Eichenwald and Newsweek Refuted: Part 2

Well here we are right at the end of 2014. Welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. It has been quite a year. Normally on this particular program we might review some of the things that have happened over the course of this year.

As I think back I've been to Spain, Kiev twice, Johannesburg, Durban, Berlin. It's been a year. It's been an incredible year. I have stood and debated in the Juma Masjid in Durban. It's been incredible.

And then Clementine came and visited. So they're right up there. Right around the same level I guess. But maybe we'll have an opportunity to do that later. I think you said you're jetting at the end of the week, right?

You don't know. If he doesn't jet at the end of the week then maybe we'll arrange something.

That reminds me I need to make a phone call.

Why don't you make that phone call while I talk over here and we'll figure it out. Anyway, be it as it may, normally we would have a review of these things. But we have something important to do today.

Refuting the Newsweek Hit Piece on the Christian Faith

And that is continue and finish up our refutation of the Newsweek hit piece on the Christian faith. And it is a hit piece on the Christian faith. When your article concludes by stating the following. When it says the Bible is a very human book.

Jesus didn't teach that. Jesus held men accountable to the words of the Old Testament. In fact, the very section of scripture that the author Kurt Eichenwald attacks earlier in the article at the beginning of Genesis.

And he said, have you not read what God spoke to you saying? So for Jesus and Kurt Eichenwald, the Bible is two very different things. And to say the Bible is a very human book in light of the context of this article is to deny its divine origins.

And so this is an attack upon the Christian faith. It was written, assembled, copied and translated by people. Well, in the sense that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Sure. But that's not what this article is saying. That explains the flaws, the contradictions and the theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, such as Mr. Eichenwald.

You want to give us some examples? Tell me, since the last program, I would think if someone had taken the time as we did to interact with your article so fully as we did, to read entire sections of it, to direct people to it, and then to point out, you know, we've addressed these things over and over again, written entire books on these subjects, debated the people, the few people that you cite, and then you don't even cite them in a meaningful fashion.

I thought in journalism, if you cited somebody, it might be good to give references, you know, some way of being able to look things up, put them in context. Obviously, I'm old school. I guess as I grade people's tests in classes that I'm teaching and stuff overseas, I just shouldn't expect them to have footnotes and things like that.

I guess that's just old school, but I've debated Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong and these various ultra-liberals that you are so enamored with. And I asked Bart Ehrman about what he feels was not original.

Any reading that we don't have the original reading for anymore in the New Testament. He came up with one example, the difference between Enoch and Enochi. That's it. So what are these passages? It is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts.

So are you talking about the longer ending of Mark? The Kamiohanium? Are you talking about the Pericopaea Adulterae? Those are all well-known things. Anybody doesn't even have to have the Nessie Island 28th edition.

All you need to have is actually read the teeny tiny little font notes down at the bottom of the page in the ESV or New American Standard or even the New King James will tell you where the textus receptus disagrees with the other texts, with the modern eclectic texts.

But what does that have to do with once that is understood, it is possible? See, those of us who know these fields, sir, recognize that you do not. You engage in so many category errors where you connect things together that have no business being connected together.

There is nothing relevant about your assertion of the contradictions and errors in the Bible and the subject of textual criticism, the transmission of the text. You seem to think that there is, but I would love, and as I've said, I have invited you repeatedly.

You are active in Twitter, even today. You are responding to people who have responded to me since before the last program. But you wrote a lengthy response to Dr. Michael Kruger on his blog, and so you're well aware of what's going on.

And by the way, let me mention this right off the bat. We predict problems with the video feed today. We just, our internet connection so far, I hope so, but our internet connection today has been unreliable.

We've reset stuff. We've done what we can on our end. It seems to be network issue beyond us. And so there is an audio link at aomin .org. If you go to the first blog article, there is an audio link. And the audio link pretty much works.

It's pretty much bulletproof. So if you start getting max headroom stuff, hiccups, interruptions, so on and so forth, please feel free to go to the audio. And obviously, we're recording the video locally.

