Dr. James White Exposes Bart Ehrman's Biblical Fallacies

Well, we're going to be discussing Bart Ehrman, and we're doing it as an interview, which is a little different format for both of us, but we've done it a couple of times.

But anyway, very good to have you with us. Bart Ehrman is, as we heard last night, the leading

English -speaking critic of the Bible. He often starts his classes with a story of what he describes as a remarkable man who lived 2 ,000 years ago.

Even before his birth, his mother was told that she would not be having a normal child, but rather an angelic visitor supposedly told her that the child she would conceive would be divine.

Birth would be accompanied by miraculous signs and wonders. He was religiously precocious, at a young age, as an adult, he became an itinerant preacher, had a number of disciples, he healed the sick, he raised the dead.

Ehrman gives it a lot more pause and drama. He tells that he was brought up on charges by the

Roman authorities, and even after he left this world, his followers claimed he had ascended to heaven and they had seen him.

And then Ehrman takes the covering off and shows you. He's not really talking about Jesus, he's talking about Apollonius of Tiana.

He smirks. And he basically tries to portray Jesus as just one more supposed miracle worker of antiquity.

James, is that a fair comparison? It's interesting, my first exposure to the

Apollonius story actually was from Robert Price, who is a mythicist.

Former Southern Baptist? Southern Seminogram? That doesn't ring a bell with me, but...

Former evangelical, at least. I think so, yes. Very interesting fellow.

We debated in 2010 in Florida. A mythicist is a person who doesn't believe that Jesus actually existed.

Now, it's interesting that Ehrman mocks mythicists because he feels that they're completely out of line.

But that was the first place that I had actually heard this story. And you'll hear it in many, many different contexts, very popular in community colleges and things like that to present the

Apollonius story. Of course, they always present it with a tremendous spin to it. They don't tell you the differences, the major massive differences that exist in regards to the sources that are used.

The fact that the only source for Apollonius actually comes from someone who's on the payroll of the

Roman Empire that's seeking to discredit Christianity at that time anyways. And that you don't have multiple sources.

You don't have Matthew, Mark, Luke. Of course, Bart Ehrman would argue that you don't really have

Matthew, Mark, and Luke either, but for different reasons. And so, Bart and...

I want to step back just a second and point out that from my perspective,

Dr. Ehrman is a brilliant guy. He's very, very sharp. He rarely gets his facts wrong.

It's the context in which he places them and the interpretive grid that he utilizes for them that's the issue.

But Bart Ehrman is an apostate. People hear that term, they're like, oh, you're being mean.

You're being mean -spirited. But apostate has a specific meaning to it. Bart Ehrman went to, made a profession of faith as a teenager, went to Moody Bible Institute.

And then to Wheaton College. And from Wheaton went to Princeton. And somewhere along that line, lost whatever professed faith that he had had.

He's given different reasons for why. His official reason is not problems in the

Bible, though he goes back to that a lot. His official published reason is the problem of evil.

And he actually did a debate with a friend of mine on that subject a number of years ago.

The issue of the problem of evil. I know some people who knew Ehrman at Moody.

And they have said that they're really surprised because he showed no interest in theology at all.

He was rather quiet in all the classes, didn't really do all that well, didn't show any interest in theological dialogue or things like that.

And so when he got to Princeton, he was

Bruce Metzger's last doctoral student before Metzger retired from having doctoral students.

And unfortunately became co -author with Metzger of Metzger's work on New Testament textual criticism.

And so from, I believe, the fourth edition of that work onward, Metzger is involved, which is why

I've always used the third edition. But he did his

PhD. I'm one of the only people on the planet that I know that's actually read

Bart Ehrman's PhD. It was on the development of the early Proto -Alexandrian text type in one particular

Egyptian writer. And again, if you're not familiar with the educational system in the

West, you have to find and convince a committee that your dissertation topic will add to human knowledge and scholarly knowledge.

And so it's difficult for you to... It's difficult, sadly, to do

PhD work on orthodoxy because we've been doing orthodoxy for a long time.

And so the tendency is to come up with some new take. Now, in the field of textual criticism, that's not nearly as much of a big deal because there's so much that could be done that isn't overly relevant to the issue of orthodoxy one way or the other.

It was a scholarly work. It was well done. It's very dated and completely outdated, to be perfectly honest with you.

And I think Ehrman would probably admit that. But the point is, he can do sound scholarship.

But he has... If you step back just a second, you will see there is a scholarly

Bart Ehrman and then there's a popular Bart Ehrman. And unfortunately, the way that you will be impacted and the way your children will be impacted...

My daughter was impacted by this... Will be by the popular Bart Ehrman, not by the scholarly

Bart Ehrman. Many of the professors at schools such as this will read

Jesus Interrupted or Misquoting Jesus or so on and so forth.

And since they don't have the scholarly background in textual criticism, that's as far as they'll go.

And so they're getting the popularized version rather than the more in -depth stuff that he's done in some of these areas.

Though, by the way, I will mention, it's been at least 10 years now since Ehrman has said he's no longer involved in the textual critical area at all.

He's writing on broad subjects of Christian history. But you'll see the two kinds of Bart Ehrman.

And then if you just back up and you look at the topics that he's written on popularly, all of a sudden...

It certainly strikes me very clearly. He has, for many, many years now, been providing an apologetic for his apostasy.

That is, it's his intention to provide the broadest, deepest foundation for unbelief.

Because that's what he's done. He has become an unbeliever. And so he starts off with questioning the transmission of the text.

And then the next book will be the authorship. So, for example, Ehrman...

I'm sorry, I'm going on forever. But Ehrman has what is called a truncated

Pauline canon. What does that mean? Well, we may argue about whether Paul wrote

Hebrews, but we don't argue about whether he wrote 1 Timothy and Titus. But you go to the majority of religious institutions in the

West, and they don't believe that Paul wrote the pastoral epistles. They are 2nd century writings.

And for Ehrman, Paul only wrote seven letters. So books like Ephesians and Colossians are actually forgeries.

So he has a book called Forgery. And where he presents that argumentation of truncating the

Pauline corpus. So you question how it's been transmitted, who wrote it.

Then he did a whole book on memory. Would it even be possible, 40, 50 years down the line, for accurate oral accounts to be written down as the

Gospels would be written down? Because, of course, he would be taking, as is very popular, a much later date for the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Normally, post -70, I guess I'm going to have to stick this in a pocket, post -70 A .D. as the dates up into the 80s and 90s.

And so the idea being, he does an entire book just on the idea that no one could have clear memory recollection for that long.

