Horrible Arguments for the Roman Priesthood, Did Jesus Say the I Am Statements?

I just looked over at Twitter and Strava just posted kudos to Jim Frerichs for setting a new fastest known time at the Grand Canyon. Rim to rim. You ever done rim to rim? Yeah, I'm talking to you. You're the only other person in the building.

You know, it took you a long time to answer that question. I mean, how old are we getting? I used to live up there. I had to remember.

I know. I know you used to live up there. No, I've never done around the rim to rim.

Well, rim to rim would be north to south or south to north, either one.

Oh, well, you go straight across, but there's actually a way to drive around the canyon up to Jacob Lake.

No, like on your feet, going from one rim to the next rim. I did not do that. Not do that. No. I did rim to rim. I did north to south, but not in one shot. This guy did it in two hours, 39 minutes and 38 seconds.

Opening Banter and Technical Difficulties

Now, I'm going to tell you something. There was one spot coming down to the north where, you know, I'm afraid of heights. And there was a spot that was extremely narrow, steep drop off, cliff type thing.

And the donkeys had gone through and decided to evacuate everything right there, leaving you only the little spot on the outside. That was one of the hardest things I ever did in life. Let me tell you something.

That was tough, but it, no, I didn't, two hours, 39 minutes, 38 seconds. You got to be in pretty super shape to do something like that. That's incredible. Hi, everybody. Are we doing the dividing line today?

Yes, we are. See how easy it is to distract me? I'm going to be making all sorts of extra noises today. I had a real good ride this morning, did a metric century. But something kicked in, has kicked in the past few hours and my sciences have gone insane.

And so I've got all sorts of stuff going, so I'm going to be sniffling and coughing and doing stuff like that. And I apologize because I was going to take a Claritin or something to try to slow all that down.

And I left the house and we don't have any here. And my Lutherol will not help with this. I can read all those little things in there and it does not help with the sinuses at all. I don't think Luther said anything about sinuses, but I could be wrong.

He talked about a lot of other bodily functions, so maybe he did, I don't know. But anyway, lots of stuff to get to today. I mentioned last time that we had the great lost dividing line and we're taking steps to make sure it never happens again.

Did we take the proper steps or are they... They're both gone. Cool. All right. Well, I see a little red light now, that's really confusing. Now you've got little red lights, but they're both on. So evidently that's the unit.

That's the hard drive up there? Oh, cool. Anyway, didn't know. Anyway, on that lost dividing line, I had addressed an issue. I said, you know what? I want to still talk about this and then we will get in that.

Oh, Luke Huck. Hello, Luke, tuning in for my first ever live dividing line. That's sort of like a first time caller on Rush's show or something. So we called him out. Luke Huck has tuned in for his first ever live dividing line, maybe the last, as happened in the past.

But anyway, I had addressed an article on that lost one. I want to do it again. I may not spend quite as much time on it as I did originally, but I did want to address it. And everybody's saying it's waiting.

We're still recording, but it's not actually going out. The live stream that had been going fine for four or five hours. And then as soon as I announced that we're going live, it stops working. That starts telling me something.

That starts telling me something. Really does. I mean, I think there's somebody out there messing with us and everybody in channel says still nothing here. So are we going to be able to continue recording if you decide to change over to the other way of doing it?

Okay. So I'm just going to keep on going. And if this all of a sudden just pops up in the middle of things, that's just sort of how it's going to be. And we'll just see how it works. What I was addressing was an article that appeared September 15th, 2017 at catholic .com, obviously the website of Catholic Answers, more Bible clues for the priesthood.

Now we've debated the subject of the priesthood. We did a debate with Mitchell Pacwa on the subject of the priesthood. And I thought that was a very good debate. And Mitch Pacwa, I think, was honest in admitting that basically what happened is there was development of doctrine over time.

And that while in the New Testament, the episkopos, presbyteros, the overseers, bishops, presbyters are all the same office. And there really isn't any question about that. They're used interchangeably.