And if there are problems, then we upload a fresh copy to YouTube later on and make the needed adjustments so that if you're not watching live. But if you are watching live and you start having problems, my suggestion would be to go to the audio link.

I wanted to mention that in passing. Anyway, which are the bad translations and what one book says in comparison to another and then try to discern the message for yourself. The point is, even in your response to Dr. Kruger, you make the assertion that, well, look, I'm not presenting a theology here.

Yes, sir, you are. And if you would take the time, like I said, I was communicating with you. We have a phone number. It's toll-free. I've sent it to you five, six times in Twitter. Other people have repeated it to you.

You know you have it. 877 -753 -3341. It's toll-free. In 52 minutes, right at the top of the hour, we'll pause. And if you want to respond to what I've said up to that point, then call in and respond.

We're opening it up to you. I don't think you will, but I hope you will. You didn't last week, but we're making the opportunity available to you. Most people wouldn't do that. We're demonstrating that the presentation you made of fundamentalists and evangelicals in this article is a strawman presentation.

Am I saying that there's no one like the people you describe? I'm not saying that. But we decry them as loudly as you do. The reality is, though, the conclusions you come to are theological, and they impact all of the Christian faith.

All the Christian faith. Let's keep going, because there's a lot to get to. And I'd like to try to get through most of it before the top of the hour, if I can, so that Mr. Eichenwald can call and we can respond to some of these things.

So I'm not responding to everything in the article. It's, I think, either Dr. Kruger…. There's a Dan Wallace who's responded. Albert Mohler or Dr. Kruger mentioned it's like 32 pages long. And so it takes so much basic repair as far as the fundamental errors that Mr. Eichenwald has that it's hard to say.

Yes, Brandon, wonky is an official technical term. It is an official technical term. I've heard network engineers use wonky. I'm not sure when it got defined, but they have…. That's when you don't really know what's going on.

And it's just wonky. So I think that's…. So anyways, it's starting right where I picked up last time. We read, to understand how what we call the Bible was made, you must see how the beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were pushed into it by the Holy Roman Empire.

By the 5th century, the political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament. Now, Mr. Eichenwald, Dr. Kruger, who is one of the greatest living experts today on the subject of the canon of the New Testament specifically, because that's the only thing that would be relevant here.

The Old Testament was already a fixed deal long before this. He wrote two articles on his blog site demonstrating that you have no earthly idea what you're talking about here. I will just simply echo his statements.

You seemingly are not aware of the fact that we have the vast majority of the New Testament in manuscript form before Constantine comes along. And even if Constantine tried to push something into the text of the New Testament, it would be impossible for that not to be detectable.

Let me…. I wasn't going to do this. I wasn't going to do this. I will have to change what I'm… open recent. All right. Let me show you, Mr. Eichenwald, where the problem with this theory you're presenting is.

I made up this graphic years ago. Again, I used this in my debate with Dr. Ehrman. Here is…. There you go. Here's just a quick run-through of this graphic that I made a number of years ago. The initial Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament were written in various places at various times.

Some were written for distribution within the community, such as the Gospels. Others were epistles sent to specific locations. The problem is that this isn't going to show the really cool animation that I did for this.

That's the problem. What happens…. This could go back to me because this might just completely go wonky as well. There we go. What happens if…. Oh, are you able to find the proper screen there? Should have practiced this beforehand, huh?

No. Yeah. Yeah, and I know why, too. Here. I can fix it. Watch this. Watch this. And…boom. That fixed it, didn't it? I'm getting good at this over here. I'm getting techie. All right. Here. The initial Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament were written in various locations at various times.

Some were written for distribution within the community, such as the Gospels. Others were epistles sent to specific locations. Then copies would be made and sent elsewhere. Often Christians traveling from one place to another would encounter a book they had not heard of before and hence would make a copy to bring back to their own fellowship.

And though a graphic that would represent how many different lines of transmission there were and how often they were interconnected would rapidly become useless due to the number of manuscripts that would be on the screen, the fact of that complex history of transmission should be kept in mind.