And so what you're seeing is this very planned out attack on the foundations and on the very things, let's be honest, the vast majority of evangelical churches, no one's talking about these things.

We do take for granted the accuracy of the text and the authorship of the text.

And we rarely, rarely have discussions about it. And, in fact, to be honest with you, I know that I have been criticized many times in many different contexts for raising issues in sermons that people find uncomfortable.

And the problem is, where else are you going to raise these issues? If you don't do it in the context of faith, it's got to be done in the context of unbelief.

And we tend to send our young people off into the university system without ever having challenged them and given them solid answers within that context.

And they run into some disciple of Bart Ehrman and were stunned that they're coming back going, well,

I'm not really sure we can really believe the Bible, Dad. Why should we be stunned? We didn't deal with it when we needed to be dealing with it.

We thought that when you have teenagers, as long as you provide enough pizza and pop, everything's going to be fine.

But that's not the way it works. And so, very plainly to me,

Bart Ehrman has been living in the light of his denial of his faith for many, many years now.

And in 2009, I had the opportunity of doing a debate with Bart Ehrman in Florida.

He initially agreed to a different topic. He initially agreed to deal with a very specific topic as to the accuracy of textual criticism.

And then we got only about two months out, he contacts us and says, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The topic of the debate will be misquoting Jesus, because that was the title of his book.

And he was very condescending, not a nice person to talk to, very dismissive of a believing

Christian. I've read a number of articles from people who have tried to work with him within scholarship and have been bullied by him.

He's fairly well known for that type of thing. So, when we did the debate,

I saw him in the bar at the hotel we were staying at. And so,

I went over and introduced myself, and he was very cool. I invited him to come to the presentations

I was doing the next day, where I was going to be talking about some of his favorite texts that he loves, he talks about them all the time.

Certain textual variants, for example, in the Gospel of Mark, there's a textual variant where there's a leper that comes to Jesus.

And in a few manuscripts, in the vast majority of manuscripts, it says Jesus looked upon him with compassion.

But in a couple of manuscripts, it says Jesus looked on him with anger. And he makes a big, big, big deal about this.

And then in Hebrews chapter 2, there's a textual variant where the vast majority of manuscripts say, by the grace of God, which is khoros in Greek.

And a few manuscripts say khoros, one letter difference, but with, apart from, or without God.

And so, in Hebrews, it would be like Jesus was abandoned by God when he died on the cross.

He makes big, big, big, huge presentations on this. And so I invited him to come.

I was going to be dealing with those texts. And, of course, he didn't bother to come because people, from his perspective, do not believe that conservatives have anything meaningful to say whatsoever.

And so we did the debate. You can watch the debate today online. I play a little portion of it last night.

I'm not sure if you could hear it from the cross -examination. But we went toe -to -toe, as I expected that we would.

And when the debate was made available, of course, he was provided, as we do with all of our debates, he was provided with an unedited master to do with as he pleased.

And for years, he never did anything with that debate. The only version of it that was out was ours.

Finally, he put it out on his YouTube channel. And the only thing

I've heard from Bart Ehrman since 2009 was the comment that he made.

He made a very short description of the video. And all he said was, this wasn't my best debate.

Now, for Bart Ehrman, that was as close as you're going to get to an admission of anything as you're ever going to hear.

This wasn't my best debate. It was fascinating because I knew he walked into that room and the

PowerPoint presentation that he made was the exact same PowerPoint presentation he had made about eight months earlier in debating

Dan Wallace. So much so that he had not even fixed the typographical errors that had been discussed in the previous debate, but were still there.

So, Bart is not overly concerned about our response to him.

I'm not sure exactly why he does what he does outside of those writing projects being very clearly...

I don't know if it's a cathartic thing. I don't know if it's the Romans thing that when you're involved in sin, you invite other people to be involved with it with you.

I don't know. But the one thing that I was very struck with in my brief personal interactions with him during the debate, before the debate, he is not a happy man.

He is not a fulfilled man. He does try to give money to charities.

I think there's probably a reason for that. But he's not a happy man.

And the number of people whose faith he has been instrumental in destroying, or the number of people that he has confirmed in their unbelief,

I can tell you that in doing debates with Muslims, Bart Ehrman is their favorite author by a long shot.

I did a debate at Duke University a number of years ago, and my opponent had four books on his table, and three of the four were by Bart Ehrman.

And so he has confirmed many people in their unbelief.

And why would any of this be relevant to you? Because my daughter,

Summer, when she went to Glendale Community College freshman year, ran into a vile anti -Christian teacher.

And when I say vile, it just shows what different generation

I'm from. I bought her an MP3 player to take the class when she started telling me what this guy was like.

And so I would listen to her classes the next day, normally while I was riding my bike. And I didn't know that in universities, you could be that colorful in your language, in your lectures.

I mean, profanity in your lectures, but that's what you're allowed to do these days, I guess. And the bias, the prejudice, the bigotry, and the inaccurate positions that he would take, especially in regards to the scriptures,

I could tell where they were coming from. I knew, when I debated Bart, I basically read all the books he had written up to that point, and I listened to a number of his online classes.

I had spent hours and hours and hours listening to him, and I can guarantee you, he did not spend two minutes listening to me.

That's been my experience with all of the people on the left. When I debated

John Shelby Spong, the late John Shelby Spong, it was on, is homosexuality consistent with the

Bible? When I debated him and Barry Lynn, both of whom are now in eternity, neither one of them brought a

Bible to a debate on whether homosexuality is consistent with the Bible. And neither one of them had read a single word that I had ever written or said on the subject.

And I had read their books and listened to their lectures, and so you can sort of tell where a debate's going to go when one side's prepared and the other side doesn't care what the other side has to say.

And it was very clear that Bart had not done anything. And then listening to these people, like the professor that my daughter had,

I could tell what part of Ehrman's material they were trying to repeat, but they didn't even understand his position well enough to accurately repeat it.

And so your kids, your grandkids, who go to universities, will be hearing from professors material that's second - and third -hand, but most of it is originated in Ehrman and in the milieu he suggests and sort of lives in.

And that's why you need to be familiar with these things and at least know what resources are available to provide responses to those things.

And so using material like Apollonius of Tiana is a really easy mechanism to try to take students that have been raised in our churches and separate them from their faith life, hope that because they're now away from home, they're in this libertine environment, that it takes just a few things like that to break the connections and start them on a completely different direction.

And it is purposeful, and he's not the only one that does it, and that's not the only story that's used to do that.

But anyway, so we were supposed to be having a conversation, and I've already... we're done now, aren't we?