That over time, the presbyters developed into priests. Now, when you think about what Rome teaches about the priesthood, and I'm not gonna take the time today to reread the things that we've done on the subject of the priesthood in the past, but the priesthood is, the sacramental priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church is central to her sacramental life, to her whole understanding of how we have salvation, grace from God, the Holy Land Yards.

And so the idea that this massively important office, which according to Roman Catholic teaching was initially established by Jesus on the night of his betrayal, because according to Roman Catholic teaching, when Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me, the necessary corollary in light of, I would argue, development of doctrine centuries and centuries and centuries down the road is that for his disciples to do what Jesus was doing, because Rome teaches Jesus was working the miracle of transubstantiation, then he was ordaining the apostles as priests at that very point in time.

So when he says, do this in remembrance of me, this is the ordination of the apostles as priests. And so the whole concept of a sacramental priesthood with sacerdotal powers and the centrality of that to the concept of the mass and everything else, this is such a vitally important concept that you're immediately struck by the fact that there is nothing in the New Testament about it.

You have two different discussions of what deacons are supposed to be about, the qualifications and the Hawaiian yards. And then you have elders, presbyters, bishops, same thing, nothing about priests, nothing about qualifications, nothing about their duties, nothing about their functions, nothing about any authority, nothing.

There is nowhere in the New Testament where the apostles go about establishing churches with bishops, deacons, and priests. There's nothing there. The entire history of the early church provided to us in the book of Acts, nothing.

The entire book of Hebrews with its full discussion of priesthood issues, nothing, zero. And so it's just one of those issues where it's just so painfully obvious that Rome has, this is why Rome can't believe in sola scriptura, because Rome would have to fundamentally change and alter its entire structure and doctrine if it were to embrace the sufficiency of scripture.

So it's really illustrative of the desperation of Roman Catholic apologists to read this article from catholic .com, more Bible clues to the priesthood. Why would you need Bible clues? How about explicit statements?

I mean, this is central to the entire sacramental life of the church, but you need Bible clues. And then to look at the nature of these clues demonstrates the incredible weakness of the Roman system. And that's why I would love to come to San Diego, to the very home of Catholic Answers.

And let's do what we did in 1990 for the 28th anniversary of our first Catholic Answers debate. Let's go to San Diego and let's do a debate on the priesthood. This is by Carlo Broussard, by the way. And the last time I suggested, last year when we did the sola scriptura series, a debate with Carlo Broussard, he just very kindly said, I'm not allowed to.

And I'm like, is this an apologetics organization? What do you mean you're allowed to? You're allowed to go on the air and make claims and statements. Why aren't you allowed to defend those against knowledgeable, prepared opposition?

Well, maybe it'd be nice if maybe things had changed. I mean, we had the debate with Catholic Answers at G3 back in January with Trent Horns. So why not? Well, let's look at some of these arguments. First argument, priestly ranks, priestly ranks.

Now, what you're not going to get is any kind of direct reference to the New Testament. Most of us would sort of think, well, let's see, this priesthood issue is in the New Testament church. So you might want to go to the New Testament to find that.

But no, you can't really do that. What you got to do is you got to go to New Testament texts that make reference to Old Testament stuff. And then instead of letting the New Testament be the fulfillment of the Old, you have to read Old Testament categories into the New.

So, quote, let's start with First Peter 2 .9. All agree this is an allusion to Exodus 19 .6, which refers to Israel as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Peter is obviously drawing a parallel between Israel and the church.

But rather than disproving the Catholic position, this verse actually supports it. Oh, let's see how. During the time of Exodus, the universal priesthood of the Israelites was merely one rank, the lowest rank of priestly status among two others.

The top level of Aaron, the high priest, and the middle level, which comprised his sons Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar, who served with Aaron. Now, I'm not really sure what he's talking about when he talks about the universal priesthood of the Israelites.