Over time, single books would be gathered into collections. This was especially true of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Hence, we have P75 and P66, which are Gospel collections. P46 contained the Epistles of Paul, all dating from the middle to the end of the 2nd century.

These collections would then come together until finally after the Peace of the Church in AD 313. You could have entire copies of the Scriptures, such as we find in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.

But the important point to note is the multifocality of this process. Multiple authors writing at multiple times to multiple audiences produced a text that appears in history already displaying multiple lines of transmission.

This results in a textual variance we must study, but it also illustrates something else specifically. It's vitally important to realize that the transmission of the text of the New Testament did not follow a phone game single line, despite what you said, Mr. Eichenwald.

Not only are written documents less liable to corruption than what is whispered in the ear, but the phone game involves a single line of transmission. The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors, with books being sent to multiple locations.

This multifocality leads to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern attacks on the New Testament, including yours, Mr. Eichenwald. To make specific changes in a text like the New Testament, which is what you just asserted happened by the Roman Empire, which originally circulated as a group of texts, not as a single body, would require a centralized controlling body that could make wholesale changes in these widely dispersed texts.

But the fact of the matter is, no such central agency ever existed or could have existed. Christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of the lower classes. There was no central authority that could ever have gathered up all the texts and made wholesale changes.

Such was impossible in the earliest days of transmission, and given that we have such ancient texts today, they obviously could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence. In fact, Mr. Eichenwald, we can prove beyond all doubt that this kind of corruption did not happen since papyri have been found that date back to the second century, and that only within the past hundred years had any later centralized organization sought to alter the text.

Those later texts would show stark differences as older and older manuscripts are found, but just the opposite has been the case. Now, Mr. Eichenwald, I wrote those lines and put that material together a very long time ago, a number of years ago, and the reality is that it describes your position absolutely perfectly because you have given us nothing new.

You have simply given us, well, what you've given us has been a wiki scholarship. It's wiki scholarship. You, sir, are the mirror image of the fundamentalists that you despise so much. Just as they unthinkingly and uncritically and without examining other perspectives hold on to one particular perspective and say things that are inconsistent, you do the same thing just in reverse.

You have your sources, and you will not listen to the other side. We saw this in looking at your previous material. We see it here as well, here as well. So what you're saying in this paragraph is simply false.

I challenge you to prove it. If you're thinking of back this up, 877 -753 -3341. I have the critical text right here. I have, Rich put up, I've got my New Testament textual set up right here. I've got the Nesjalland text, Metzger's textual commentary, Comfort's textual commentary.

I've got the CNTTS apparatus right here. Show it to us. Show it to us. I've got the best scholarship offers us right here. Call in. I've got the phone thing right here I can see. Show us where this happened.

Show us where the Holy Roman Empire. Show us where the Roman Empire decided what gospels were going to be in the New Testament, sir. Show us when that happened. You seem to indicate that Constantine had something to do with it.

He didn't. I want you to show us how the Holy, you called it Holy Roman Empire. Well, there was no Holy Roman Empire, by the way. That's an incredible anachronism. Yeah, the Roman Empire, the HRE comes into existence during the medieval period.

So you're hundreds of years off on that. And we have the functional four gospels way before the end of persecution by Rome against Christians. So we are truly left wondering what it is you're talking about.

Because the beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were not pushed in the New Testament by the Holy Roman Empire. And fifth century councils did not determine the the issue of the canon of Scripture.

It's just it's just bogus. It's just it's just false. Phones ring. But it was you testing it. Just making sure it's working. OK, go ahead. Freak me out if you want to. It's all right. See, you just keep getting my hopes up there.

Thanks a lot.

Well, at least on this show, I didn't do the dial tone thing like I did last time. OK.

All right. Then it says with the power of Rome behind them, the practitioners, this proclaimed orthodoxy wiped out other sects and tried to destroy every copy of their gospels and other writings. Again, it would be nice if you would provide footnotes, references, even Wikipedia does that.