Isn't that pretty much it? I think that's it, yeah. Let's go through a few of the specific examples. You mentioned the fact that rather than being a contemporary of Jesus, what we have is from Philostratus, which is he's writing 200 years after Jesus.

He's writing about someone back in the late 1st, early 2nd century. So more roughly contemporary with Jesus.

But the sources are much later. But most people don't know their history, so they get overwhelmed.

But when you start looking at the supposed parallels, you find out the angelic visitor is actually a

Roman demigod, Proteus, half man, half fish. He's portraying divine in a

Roman sense when his sponsor is the wife of Septimius Severus, who's trying to destroy the church.

He was also called the son of God because he was the adopted son of Marcus Aurelius, the previous

Caesar. But one of the things I want to... And all of those are very, very, very different contexts than the

New Testament's understanding of Jesus. It's very, very important. People don't understand that there's so much material on YouTube, so much material in the modern context of people trying to draw these parallelomania where there's all these dying and rising gods.

No, there's not. Not in the context of monotheistic Judaism. Not in a context that would be consistent with the

Old Testament. Not in a context where you have documented, proven, prophetic materials that we know were written hundreds and hundreds of years before the events that take place in the first century.

And the vast majority of dying and rising gods are actually mythology related to the agricultural cycle because we don't understand that grocery stores are an amazing modern invention, okay?

And for a very, very long time, everyone's life was regulated around the agricultural cycle.

The growing season, harvesting, almost all of the religious festivals and everything else had to do with, hey, winter's coming, and Al Gore is wrong, and it gets cold, and you've got to have food to survive, and you've got to keep your crops, your animals alive.

And so it was very, very... And so almost all this dying and rising god stuff was about the cycle, the agricultural cycle of death in the winter and rising in the spring, and et cetera, et cetera.

And that has nothing to do with the story of Christ. It has nothing to do with monotheism.

It has nothing to do with the prophetic. It's completely different. And they simply market...

They recognize that most of the people they're trying to reach don't have a critical knowledge of the differences between Judaism in the ancient world and the religions of Rome, Greece, Babylon, Assyria, whatever it might be.

There's these massive, massive differences. So it's easy to confuse people at that point. By the way,

I forgot to mention in our introduction, we'll have another speaker in October, Lord willing, and talking about progressive

Christianity. She's written several books, Lisa Childers. We'll be talking with Dan Jensen, who's also written on progressive

Christianity. But I want to tie in the story of Apollonius to a broader subject for Ehrman.

Apollonius is not killed. He dies, I believe, a natural death. He's not killed by the Romans. He does not physically rise from the dead.

But there's a dream that someone has that supposedly affirms that he is still alive, that there's an afterlife, and his spirit is still out there somewhere.

Ehrman tries to tie that into Christianity because he insists that, here's a quote, the only way you can do history responsibly is on the basis of shared presuppositions.

And he explains, he says, you can't say Jesus was raised from the dead as a historical statement because it presupposes all sorts of theological beliefs that aren't shared in the historical community.

And so he says that the way Jesus became God, the way the resurrection came to be accepted was that people had dreams, and then they assumed that, like Apollonius, Jesus had actually been raised.

How do you...? Right. Ehrman simply will not even acknowledge someone as a historian unless they agree with him that history must be purely naturalistic.

You know, he said that to me, well, you're not a historian. It doesn't matter if I teach history, but you're not a historian. And so the idea is that real history is naturalistic history.

That is, it cannot allow for... It can allow for God to exist, it just cannot allow for God to be active in history.

And his whole idea is, well, if God hasn't spoken, then we wouldn't know when

God had interfered in history to begin with, and therefore, we simply can't allow that kind of claim to have any kind of impact in our historical conclusions.

Well, the result of that is that you are presuppositionally coming to the conclusion that whatever you say about history, you cannot say

God had anything to do with it. You can say it's strange, you can say it's weird, you can say we don't know, but the one thing you can't say is that there is any kind of coherent pattern or purpose.

So, fundamentally then, what's behind that? Well, I would think that one of the things that's behind that for Ehrman anyways is that he well knows that the early church, as recorded in Acts and at the end of Luke, the early church had as its foundation the idea that the life, death, and ministry of Jesus Christ had been prophesied from Moses throughout all of the prophets and the

Psalms, and that this was what gave him unique authority.

So, I don't know if any of you saw, about three weeks ago now, my fellow pastor and I, Jeff Durbin, had a discussion on Apology Radio with Brandon Robertson.

Did anybody? That's about a third. Okay, very good. Brandon Robertson is a homosexual theologian, basically,

I guess is what you would call him. And when I raised the statement of the

Gospel of Luke that Jesus, beginning with Moses, through all of the prophets and the

Psalms, demonstrated their testimony concerning Him, I said, let me take a guess, you don't think

Jesus ever did that? And he says, no, of course not. And then he went off into the Jesus Seminar. And if you don't know who the

Jesus Seminar was, they're not really relevant any longer, but back in the 1980s, they were a bunch of radical, see,

I would call them leftists, they would use progressive if you want to use that, but way out on the left fringe, that got together, and you may have heard of this, they would present papers before their meetings, and then they would take a vote of their members as to whether Jesus ever said the section they were currently studying.

And they would vote by putting marbles into a bag that was passed around the room. And the marbles represent, yes, he said it, no, he didn't say it, he might have said something a little like that, or he probably said something like that, but not exactly type of a thing.

And then you'd count the marbles up, and they eventually put out a very humbly titled gospel, gospels called the

Scholar's Version. And they printed the various portions of the gospels based upon their conclusions.

And of course, like in the Gospel of John, there were like two words that Jesus actually said from their perspective. And so this is the kind of radical skepticism.

There is, I linked to it just recently, I actually had the opportunity as a seminary student to be on a secular radio station with the founder of the

Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk. Did you ever hear this? You did? I think. I'm not gonna ask you to exegete it, right?

This panicked look, like, I don't know, what should I say? I'm not sure. What happened was, this was a long time, this was a very, very long time ago.

I was challenging him. I was a student at Fuller Theological Seminary, so I already heard all the leftism I needed. And so I was challenging a lot of things that he was saying, and he wasn't used to being challenged in that way.

And so during one of the commercial breaks, I grew up doing radio. I started doing radio as a freshman or sophomore in high school.

And I worked through college as a radio announcer. So microphones and stuff like that, no big deal for me.

And so I noticed that the host of the program, a guy named

Barry, he was getting in his earphone.

I could tell that Robert Funk had hung up on us, that he had left. And so Barry Young was his name, and he says, well, call him back.

He said, but he hung up on us. Call him back. And so live on the air, the phones, and he picks up and he says,

Dr. Funk, we lost the line. No, you didn't lose the line. I hung up on you. Well, why would you do that?