There is a specific priestly group, as we'll see in the discussion of Korah, but won't argue about too much right here. When we look in the New Testament, we discover a top level there, too. Jesus, our high priest.

We've already seen that the bottom rank consists of the body of Christian believers, First Peter 2 .9, in a parallel with the universal priesthood of the Israelites. It makes biblical sense for there also to be a New Testament parallel to the middle rank, ministers specially ordained to serve the people with Jesus, just as Aaron's sons served with him.

Yeah, this is supposed to be serious argumentation. And for some people, I guess, who maybe just out of simplicity or not much familiarity with logic and logical fallacies and things like that, might go, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds great.

The problem is this kind of argumentation can be used to prove absolutely positively anything. All you've got to do is set up some type of category from the Old Testament. And this, of course, is what Rome does with Mary all the time.

I mean, all the parallels you allegedly find, Elijah and all the rest of this stuff. The Old Testament becomes a playground of just looking for whatever you want to find. And you don't have to worry about whether you're being consistent.

You don't have to worry about matching everything up as long as you can find something to put together. It's good enough for people who already want to believe. So here you have this idea that, well, this makes Aaron Jesus.

And so Jesus must have regular priests beneath him above the universal priests that are never mentioned in the New Testament. And you got that little problem with the fact that that specific group of priests are the Aaronic priesthood, which is specifically said to have been fulfilled and passed away in the Book of Hebrews.

That's a bit of a problem. But again, Rome doesn't have to worry about that because Rome's ultimate authority isn't actually scripture. It's Rome. So if Rome says, well, here's a parallel, that's good enough.

It doesn't matter if the New Testament itself says that this is the old and it's passing away and the functions are gone and fulfilled in Christ. They don't have to worry about any of that stuff. I mean, hey, they're the same people who come up with the idea that, you know, you don't have to worry about that epipox, hoppox, that that emphasis in the Book of Hebrews of the once for allness of the sacrifice of Christ, despite the fact that in Roman Catholic theology, Jesus's death is represented as a propitiatory, but imperfect, not not perfect sacrifice does not perfect anyone over and over and over again, the Roman Catholic mass, which is a direct violation of the argument of the Book of Hebrews itself.

But again, Rome's ultimate authority is Rome, not the New Testament. So you don't have to really worry about that. Then the next argument, who is the rebellious Korah? A second obscure clue. We appreciate the admission that this is really obscure.

Pointing to this middle rank is Jude's passing remark. Yeah, it's always good to use passing remarks as evidence that some Christians in the first century had fallen into Korah's rebellion. Woe to them for they walk in the way of Cain and abandon themselves the sake of the gain of Balaam's error and perish in Korah's rebellion.

Now, this is Jude 11. And of course, the point of Jude 11, given that you have Cain and Balaam and Korah, all who engaged in a rebellion. That's the point that ties them all together. So these are rebellious people.

That's it. To look for anything else, you might as well start looking for, OK, so who is the fulfillment of Balaam's donkey? What about the way of Cain? What can we figure out with Cain? There are just so many things we could do.

But again, this kind of argumentation doesn't worry about consistency. It just, as long as you can find anything, just string it all together. This is only for people who want to have a reason to believe.

It doesn't have to be a sound reason. It doesn't have to be a reason that actually survives examination, as long as it's there. So, Jude 4 sets the context by stating that there were ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God in licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ.

So what is this? This is rebellion. How were these men perverting God's grace? Whatever they were doing, it was something similar to what, and then notice what he does here. Korah did. No, it was similar to what Cain and Balaam and Korah did.

It was rebellion. It has nothing to do with priesthood. It has nothing to do with anything, because there was no priesthood in the day of Cain. There was no priesthood in the day of Balaam. Well, yes there was, but Balaam wasn't part of the priesthood system.