But you just throw this stuff out there as if it's just common knowledge. You seem to think that the Gnostic gospels were widespread and and extremely popular. You know, you can have a meaningful discussion about the rise of sacralism and that's what you're talking about here.

I don't think you understand it, but that's what you're talking about here. You're you're you're talking about the rise of the church state. And Nicaea is an important element in that. Theodosius is a much more important element in that.

And it it takes quite some time. But the reality is that the groups with their other gospels were disappearing long before this period of time. Do you know, Mr. Eichenwald, how many manuscripts, for example, of the Gospel of Thomas we have?

You know what language is there? In comparison to New Testament. Do you know what the dating of such things as the Gospel of Peter or some of the others that you mentioned elsewhere in Europe? Do you know the dating of those where they were, where they actually come from?

They don't come from the first century. And the early church recognized that and recognized they were not apostolic. Anyway, I recall they were already working from a fundamentally flawed document. Now, we actually saw that Mr. Eichenwald again.

And Mr. Eichenwald says, I'm guilty of calling him names because I keep saying you're ignorant. Well, when you produce a document that's published as a cover article where you make documentable errors, when I can put the error on the screen, I can put the Greek text up here, which you admitted you can't read and go.

That's what it actually says. And this is what Mr. Eichenwald said. What other term would you like us to use? Truth challenged? I mean, how postmodern can we get here? You don't know what you're talking about.

You just don't know this. You claim in your response to Dr. Kruger that you've been studying the Bible for 30 years. Sir, I teach theology and textual criticism and apologetics and church history in a number of different places.

And, sir, this, if you turn it into me, you ain't graduating. It fails. It fails. It's it's not acceptable. It is so riddled with errors that it's not acceptable. What do you call someone who studied something for 30 years and can't submit a paper that would pass the very basic levels of examination?

What do you call someone like that? What what name would you suggest? I don't know. I think the proper term is ignorant. You do not know the field. When you can say Constantinople declared Jesus to be the father, son, Holy Spirit, you do not know the field.

It's a fact. Simple fact. We're all ignorant of things. If I wrote a cover piece on finances or the history of Belgium or certain common foot funguses, I would be easily identified as ignorant by those who actually know the field.

That's what's happened here. And that's what's amazing, is that Newsweek would actually publish something like this and not pass it on to someone and go, well, what do you think about this? Errors and revisions by copyists have been written in by the fifth century and several books in New Testament, including some attributed to Paul, are now considered forgeries perpetrated by famous figures in Christianity to bolster their theological arguments.

Well. Most in our audience, anyways, will remember that when Forged by Bart Ehrman came out. We not only reviewed the book, but we also played and reviewed the interaction between, if I recall, it was Daryl Bach, someone from Dallas, I'm pretty sure it was Daryl Bach and Bart Ehrman on the thesis.

And again, you show zero familiarity or at least any willingness to admit the existence of any meaningful scholarly defense. Of the apostolic authorship of any of the books to which you might be referring, you specifically don't like First Timothy, Second Peter, any of the Petrine Corpus, evidently.

Are you familiar with the meaningful scholarly defenses of those books and their apostolic origin? Who have you read? Who have you read? You've been studying for 30 years. This is supposed to be a piece of journalistic with journalistic integrity.

Who have you read? Why do you dismiss them? Why didn't you mention them? How do you interact with their argumentation? How do you interact with the fact that, for example, when Bart Ehrman attempts to create a minimalistic Pauline Corpus of only seven books, that the standard argumentation he utilizes is to say, well, when we look at the pastoral epistles and we graph the unique vocabulary found in the pastoral epistles, they're different than what's found in what we identify as the Pauline Corpus.

Many people have pointed out for a very long period of time now that that is a bogus standard. Why is it a bogus standard? Well, sir, it's pretty simple. If someone took your published work, if someone took this 32 page document that you have written on the subject of Bible and compared the particular vocabulary in it, the unique vocabulary items in it, in comparison to all, say, your emails over the past two weeks, written to friends and family about the holidays.