He says, well, because I felt like it. And Barry says, well, my producer says you told us all to go to hell.

He says hell's a good place to go. And that's how it went. He literally told us all to go to hell and hung up on us because I was challenging him on his presuppositions.

This is what the Jesus Seminar is sort of about. The other co -founder of the

Jesus Seminar was John Dominic Crossan. And I debated

Dom Crossan in 2008, I think. Dom was a lovely little teeny tiny

Irishman. He's a wonderful little Irishman. And he spent the entire decade of the 60s in a monastery cell as a

Roman Catholic priest studying the Gospels. And the end result was he eventually was removed from the

Roman Catholic priesthood and came to the conclusion he wasn't sure there is a personal

God. And he certainly doesn't believe there's an afterlife. And he was the co -founder with Robert Funk of the

Jesus Seminar. So that's how radical these folks really are. And that's where Brandon Robertson was getting his material to just dismiss the fact that you have this consistent testimony in the

Gospels. And just listen to the sermons of the early church. What are they doing?

If you want to know, when Jesus talked to the disciples and walked them through the prophetic testimony, read the sermons of the early church in Acts.

Read Paul's arguments in his epistles. Read Peter does the same thing. And you will see them very carefully utilizing the

Old Testament text as a testimony to who Christ is. And that prophetic...

And remember, up until last century, the oldest manuscripts we had of the

Old Testament were the Masoretic text from around 900 years after Christ. And then what do we have?

What happens last century? The Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran. And now we have manuscripts that predate

Christ, especially the Isaiah Scroll, where there's so many prophetic references to Jesus.

And most of the Psalter as well is found there, predating the days of Jesus. And so all these texts that the

New Testament writers were referring to, we now can document. Yes, they weren't just creating this stuff out of whole cloth.

This stuff was written long before, as we had believed.

But again, progressivists will always... I mean, it almost seems to me that one of the best things we could do in our churches, honestly, would be to have a

Sunday school series of lessons, not from a pulpit, but make sure all of our people are there, to give them an understanding of what most liberal

Christians, quote -unquote Christians, think about the Bible. Because that's the majority of what the schools are teaching, including religious schools.

That's just the reality. We need to recognize that, because they don't believe there was a

Moses, and they think you're an idiot if you think there was a Moses. Jesus thought there was a

Moses, but there's even a way around that. You know how they get around that? Well, we don't know what

Jesus actually said. That's just Matthew's perspective, which means we don't have any idea what Jesus said about anything.

I don't know how you can call yourself a Christian, and you don't really think that we have any idea what Jesus ever said, but this is where we are.

And so they have these positions. They can get around almost anything.

But when you get to really digging into the presuppositions, the early church believed that they had divine, historical prophecy that is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

And the progressivist mind must do whatever it can to automatically dismiss that because no one can know the future.

That's a presupposition. No one can know the future. There cannot be prophecy, so you have to deal with it in some other fashion.

And they always come up with something. Mark Urban likes to say,

I'm a historian. I don't believe in miracles. So basically, you start with that presupposition, and then you come up with any kind of naturalistic explanation.

The disciples must have had dreams. They must have had a vision. They must have been smoking something.

It must have been some kind of naturalistic explanation because you've excluded any supernatural explanation by definition.

One of the things that that leads, you know, Urban can do real scholarship.

Yes. And in the same way that he can then claim that he's a scholar and he can offer opinions on child rearing, you know, because he's a scholar.

Right, right. And anything a scholar does must be scholarship because it's in a related field.

People don't laugh at it. Right, but they should. But then he'll take it to another level, and he'll make statements like Jesus didn't think he was

God. Right. He says Paul didn't think he was writing the Bible. Right, as if he can know.

Yes. I mean, it's one of these things. It's like if you just take basic logic, how does he presume to know what

Jesus thought? Well, I can't answer how he presumes to, but one of the most glaring examples of that inconsistency,

I remember before we debated, so this would probably be about 2007 -ish,

I was riding South Mountain, which is a beautiful park down in the southern part of Phoenix, and I was listening to an interview that issues, et cetera,

I don't know if you've ever heard of them. It's a Lutheran program. I haven't heard them for a while.

I'm not sure if they're still on the air. But anyway, issues, et cetera, had him on, and it was the first time that I heard him explaining why he had rejected the inspiration of Scripture on the basis of textual variation.

Now, think about what he said here, and then you're going to realize where the contradiction is. He literally believes that if the

Bible was inspired, God would have prohibited any scribe from ever making a mistake in the transmission of the text.

And so since scribes made errors, then the Bible can't be inspired.

And I remember I was riding along, and I mean, I've dealt with Mormons and Muslims and atheists before this, and I had heard a lot of different stuff, but I expected

Ehrman to have a very nuanced, thought -through position.

And this is almost childish, and he still holds this position, that if God were to inspire the

Bible initially, then He would basically continue the act of inspiration for every scribe thereafter.

And I'm sitting here going, exactly how does that work? Okay, I mean, think of it.

You're sitting there making a copy of the Gospel of John, okay? And your mind is wandering.

That's happened a few times in life. And you're about to skip a line.

You're about to misspell a word. You're about to put another word in your mind in the place of the original word or something.

What's God going to do? Is He going to all of a sudden take you over and start doing automatic writing, where instead of writing what you were going to write, all of a sudden...

Then all of a sudden you go, ooh, where did that come from? Or is He just going to make the scribe spontaneously combust?

You know, flames at that particular point. What's He going to do?

I'm sitting here going, how does this even work? But think about it. That would require

God to be very much active in history. He'd have to be supernaturally intending everything taking place in history for Bart Ehrman to believe that inspiration had taken place in the past.

But the reason he doesn't believe it took place in the past is because of what happened in history. And it's just so obviously this vicious, tight circle that this brilliant person doesn't seem to see and is unwilling, as I found out, like I said, our initial, when we contacted him and the contract he signed was going to specifically focus on that issue.

Can there be divine inspiration in light of textual variation? And when he gets just a few weeks out, he's like, mm,

I ain't doing that. I don't know if he wanted to blame somebody else for signing the contract or whatever.

He didn't want to touch that with a 10 -foot pole. Does he know that there's a contradiction there? I don't know. But he is incredibly inconsistent at this very point.

The other thing that that issue raises is

Bart Ehrman is good on historical stuff. He is not good on theology.

And it is a problem in our society that if you have letters after your name, somehow that makes you an expert in everything.