So, if again you were to allow Jude to define his own categories, already the argument just collapses. It's just laughable. But, there you go. But who was Korah and what did he do that was so bad? I should have grabbed one of our Aaronic priesthood tracts, but we have this tract where a friend of ours from years and years and years ago did a drawing of Korah, Dathom, and Abiram as the earth opened up swallowing them.

And we wrote this for Mormons, because Mormons claim to hold a priesthood that does not exist biblically. And we passed out thousands of these things over the years, and I should have grabbed one of those and showed you what that looked like.

Anyway, Korah was a figure in the Old Testament who, along with many other Israelites, rebelled against the authority of Moses and the Aaronic priesthood. See, it's rebellion, but rebellion in general, not rebellion against priesthood issues.

Korah and his followers rejected the hierarchy of the Aaronic priesthood, claiming themselves to be of the same rank. We get a hint of this in Numbers 16, 8, 10 through 11. And Moses said to Korah, would you seek the priesthood also?

Therefore, it is against the Lord that you and all your company have gathered together. So, they're rebelling against Yahweh and against his ordering of things. In response, Moses proposed a challenge which consisted of Korah and the other rebels filling their censers with incense while Aaron did the same.

And seeing whose offering the Lord would accept, the Lord rejected the offering of Korah and his followers, making the mouth of the earth open up and swallow them into Sheol. Moses had the censers hammered out and made into a covering for the altar as a reminder to the people of Israel, so no one who is not a priest, who is not of the descendants of Aaron, should draw near to burn incense before the Lord, lest he become as Korah and his company.

By the way, this actually demonstrates that the Aaronic priesthood as a whole was one priesthood. And as we see in the book of Hebrews, it disappears. It's fulfilled. Notice that the warning here was not only against those who would object to Aaron as high priest, but also those who would object to the priestly rank of the descendants of Aaron.

God was not only serious about the top-level rank of the high priest, but also the middle level of his ministerial priests. It is against this Old Testament backdrop that we must read Jude 11, and it's mentioned that some early Christians participated in Korah's rebellion.

If Korah's rebellion was present in the first century... Now, here's the argument. Here's the argument. If Korah's rebellion was present within the first century Christian community, there must have existed a priesthood above the universal priesthood to rebel against.

That's the argument. The argument is that they are rebels. And when you allow all of Jude 11 to speak, you see that because it mentions Cain, Balaam, Korah. This level of desperation, this is twisting of scripture.

It's twisting of scripture. And it's so obvious and so blatant. That's why I'd love to get the guys at Catholic Answers to try to defend this stuff in debate. I don't think they'll do it because this is indefensible in debate.

This is so bad. This is worse than Jehovah's Witnesses. I mean, at least Jehovah's Witnesses come up with a little better argumentation for some of their stuff. This is just horrific. But that's what happens when you have beliefs that have been forced upon you.

You deny Sola Scriptura, and there you go. That's what you've got, and you're stuck with it. So, dealt with that, like I said, a few weeks ago. But we unfortunately lost that, and we wanted to address that.

I'm not going to spend any time on this, but I did save an article. This is just the title. World's First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses to Install Muslim Prayer Space. Well, what do you expect?

When you put non-Christians in the position of pretending that they are, they're going to act like non-Christians. It's not really overly surprising whatsoever along those lines. All right. What I wanted to deal with today primarily is an issue that came up while I was in Germany.

The Catholic Priesthood and the Failure of Roman Arguments

And once again, it is an issue that we have dealt with before. I'm actually looking for something here real quickly. What did I call that thing? Because I'm not sure if I want to project this or not. I should have brought this up, obviously, before diving into this.

But let's see if it just pops up. Well, it pops up. What did I call that? Oh, is it that? Let's click on it and find out. Of course, that's always when you find out that the program you're using needs to be updated or whatever.

Who knows? Yeah, I double-clicked on it, and absolutely nothing is happening whatsoever. I double-clicked on it, and you don't want to open it. Let's try it again. Well, evidently, I'm not supposed to use it, because when you double-click on it to open it, it doesn't open it.