Would not your emails demonstrate a completely different set of vocabulary than this particular piece of writing? Which would be equal to, I don't know, at least one of the major epistles, maybe longer.

I don't know. I didn't do a word count. But the point is that the pastoral epistles are written to individuals in a completely different context. And therefore, the idea there is going to be a difference in the unique vocabulary of those of those letters is a given.

And yet that's the primary basis that and a particular theory of what the early church looked like. And it's just a theory. That's the basis of rejecting the authorship of these books as well. You know, they're addressing things that really hadn't happened, really hadn't developed yet.

And Mr. Eichenwald, are you not aware of the fact that only only 150 years ago? If you had if you had gone to school in Germany, you would have been assured beyond all question. The Gospel of John was written around 170, 180, 80.

That was the assured result of the experts. Well, until we found P52 anyways, which was written around 125. And that sort of caused the problem. And and we found documentation that what the experts thought based upon their theories, which all begin with the assumption that whatever the Bible is, it's not what Christians have always believed it was.

That's the bedrock assumption. It's got to be something other than that. That's what you're doing. That's what you're doing. And the problem is you don't seem to be aware of it. You don't seem to be aware of it.

It is small wonder, then, that there are so many contradictions in New Testament. We haven't found any of them. We certainly have found your unwillingness and inability to harmonize text or to allow text to speak for themselves.

But some of those contradictions are trivial, but some create huge problems for evangelicals insisting they're living by the word of God. Now, again, this is just standard, the standard unbelieving stuff that we get all the time, just without even meaningful good examples.

It's not like this is anything new. And it just wonders. We wonder how it gets there. It's interesting that there I guess there was a picture. I have this in Evernote, but I guess there was a picture of the Westboro Baptist at this point.

Nothing like going for the low end, right? Don't want to deal with the best. We want to go for the low end. And then we have a brief discussion of Christmas. And I'm just gonna be brief on this. You may not recognize this version, but it's a story of Jesus' birth found in the Gospels.

Two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, tell the story of when Jesus was born, but in quite different ways contradictions abound. Your presentation here, Mr. Eichenwald, again, shows no meaningful appreciation of any of the harmony of the Gospels that have been produced, any of the meaningful work that's been done on the Synoptic Gospels.

For example, I've been teaching through the Synoptic Gospels with lots of breaks, obviously, but for about a decade. And using the Åland Parallel, the students using the Greek, I'll use Greek, or students using English, I'm using the Greek or the English.

And we have dealt with so many of the alleged quote-unquote contradictions. I don't get any evidence, you didn't even bother to define what you mean by contradiction. If one Gospel says there were two angels and another says there was one, is that a contradiction?

Why? Have you seriously thought through why there are four Gospels? Have you seriously thought through why an author would include more information, another author less information, depending upon the size of the book they want to produce, the audience they're seeking to communicate with?

I mean, obviously, Matthew is writing to Jews, Luke is not. Mark is leaving out a bunch of the teachings of Jesus that Matthew and Luke include. But interestingly enough, when Mark includes one of the pericopes that, for example, Matthew has, Mark will almost invariably have a longer rendition than Matthew does.

There's just all sorts of things that are required of someone to meaningfully engage in synoptic studies. You just simply put it all aside, that's irrelevant, doesn't matter, it's just a bunch of contradictions.

Can you understand why those of us who, you know, you say you've been studying the Bible for 30 years. Well, so have I. I can just prove it. 24 books, 140 debates, hours and hours of this program, I can actually prove it.

And I have all sorts of critics, from atheists to Roman Catholics to Mormons to Muslims to Oneness Pentecostals, so on and so forth. So, man, what I say gets examined really, really carefully. You think you get examined carefully.

You ought to sit in this seat for a while. But I don't just shove all that stuff aside. Can you see why someone who puts out the effort and who then actually listens to what you have to say and has read, I mean, the number of books I've read by people like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman and people like that.

