that need to be addressed, specifically the nature of the canon and the means of recognition, the difference between passive and active recognition of the canon.

Well, thank you very much, Dr. White. Okay. And J637 says hi. Okay, thanks a lot. Bye. God bless.

Bye -bye. Should we try to... Now, we're probably pretty much hammered here on time.

Let's go ahead and talk to Howard. Let's just throw him on there and see what happens. Hello. Hello, Howard.

You got about, like, 30 seconds, dude. Well, I would have called earlier, but I'm on the fire department, so I had to leave and come back.

That's... Well, did you put the fire out? We did, actually. Well, then that's the most important thing. I was going to ask you on that Alexandrian question.

You kind of responded briefly on the chat room, but I will just call back on another time and ask that question.

Well, was this... Why... Were you asking me if I'm the high priest of the Alexandrian cult? Is that what...

No, I was actually talking to a King James Only guy once, and he was talking about the Alexandrian manuscript to his god...

Oh, okay, yes, yes, yes. ...versus his son, and I couldn't remember if you had addressed that in your book or not. Oh, yes.

Very, very much so. It's fully addressed to King James Only controversy, and I think if you really want to hear how that plays out, what you need to do is...

And I think this is available on Straightgate. Listen to my radio program with D .A.

Waite. That came up more than once. I challenged him. He's one of the leading King James Only advocates.

Listen to how he attempted to respond to that. You'll see... I think you'll learn a lot from that, okay? Thank you very much.

All right, God bless. Thanks for putting that fire out. You bet. And speaking of fire, it's about 109 degrees out here still, and Lord willing, and we survived the long weekend and the heat.

We will be back Tuesday morning here on The Dividing Line. You guys have a great holiday. God bless.