That's really not good. I'm going to click on something else. Yeah, so evidently, Keynote no longer works on this system. I wonder if I forgot to update something, because there was a whole new iOS update.

That's a shame. I have been left high and dry. Oh, something's happening. Well, okay, now it's opening everything that I've clicked on over the past few minutes. It all of a sudden decides, oh, am I supposed to do something?

Oh, okay. Good, wonderful. Thanks, appreciate that. Let me see here if this is the one that I actually wanted. There's some neat stuff in here. We could talk about this, I suppose. Oh, I didn't know I had that hidden in there.

That's cool. That'll work. I'm not sure I'm going to project it, but it'll work. Anyway, sorry about that. Of course, I'm having my technical problems, and obviously, Rich is too, because Twitter is telling me that ain't working, huh?

Got nothing. If that doesn't prove that there's somebody out there hacking us, I don't know what does. If you can go four or five hours without announcing it, and it works fine, and as soon as I say, okay, we're going live, it's dead as a doornail.

That tells you there is somebody out there, maybe works for one of the IP companies or something, has decided they're going to try to keep us from being able to do this. I think that other way of doing things is the only way we're going to be able to do it in the future.

I know we're recording, but you announce we're going live, and then it's dead, and so you've got to minimize everything, because that's all you're seeing on the screen. It's dead! I don't see anything!

Anyway. We will press forward, and hopefully next time we'll be live. We'll do another deadcast today, and next time we'll just have to go with the assumption that there's somebody out there that doesn't want this to be live, and do it the other way.

Hopefully that will work. Anyway, we have many times discussed a number of related issues. Mike Licona posted an article, my date on it is September 30th, so a few days ago, risenjesus .com. Are we reading an adapted form of Jesus' teachings in John's Gospel?

I first saw this as it was being posted by a Muslim on Facebook, who specifically said,. As a Muslim, I would like to thank Dr. Michael Licona and Jonathan McClatchy for advocating the view that Jesus did not actually say the I Am statements.

In the video, Airman asks Evans if he thinks Jesus actually uttered the I Am statements in John's Gospel. Evans answered that most of them were probably not uttered as recorded, and that John was probably of a genre different than the other Gospels.

And Licona then is quoted as saying,. Now I realize some of my rather conservative brothers and sisters in Christ will experience some discomfort at Evans' statement. Yeah, why would that be? I mean, why would anyone have a discomfort at someone saying that what's in the Bible, Jesus didn't really say?

How strange. They do not realize, and listen carefully folks, They do not realize this is the position of the majority of New Testament scholars. And that probably includes the majority of Evangelical New Testament scholars as well.

And then Ijaz Ahmed, the Muslim who posted this says, Thank you to these two. Well, there's a little bit of a tweak there from Ijaz's perspective, I'm sure. But, now it's interesting, Samuel Green from down in Australia commented on Ijaz's post and said, You cannot single out the I am statements of Jesus from these professional academics.

Read their books, they say the whole story of Jesus is made up. This includes his virgin birth, healing the sick, raising the dead, etc. Ehrman believes that Jesus was made the Messiah by later Christians.

The Quran affirms these aspects of Jesus' life in it. Why do Muslims accept these professional academics when it comes to the I am statements, but not when it comes to the virgin birth? The whole approach to these academics is that the Gospels can be confidently deconstructed.

This is sheer conjecture. Now, I have for a long time been pointing out the systemic inconsistency of Muslims who will utilize Bart Ehrman. I pointed out that when I did that debate at Duke University, three of the four books on my Muslim opponents table were by Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman is cited constantly by Muslims as the go-to source when it comes to the issue of, well, anything, especially the transmission of the text of the New Testament. And this is what Samuel was talking about.

The problem is, of course, that there are many apologists, Mike Licona being one of the primary ones, who, because they utilize the minimal facts argumentation and because they utilize the majority of scholars' argumentation, well, there's a price that comes with that.