Why don't you read what we have to say? That's what a lot of us are asking. Why no evidence of this? You know, you say in creating the familiar Christmas tale, Christians took a little bit of one story, mixed a little bit of another and ignored all the contradictions in the two.

Well, again, are you talking about people who've never wrestled with the synoptic studies? Evidently you are. And see, in our brief Twitter conversation, you said, I wasn't talking about people like you to study the Bible.

I'm talking about and, you know, it's the people you want to go after. Governor Perry and people like that, that you find to be just gross hypocrites. Those are people you're talking about. OK, then how come your conclusions are about the entire nature of the Bible?

That's the problem. You can't just go. Well, I wasn't talking about you folks. Your conclusions sure are. Your conclusions sure are. You say, and both Matthew and Luke offer that proof. Both trace Jesus' lineage to his father, Joseph, from there back to David, except Joseph wasn't Jesus' father.

Jesus' son of God. Remember? Moreover, the genealogies who count on the two Gospels are different. Each identifying different men as Joseph's father and grandfather. Mary, the mother of Jesus, can be the only parent with a bloodline to David.

But neither of the Gospels makes any mention of that. Again, if you gave, if you then followed this up with. Now, of course, I've taken the time to read the many, many pages in Daryl Bach's two volume commentary on Luke.

And then I cross referenced Carson's work on Matthew. And I've put these together and looked at these other in-depth articles that have been written by Christian believers. And the subject of genealogies and Matthew and Luke.

If there was some of the rest of that, then we could go forward from there. But again, this is wiki scholarship. And you clearly are not aware of issues relating to genealogical studies. The use of, you know, for example, Matthew very clearly breaks his genealogy up into sections numerically.

He's writing to Jews. They didn't have a problem with doing that. You're assuming certain modern standards for genealogies. It's just it's stuff we've talked about many, many times in the past. But unfortunately, again, maybe you just haven't taken the time to really look into all that stuff.

And then you do the Bart Ehrman thing. And I'll just run through this quickly and then just refer people to where we have, for example, Bart Ehrman does this very same thing. Almost word for word. Well, let me read it and then I'll direct you to where we respond to it.

The stories in the four Gospels of Jesus' death and resurrection differ as well. When brought before Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks only two words and is never declared innocent. In the Gospel of John, Jesus engages in an extended conversation with Pilate, who repeatedly proclaims this Jewish prison to be innocent, deserving of release.

The Book of John was last to be written and came at a time when Gentiles in Rome were gaining dramatically more influence over Christianity. That explains why the Romans are largely absolved from responsibility for Jesus' death and blame instead is pointed toward the Jews.

That has been one of the key bases for centuries for anti-Semitism. So just throw a bunch of stuff in there. And then, and who went to anoint Jesus in his tomb? And Matthew was married and another woman named Mary and an angel met them there.

And Mark was married to Magdalene, married the mother of James. And Salome and a young man met them. And John, it was Mary alone and no one met her. It's told in Matthew that the disciples go to Galilee after crucifixion to see Jesus ascend to heaven.

And an excerpt by Luke, disciples stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus ascend from there. That's a very poorly slung together version of Ehrman's stuff. And so it would be much better for folks to go to our response to Bart Ehrman.

We've done it here on the program where we have gone through his better rendition of these alleged contradictions. I think if I recall correctly, it was either from, I think it was from his debate either with Mike Lycona or with William Lane Craig.

That's my recollection. And I'm assuming it was sometime after, sometime in 2008 or 2009, as I recall, where we went through all of these and much more in depth. And I would direct people to that because you're going to be, at least there, we're not dealing with the low hanging fruit version.

We're dealing with the Bart Ehrman presentation of it. Next paragraph, for example, evangelicals are always talking about family values. But to Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching God. In the gospel of Matthew, he states, and everyone that hath forsaken houses or brethren or sisters or fathers or mother or wife or children or lands for my name's sake shall receive and a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal, shall inherit everlasting life.