No, it doesn't. In fact, I'll be honest with you, the way we do education today makes it a higher probability that if you do have a highly specialized degree that you probably know less about the general field of human knowledge than a lot of people just have a lot of life experience because we have so atomized the field of scholarly study.

You have to go so narrow and so deep in one area that you don't have time to learn broad -spectrum fundamental truths.

Someone who, for example, has a degree in computer science in the vast majority of educational systems today is not going to be required to have anything but extremely general classes in philosophy, history, all the things that would allow you to put computer science into some type of a context in the history of mankind.

And yet what we do is, oh, that's Dr. So -and -so and therefore he must know everything about everything.

That's not the way that it works and yet we treat people that way and the result is what we see with Bart Ehrman.

And so he has made some, I'm not sure if you're going to get to this, but he has made some massive theological blunders.

Okay. You're just going to have to wait a little while longer.

Let me touch on a couple. What he's done with the story of Apollonius is dust off...

We're back to Apollonius, folks. Just to tie up loose ends. He's dusted off third -century anti -Christian propaganda.

He's redefined everything, trying to make it fit a narrative that has no historical basis.

But since people don't actually go back and read what Philostratus actually wrote, it sounds good.

No one's ever heard of Philostratus. And it settles, in terms of motivations,

I don't know the man, but Bruce Metzger never made it to the New York Times bestseller list saying that we have the word of God.

Right. Bart Ehrman, on the other hand, takes the exact same evidence and says, there's three times as many textual variances as there are words.

We can't know anything. That sells. That's true.

But let's go into another topic here. He dusts off some other anti -Christian propaganda.

He describes a bombshell being dropped in 1934 by a prominent

German scholar, Walter Bauer. Orthodoxy and heresy in earliest

Christianity. He calls it, arguably, the most important book written on early Christianity in modern times.

And this sounds weighty. This sounds profound. What's the problem with that?

Well, Bauer's hypothesis was certainly something that was a major part of my education at Fuller, and it did have a huge— you cannot dismiss the huge impact it had on scholarship generally, despite the fact that it comes from a period of time where the

Nazis were in ascendancy. German scholarship from the 1800s onward had a fundamentally unbelieving direction to it all the way through.

And you have to look at anything that's produced in that time period up through World War II with a level of skepticism at that point.

But what's important for you is heresy and orthodoxy. A book came out,

I forget when I read it, but it was sometime, I'm thinking 2015, might be the time frame, maybe a little bit earlier than that, called

The Heresy of Orthodoxy. And I highly recommend The Heresy of Orthodoxy to you.

If you have any interest in this area at all, you need to have this in your library. It was a number of the best conservative scholars came together, and of course they're riffing off of the name of Bauer's book, to utterly shred

Bauer. And of course, being 70, 80 years removed, there's been a lot of research done, a lot of material discovered that Bauer did not have access to, or if he did, he didn't properly utilize.

And The Heresy of Orthodoxy really ends

Bauer's reputation, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, anybody who would read it and analyze the information would have to come to the conclusion that Bauer's hypothesis should never have gained the ascendancy that it did, but having done so, should now be fully repudiated.

Has it resulted in that? No, because it is Bauer's hypothesis, which is basically the idea that there was, there was never any

Orthodox position, really, that there were many Christianities, and Ehrman wouldn't have anything to say on church history if he wasn't repeating

Bauer. He's that sold out to it. And so, he starts with this idea, that there were so many contradictory

Christianities, and what happened, of course, is that eventually, the proto -Orthodox position happened, without any divine intervention, happened to win out, and then changed history to wipe out the testimony of all the other

Christianities that were there. Now, some, we still have some records of, the

Gnostics, and the Ebionites, and some small groups like that, but he would say that the vast majority of that information has been filtered through the victor's lens as well, and this allows you to radically change the history of the early church, and to basically say that the canon of Scripture, I mean, from their perspective, there is no canon of Scripture.

They'll recognize what was eventually decided, but it's a purely, it's just that one side won, and if the other side had won, then you'd have the

Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and all the rest of that stuff in your

Bible, rather than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it was just a toss of history. That's what they want to communicate to their students.

If they can get a student from First Baptist in some place in Memphis that comes to their class to embrace the idea that what we have today is just simply happenstance, that your side just happened to win.

That's all there is to it. There's nothing else there. You've destroyed them.

They may still go to church, but you have taken them out as an effective, meaningful witness in our culture today.

That's what they want to do, and that's what they're accomplishing, and they're using this kind of theory, which again,

Americans, look at N .T.

Wright. Believe it or not, there is honestly one of the reasons that N .T.

Wright, and he's a brilliant guy, he's not wrong about everything, but when he's wrong about something, he is doggedly wrong about it.

I had the opportunity of engaging him on the Unbelievable Radio program a number of years ago.

I had exactly three days to prepare for that. That was an intense period of time.

I thought it went pretty well, but one of the reasons, honestly, that Americans are so impressed with N .T. Wright is his stinking

British accent. When you say things with a British accent, you sound really smart, but if you come from Georgia, what can you do?

He can say the same words, and you're going to go, did you just spit the straw out of your mouth that you were chewing on before you said that?

We Americans have looked at the continent as mama as far as educational stuff's concerned.

We feel, and so the Germans especially, and it's partly because German just sounds so mean, they must be right because they say it with such confidence.

Bauer had a huge impact over here and was not critically analyzed for a long, long time.

So many books have been written and so many people have been taught with that as their background that it's hard to dislodge that kind of stuff over time, and we're still dealing with it today as a result.

Ehrman neglects to tell us that Philostratus was writing Apollonius' biography on the payroll of the empress, whose payroll was

Bauer on when he wrote Heresy and Orthodoxy? Well, you already know that.

I know I do. Go ahead and tell everybody while I take a drink real quick. Who was, people love to say was a

Christian, which he was not. There had actually been a long trend in German biblical scholarship trying to divorce

Christianity from Judaism, and Christ from the Old Testament. Oh, big time.

And even to this day, there is a huge, this doesn't have anything to do with Ehrman, but there is a, because of World War II and because of the

Holocaust, there is a massive amount of embarrassment by certain

New Testament texts. You want the clearest example of this, one that you all will remember? Well, I think you'll remember.

Remember when The Passion of the Christ came out? I don't know if you remember that right before it hit theaters, there was a big controversy because they literally pulled the reel -to -reels that they'd already sent out back and made a change.

And what was it they changed? Anybody remember? In the scene before Pilate.

If you remember, and I was not a supporter of the film, but they did some amazing things.

And one of the things they did, I'm not sure how they did it, but the people were literally speaking

Aramaic as they were yelling in front of Pilate.