When you argue, for example, that the majority of scholarship agrees on these four minimal facts in regards to the resurrection, you've now invested in whatever majority of scholarship means. I don't know what that means.

I'll be honest with you. I have no idea what that means. Majority of what scholarship? Majority determined by what? Who did this survey? I've taught in seminaries and studied in seminaries long enough to know that, for example, the vast majority of people with a seminary degree, let's just say you've got a master's degree from a seminary someplace.

The vast majority of those folks will accept the positions that were default amongst their favorite professors. Maybe not amongst all of them, but their favorite professors. So, the dating of the Gospels.

If you surveyed them, you're going to come up with a real large number of folks that are going to, say, adopt a later dating of the Gospels. Now, how many of these individuals have ever critically interacted with any of the argumentation in regards to the subject of the dating of the Gospels?

Very few. Very, very few. They've just simply accepted the dates that were given to them and then operate on the basis of that. How many have ever even thought through why, for example, Bart Ehrman has a minimal, very, very minimal Pauline Corpus?

Pauline Corpus is the number of books Paul actually wrote. From his perspective, that number is extremely small. Seven books, I think. Well, why? Well, he's Bart Ehrman. You don't have to ask why. No, actually, you do.

And when you really start digging into it, you discover that they have theories, just simply theories, that, well, the pastoral epistles can't be Pauline because they reflect a later period in church history.

Well, how do you know it's a later period in church history? Well, because I have a theory as to what the church initially looked like, and then it developed into this and developed into that. And since it represents this later one, then these have to be later.

So your theory, based on, well, based on my interpretation of what I consider to be the original books of Paul, and that's where you find the circularity of it. Well, but they also says, you know, there's different vocabulary in the pastoral epistles than you have in the genuine Pauline epistles.

Well, you know, guess what? There's different vocabulary in Bart Ehrman's popular books than in his scholarly books. So clearly he didn't write either. He didn't write. If he wrote the scholarly ones, he didn't write the popular ones.

Right? Or his emails. Oh, his emails are very different than his scholarly works. It must be somebody else that wrote that. Right? That kind of stuff just generally doesn't get taken into consideration.

And so when you talk about majority of scholars, are you talking about people who actually work in the field? Who are actually doing regular current research? Who are you talking about? And obviously, when you're talking about issues of scripture, and you can pretend all you want that you can assume naturalistic neutrality in asking the question, did Jesus say what's in the gospel of John?

There is no neutrality. If you are approaching texts that breathe the supernatural as a naturalist, this is going to impact how you interpret them, especially when you place them side by side. And so when people look at the gospel of John, they go, oh, this can't be historical.

You don't have this stuff going on in Matthew, Mark, Luke. Well, okay, you've got some of that stuff in Matthew. But aside from that, this kind of open teaching on Jesus's part regarding who he is, conflict with the Jews, it's not in the synoptic gospels.

And so John's clearly just making this up. He's writing later on. You can talk about his theological reflection. You can talk about it as the beloved disciple expanding upon hints that Jesus gave here, there, everywhere.

But fundamentally, it just can't be the same thing because there can't be any reason why the earlier gospels would have a different audience or a different approach. There can't be a reason why only the later writings of John would get into such personal conversations amongst the apostles or the details of specific conversations with the woman at the well.

There's no reason in the world why Nicodemus's conversation with Jesus wouldn't be recorded by the synoptics but would be recorded by John. Think about that one for a second. I'm being facetious here but making a point.

You're not even allowed to theorize. Is it possible there might have been things in the context of the writing of the synoptic gospels that are earlier than John that would have, because of the purpose of the writing, the audience, the timing, that John is able to bring things out, that he has the freedom to bring things out, that the synoptic gospels would not have done so for numerous reasons, people still being alive, the purposes of why they're being written down, an agreement amongst the disciples, that these are things that we're going to focus on first and these are things that we're going to not focus upon.