The only reason I can think why you use the King James was you didn't have to worry about copyright stuff. Is that right? Is that really why? I mean, wow. Anyway, family was an impediment to reaching God.

No, sir. Love of anything on earth that is above love for Christ and for his gospel is an impediment to being a disciple. That would be the meaningful reading of the text. The idea that the God ordained family is an impediment.

Now, if you really want to have a meaningful discussion, you would want to deal with what Jesus said about I've not come to bring peace, but a sword to bring division between father and mother, so on and so forth.

Then we could talk about living the gospel in divided families. Jesus's recognition of what the gospel is going to mean when the gospel goes out into the unbelieving world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But you didn't bother to do that. Then you start talking about eschatology. Two problems. That does nothing to counter what either Jesus or Paul said. And even in ancient times, many Christian leaders proclaimed second period to be a forgery, an opinion almost universally shared by biblical scholars today.

It is not almost universally shared by biblical scholars today. That is a great overstatement. And I'd like to know who the in the ancient times, what Christian leaders proclaim second period to be a forgery.

And again, take you back to, again, the discussion of, you know, why is there, for example, a lexical and syntactical difference, fundamental difference between the writing style of first and second Peter?

I know you can't read it to know that, but those of us that can have known that all along. And this is nothing new to us. I mean, Mr. Eichenwald, believing Christians back in the 17th and 18th centuries in England by their junior year, and it didn't map exactly to our way of doing things, but by their third year in higher education, not only had to be able to read Greek, they had to be able to debate in Greek.

You think they missed? The stylistic differences between first and second Peter? Excuse me. They didn't. And so there's nothing new here. You may notice that one of the two epistles of Peter makes specific reference to the amanuensis, the scribe, who was the one who wrote the epistle.

Hence, it is quite possible that Peter may have dictated the epistle in Aramaic and then that individual rendered it in Greek. That may have happened with both for that matter. That's not a problem for our understanding of the inscripturation process because it is what is written that is theanoustos, that is God breathed.

But again, that's being fair. That's just being fair and discussing it. Then you just started really getting silly with some Old Testament stuff. Again, not showing any familiarity with any, basically any believing scholarship on the subject.

You said the next time someone tells you the biblical story of creation is true, ask that person which one. Oh, someone alleging that there is a difference between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Well, you know, again, more wiki scholarship.

And it's become such a given that I can forgive you for not even knowing where to look. I've lamented many, many times that we, in general, have given the Old Testament over to the liberals. Not completely.

Thankfully, there are still believing scholars that can argue their cases very convincingly. But in general, that's certainly been the case. But you don't, again, in all of this, in this entire discussion of Genesis 1, Genesis 2, you don't even show the slightest familiarity.

You don't even give a tip of the hat, any indication that you realize, I know that there are intelligent Christians who actually believe this is the word of God, and they have engaged everything I'm saying.

You just don't show any of that. And nothing that you say. You do actually quote Richard Elliott Friedman. Why not? See, you can find folks like this. Why is it you only find the ultra-liberals? Why don't you go, I would think, as a journalist, that you would go, I wonder if someone has responded to this.

It seems you have the presupposition that we don't know what people like Friedman have said. And that we don't care and we've never responded. You may actually believe that to be true. You may actually believe that to be true.

A lot of people function that way. A lot of people function that way. And then you make the conclusion, these conflicting accounts are only serious matters because evangelicals insist the Old Testament is a valid means of debunking science.

Really? We do? Who says that? Who says that? I'd like to know who that is. That's a misrepresentation, and I know who you're even misrepresenting here. That's not even a semi-valid statement. I know who you're talking about.

And what you're actually talking about is that there are people who believe that the Bible is the word of God. It provides a coherent worldview and that when you construct that worldview, you can then interpret the facts of science within it in a consistent, coherent way.

But you see, it wouldn't serve your purpose. And you do have a purpose. You say you're not presenting a theology. You are. And here's a good example of it. Here's a good example of it. It would not serve your purpose to put it in that way, would it?