There were subtitles on the screen and they were actually speaking in the original languages as far as the soundtrack was concerned.

And so I've studied enough Hebrew and Aramaic's related language that I was able to understand what they were saying.

What they did is they removed the subtitles. And so the

Jews are chanting in Aramaic, His blood be upon us and upon our children.

And they took the subtitle out. They left the chant in Aramaic because they figured probably no one's going to be able to understand that anyways.

But they had to edit it out because of World War II, because of the influence that German theology had in the

United States, there is to this day a tremendous embarrassment about what is supposedly the anti -Semitic sections of the

New Testament, which of course are not anti -Semitic because you're talking about converted

Jews that are writing this stuff, but you're just not even allowed to do that.

So there was a massive overreaction to that after World War II where you couldn't even write commentaries on some sections without being accused of anti -Semitism.

Real quick on a couple of short things. If you'd like to see more about some of these topics, particularly about the

Aryan Jesus, the Nazi New Testament, where they created a

Bible, no Old Testament, highly edited New Testament. We did a video.

It's free on our YouTube channel. You can access it through the card over there. It's called the

Bible versus Barter. But a claim that I actually got...

And believe it or not, there's a section on Apollonius of Tiana in that video. I know it's hard to believe, but there is.

We want to make sure that horse is dead. We also deal with Bauer.

But at any rate. So one of the things

I had written to me as a feedback for advertising this was a fellow told me, all honest biblical scholars admit no one knows who wrote most of the books of the

New Testament. And Herman especially says this about the Gospels.

He said that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the

New Testament. He says that they were all written anonymously. And like I said, Herman has put out a book,

Forgery, where he develops the skeptical perspective on the authorship of the

New Testament as well as the rejection of a number of books that have named authors but he rejects those as being written by those individuals.

So 1st, 2nd Timothy and Titus especially, but Ephesians and Colossians as well.

And so this is another approach that is highly effective because the vast majority of the time we don't step back and take the time to tell our people why we believe, for example,

Paul wrote 1st, 2nd Timothy or Titus. And as a result, then they're not prepared for it.

And part of that is because, well, it doesn't make for a good sermon. Okay, then do it at other points or illustrate it or something, but we still have to do it.

And I have a story from my own ministry that illustrates this is

I, for years as I would teach at Phoenix Forum Baptist Church, I was the adult Sunday school teacher and I would, okay, bore my people at times by going over this kind of stuff.

And I would explain to them, we're sending our kids out. You need to know this type of stuff.

You need to know about authorship issues. You need to know why people like Bart Ehrman will say, well,

I don't believe, 1st, 2nd Timothy and Titus is by Paul because I believe the early church looked like this.

And it's clear that in 1st, 2nd Timothy and Titus, it's a much more advanced form of the church.

And so since I don't think that took, that even developed until the second century, then that couldn't have been written by Paul, which means you have to go back into Acts when

Paul revisits the churches that he's founded and what does he do? He establishes elders in those churches.

Well, you got to take that out now too. And so what it is is what liberal theology does is it creates theories and then edits the text of the

Bible so that their theory works. Another one of the main reasons that they don't believe that these books are written by, for example,

Paul is that they will do vocabulary studies. Now we can do this with a computer now.

I can do that in my computer. You can do word frequency studies and you can go, hey, look, there's a set of words that appear very often in 1st and 2nd

Timothy and Titus that don't appear in the books that we consider to be Pauline.

So Galatians is Paul, Romans is Paul, 1st and 2nd Corinthians is Paul, 1st and 2nd

Thessalonians is Paul. And so we set them up as the standard.

You establish a database of vocabulary and then you look at 1st and 2nd

Timothy and Titus and that's different. Ephesians and Galatians, it's different. And therefore they kind of couldn't have been written by Paul.

And I just, I know that sounds impressive to students and stuff like that, but I just sort of sit back and go, okay, let me see if I understand this.

Paul writes Romans, which you believe is Paul. He writes it to a major church.

He clearly writes it so that it will be distributed to other churches. Rome, all roads lead to and from Rome.

So you establish the truth there and you're going to be establishing it in other places. But it's meant to be read in public to a wide audience and it's meant to be an argument on the nature of the gospel.

And then you compare that to a personal letter to a fellow pastor and go, it uses different terminology.

Well, congratulations. I'm glad you figured that out. So if I take

Ehrman's arguably largest, most widely read scholarly work, not popular work, called the

Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. If I took that work and I did a vocabulary study on it in comparison to any of his popular works, the result would be there are at least two

Bart Ehrmans. And if I then had access to his personal correspondence, oh my goodness, there is forgery everywhere.

I honestly, I sit back and I look at this type of argumentation and I just go, how do people not question this?

It seems so obvious to me. But it's sort of like people go to seminary and I'm just so impressed with this professor.

He knows so much that I'm not willing to question, where he's getting some of this type of information.

And conservatives are bullied, especially by publishers, to not rock the boat and to challenge these things and to follow the consensus.

It happens, believe me, I know. And so, there's just so many issues like this that I'm not even sure what started that, but it wasn't

Apollonius, that's all I know. It was good. You know, I am from Georgia, but it doesn't take...

We know, brother. Yes. We know, brother. And I love you anyways, it's okay. Thank you.

It doesn't take much digging to see this is a bunch of bunkum. I was sorely tempted...

Could you define bunkum for me? I'm not sure. Well, I... Never mind. I was tempted to title this, at least on the video version,

Bart Ehrman, the P .T. Barnum of atheism. Because, you know, P .T.

Barnum sold a lot of tickets to see The Fiji Mermaid, which was the upper half of a monkey sewed to the bottom half of a fish.

And people paid a lot of money to go see it. But it's a fabrication. He was putting things together and he was fooling people.

We know illusionists can fool us very easily with all kinds of slights of hand and things like that.

We never hold biblical scholarship to the same standard. If a scholar says it, there's a temptation to believe it.

You know, I'm the South Georgia Redneck who says, can we see the evidence? Can we see the logic?

Can you take us through the steps of how you got there? Ehrman tends to use bullying at that point.

I'll be honest with you. When he's challenged in debates at that point, it's how dare you question me?

The one thing that shocked me, because I know Ehrman is capable of real scholarship.

Not on any of his popular stuff. His popular stuff is a bunch of bunkum. Excuse me,

I'm from South Georgia. My vocabulary is limited outside of the barnyard. But at any rate, the one thing that shocked me was in a debate in 2015.

I'm glad we finally got to that. We need to get that before we run out of time. We definitely need to get this. I had seen in...

Especially because I have challenged him to debate this. Oh, of course he won't. And he won't unless we come up with 25 grand.

Well, since we covered this in our video, I don't, I have no idea whether he ever saw it.

I know that Rocio Christie's been showing our video at Chapel Hill. But since we put out the video,

I think it was spring of last year or the year before, he actually came out and doubled down on this.

But in one of his learning company courses, and then also in his books, he defined the

Trinity as three beings in one God. Or three beings in one being.

And I'm sitting there going, that's not... Not even close. It's not close. But in 2015, he did a debate with Justin Bass.

And when challenged, he said, Jesus is definitely not Yahweh for any author of the

New Testament. Yahweh and Jesus are different beings in the New Testament. He said, if you think

Jesus was Yahweh, you've committed the heresy called civilianism, which was a third century heresy that said

Jesus and Yahweh were the same being. It was condemned as a heresy in early Christianity and continues to be condemned as heresy by every

Orthodox Christian on the planet. And he said it with pretty much that level of confidence.

And when that debate first dropped, I did an entire program just decimating that argumentation.

And I just cannot even begin to understand how Ehrman can get away with this kind of stuff.

Because on this level, he's just... He's not passing my early church history class, okay?

Because he doesn't understand civilianism. He doesn't understand the New Testament. And it amazes me, to be honest with you, because when you look at...

And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that he doesn't believe, for example, Peter wrote either 1st or 2nd Peter, because he believes

Peter's illiterate and Peter couldn't write anything, despite the fact that Peter identifies as Immanuensis, to whom he's dictating the letter anyways.

But Peter... One of my favorite places where Jesus is identified as Yahweh is in a place where most of us don't necessarily catch it.

I teach people, we don't have time to do it right now, but I've done it online many, many times. You can catch it. Extremely useful in dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses.

Using Psalm 102, 25 -27, with Hebrews 1, to demonstrate that the writer of the

Hebrews identifies the unchanging Yahweh of Psalm 102 as the

Son in Hebrews 1, verses 10 -12. And then John, in John 12, 41, quotes from Isaiah 6, where Isaiah sees

Yahweh sitting upon his throne and says in John 12, 41, these things Isaiah said because he saw

His glory and he spoke about Him. Yet, but despite this, many of the Jews still believed in Him.

He's talking about Jesus. And he's identifying the one that was seen by Isaiah in Isaiah 6 as Jesus, which was, of course,

Yahweh. So we know those. We know those texts and the...

Was it Dr. Bush? What was the name who debated him? Justin Bass.

Bass, Bass, sorry. Even Dr. Bass pointed out Romans 10, call upon the name of the

Lord. Who is that? That's Yahweh, but it's being used of Jesus. In the

Old Testament, he doesn't even seem to... Ehrman just doesn't get it. But let me give you an example you may not be familiar with.

The key text for apologetics from Peter is always be ready to give a defense to the hopeless discipline, right?

But if you actually read that section, he's quoting from Isaiah. And then he says, when he gets into the key text, he says, we are to set

Christ as Lord apart in our hearts.

To set Him apart, to sanctify in our hearts. And when you look at what he's doing, he's actually continuing the citation from Isaiah.

The Lord there is actually the tetragrammaton in the Hebrew. Tetragrammaton, Yahweh. It's the name Yahweh. We are to treat

Christ as Yahweh in our hearts. That's Peter. There are so many of these in the

New Testament that this is why a friend of mine who took classes with Ehrman at Moody said he slept through the theology classes.

And he certainly did. But here's a situation where because of his own inflated view of his own scholarship, he is unwilling to accept correction at all because he is assuming

Yahweh is Unitarian. And therefore to say Jesus is Yahweh is to say he thinks we're saying

Jesus is the Father. And so he thinks we are denying the existence of three divine persons in eternity, which we are not.

We are identifying Yahweh with the being of God. And then the distinction of the

Father, Son, and Spirit is within that one being. We are not saying that the Son is the Father in any way, shape, or form.

And so this is just a glaring example of what happens when you start believing your own press.

When you start believing that you are the ultimate authority in all of these things, and therefore you can't learn, especially from the people on the other side.

And that becomes very, very dangerous. We can't do that either. I've learned a lot from people to my left.

Very often they're very good with facts. They're very good with research. They write great bibliographies, stuff like that.

I had to learn in seminary to learn from people that I disagreed with on fundamental issues.

But you have to learn to do that in a very discerning fashion. And he has not learned to do that in any way.

He discredits Dan Brown saying that the Da Vinci Code made good fiction but...

Bad history. Bad history. Yep, and he's right about that. The thing is, if you hold his materials up to the same light, you find out he's basically substituted one fiction for another.

Let's wrap up with this and then we'll go to questions. It's my contention that no one has anything to fear from the truth but liars.

That Christianity will stand up to any scrutiny. Our critics, they can throw all kinds of things at us.

If we just take the time to actually say, let's get everything out on the table and examine it. Let's look at what the scriptures actually say.

Let's look at what history actually says. What you find is they presuppose things out of court.

They presuppose histories of suppressed gospels.

They presuppose... You read the Gospel of Thomas. Oh, you're going to...

And it says things like... Yeah, you're going to read section 114 and that's being biased. Watch.

He says... I'm right, aren't I? Yeah, yeah. I know.

We've been doing this for close to a year. Well, but I listened to the video on the way driving up here too. Simon Peter said to him, this is to Jesus, let

Mary lead us for women are not worthy of life. Jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.

For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. It's section 114 of the

Gospel of Thomas. Do we have anything to fear from all this stuff?

Someone sent Apologia a sticker that they had made. I have it on my phone.

I could probably show it to you. But it's story time with Uncle Jimmy. And if any of you listen to the

Dividing Line, once in a while I will do story time with Uncle Jimmy. And most of that came from when

I was introducing my audience to the Gnostic Gospels. And so I read most of...

I think I read all of the Gospel of Thomas on the Dividing Line. See, I don't worry about audience.

If I did, I would not do stuff like that. We're trying to do something a little bit more important than that. When you familiarize yourself with these things that people are bringing out, whether it be the

Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene... Remember the Talpiot tomb story that came out a number of years ago where allegedly they found

Jesus' bone box and all the rest of that kind of stuff? I wrote a book in 17 days on that subject, going through the

Gospel of Mary Magdalene and all that kind of thing. No, we don't have anything to fear. Sometimes the sources are difficult to track down and sometimes you have to be patient to find the information.

But honestly, when you do, you will grow in your confidence in the faith.

Certainly, that's been my experience over the years, encountering all of these challenges, starting with more missionaries.

Actually, starting with the guys running the printing presses where my mom worked as a secretary when

I was nine years of age. She took me to work one day and then she looked around, couldn't find me, and she went back into where the pressmen were doing their stuff and they were all standing around and I was arguing with them about the existence of God.

So that's really where it started at about age nine. But those years of answering those questions and being challenged, there are tough questions.

I'm not trying to sit here and say, oh, I've found all the questions to be easy. No, there's tough questions. But when you work through them, you almost always discover a bias and a presupposition of prejudice functioning on the other side, that it may be buried, may not even be expressed, but it's there.

And when you challenge it, then you're able to find your answers. Are there any quick questions for Dr.

White? If you're in a church where the youth have never been challenged to take their faith very, very seriously and to recognize that the world's going to hate them and that there is work they're going to need to do, it's going to be tough.

If the best you're able to do is to keep them coming with pizza parties and videos, yeah, they're going to have a real problem.

There's excellent material out there answering everything that Ehrman's done. When Ehrman puts a book out, there are good

Christian scholars that put responses out. They're not going to be New York Times bestsellers, and they may be hard to track down, but they will be there.

When he put a book out on how Jesus became God, a bunch of scholars contemporaneously put out a book on the deity of Christ, arguing from the other perspective.

And so there's material out there. Like I said, The Heresy of Orthodoxy is a book that everybody, I think, really does need to have in their library because it takes the whole

Bauer stuff apart big time. It's not that the material isn't there. It's that it's not entertaining.

And if we have not matured our young people to the point where they don't need to be entertained, they know that it's important for them to be taught, it's a tough question to answer.

Tough question to answer. We actually made a video that with pizza could actually be somewhat entertaining.

Sorry. And a little bit of banjo music.

There's someone in the back. It was Amazing Grace on a classical guitar. Okay. I would have to have them define what they think anti -Semitic is.

It's sort of like today, our media today is filled with the term transphobic.

Words appear. And literally only a few decades ago, if a term was coined, you had to bear the responsibility of providing a meaningful and historical foundation for the use of the term.

Now, as long as it appears on MSNBC, it's gospel truth. This is our problem.

Leftism attacks the utilization of language and hence the ability to communicate truth meaningfully between people.

And so what is anti -Semitism? What is racism today for crying out loud?

There's a biblical definition, but it's not the definition that's being used in our society.

And so you have to, and it sounds like you're dodging the question, but you're not. You're actually getting to the actual meaning of the question.

But people in your generation, hate to put it to you this bluntly, the very fact that you're asking this question puts you outside the mainstream of your generation because your generation is concerned about the feelings it produces, not the meaning of the words.

And no society can survive putting emotion as the center of our dialogue and communication.

We will split into 350 million different parts because that means there's no way of coming together to agree on anything.

So I would respond by saying, what is anti -Semitism? If you're talking about, are there harsh things said about the

Jews that lived in Jesus' day for what they were doing and what they did, of course there was.

But some will say, well, the Germans used that in the 1940s as a basis for doing what they did.

But the question is, was that a valid use? Not, did they do it? They did do it, but was that a valid use?

All of this requires some level of critical thought that, unfortunately, some forms of fundamentalism eschew and our entire society now has simply abandoned.

So you've got to define the term. Well, first of all, that impacts the very understanding of what the

Word of God is. But again, the question is, was it true at the time?

And the answer is yes. What did it mean at the time? And then the important thing is we then need to make application to our day.

And if you get rid of it, you can't make application to our day. I would point out a lot of people that are doing with Scripture the same things that the

Pharisees were doing back then that are no longer Jewish. But they would come under the condemnation of Jesus in Matthew 23.

And so when you look at the hard language in Matthew 23, the question is, is that ever warranted?

And in a society where truth has been traded for feelings, it's never warranted. But that's not a society that will ever last.

It might also be interesting to ask people if the Old Testament is anti -Semitic. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, ever read the Prophets? Oh, boy. Don't read Ezekiel. No, no.

No, no. Bad stuff. Bad stuff. Warning. But you know what the funny thing is?

Have you seen my debate with him? Okay. During the debate,

I challenged him. I said, Dr. Ehrman, if you're denying what's called the tenacity of the text, that is, if you're denying that we still have all the original readings, at least in the manuscript tradition, then can you show me any place in the

New Testament where you believe we don't have the original readings any longer? So, in other words, there might be a textual variant.

For example, there's one in Galatians where there's five different possibilities. It's a really tough variant. But even

Ehrman would say, yeah, one of those five was probably the original. Where is there anywhere in the

New Testament where you believe the original is completely gone? And he pointed to one place where it's an obscure passage.

It has nothing to do with any theology whatsoever. It's in Peter. And I really couldn't go over it without even projecting it.

But the point is, even from his perspective, he came up with one part of a sentence.

That's his admission. Yeah, when he's with scholars, what he says is, we know what the

New Testament says. We're just tinkering with some of the minutia. That's what he says with scholars. But in the popular stuff, the way you're reading it is, we don't know what it originally said comes across as if everything is up for grabs.

When the reality is, even he admits, we're only talking about a handful of places where even he would say, yeah,

I don't think we have the original. So there's a huge difference, like I said at the beginning, between the scholarly

Bart Ehrman, where he'd have to actually defend that stuff against knowledgeable opposition, and then the popular

Bart Ehrman that is interpreted in the very way that you yourself are understanding him. I think it puts you so far away from actually being able to engage

Ehrman at that point, because Ehrman's going, you're talking 1 ,200 years after Christ.

How is this at all relevant to what was originally written or what was originally intended and things like that?

And so I don't know that it would have a direct impact. My great concern about this new appeal to the great tradition is that I can define what the

New Testament is. No one can define what the great tradition is. And so once you go there, then what they're having to do, especially amongst

Protestants, is to say, well, we're only talking about the great tradition in its doctrine specifically of God.

And so they're tearing one part of that out. And I've pointed out over and over again just recently, if you're a

Baptist, you're not a part of the great tradition, because the great tradition were

Pado -Baptists. And as I pointed out to Jason, we talked about this yesterday dinner, he's not a part of the great tradition either because the reason that he would baptize an infant is not the reason the great tradition would baptize an infant.

So they don't fit. They don't fit either. My reading of church history is a bit different.

Yeah, well, you know, you're in Georgia. They're from Georgia. We would stand together against Thomas Aquinas.

Right, right. So I see it as an issue of scriptural sufficiency in theology.

Ehrman's not even in that field. He's not even that far apart. But is the great tradition a phrase that has been around popularly for a long time?

Yes, yes, but not in our circles. Not in our circles. There's a lot of stuff that we haven't heard before that's all of a sudden now central and on the center of the stage.