We don't know. The problem is that a large majority of scholarship thinks it does know. I mean so much of what's written today just assumes mark and priority, just assumes it and then builds from there.

Yet computer models argue against it and just the fact is we don't know the order in which the gospels were written. It certainly seems fairly clear that John is the last to be written but we don't even know that.

So there's a lot of certainty on things that are actually not certain and we talk about the majority of scholarship. These issues are almost never brought up. That's why I just loathe the term. I loathe when it's used by Christians.

I loathe when Shabir Ali uses it. Well, scholars tell us and then you find one scholar who says one thing and then he weaves together something over here and something over there and ends up with saying well scholars have already told us when actually scholars didn't say anything like that at all.

So we've talked about a lot of this stuff before along those lines and you just need to be very very careful when you hear people saying things like this. But going back to what Samuel Green had said and then Ijaz responded to Samuel Green.

I'll get it to go the right way here eventually. I know you know who Evans and Lycona are so I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. Well Samuel Green was focusing primarily upon Ehrman. But Craig Evans, I forget how long ago it was, we reviewed a debate between Evans and Ehrman four or five maybe six years ago now I think.

And I at the time said you know thankful for some of the good stuff Evans has done but not my perspective. Way off in the woods as far as I'm concerned. But I recognize that when you're talking about academia in the West we have lamented many times the desire of Christian academia to be accepted at the table.

And therefore the idea of the Lordship of Christ over all areas of human knowledge is simply not going to be accepted there. And it wasn't, well it was about a year and a half ago we had that discussion of that book on inerrancy.

And we addressed some apologists who are saying hey unless we take a particular perspective we're not going to have a place at the table. And I point out we're never going to have a place at the table.

If the requirement of having a place at the table is to embrace naturalistic materialism as a fundamental starting point we can't go there. Not if we still believe 1st Corinthians 1 and 2. Not if we believe that preaching the gospel will always be foolishness and that the wisdom of this world will always lead to error.

And I just mentioned in passing to my Muslim friends you don't seem to realize that you're embracing this kind of stuff is injecting absolute poison into the very bloodstream of your system. The very same people who for presuppositional reasons say that something supernatural like the resurrection simply cannot be affirmed historically will say the exact same things about any supernatural element of the Islamic message as well.

They have to if they're going to be consistent. Now they may avoid it just because they're afraid but they will have to and on the exact same presuppositional grounds. So if you want to accept their conclusions and go you're an anti-intellectual unless you believe this.

Well then you're going to abandon the Isra and Miraj and you're going to abandon all the supernatural elements of the story of Muhammad at least in the Hadith not necessarily in the Quran. I mean seriously one of the primary arguments of the Quran for its own inspiration is that nothing could ever be produced like it.

I'm sorry I can't think of a single critical scholar on the planet that would accept that argumentation as having any validity whatsoever. Any validity whatsoever. There's far too much variation in form and style within the Quran.

There are sections of the Quran I'm sorry that just simply are not compelling. You try to actually try to say that's a meaningful argument they wouldn't buy it for a second. Wouldn't buy it for a second.

So I'm trying to be consistent here because I'm saying to people on my side don't buy into this majority of scholarship stuff. Same thing for you. What that scholarship is based upon is pretty important.

Pretty important stuff. Anyway correct me if I'm wrong but you're trying to say that two top conservative Christian evangelical scholars I assume he means Evan Laconia. Craig Evans and Mike Laconia are merely professional academics whose books include denying the virgin birth, healing and miracles by Jesus.

No he was referring specifically to Bart Ehrman in that case. If that's the case then one you're wrong. Two they're evangelical just like you are. And three they literally reject none of the things you mentioned.

So either you're being facetious for the sake of it or this is just a poorly thought out comment. Or you just should have read a little bit closer. And Sam could have been clearer as well because the antecedent did include Evans and Laconia.

But obviously he was referring to Ehrman and his ilk. I failed to see how or why Ehrman needs to be mentioned. Well because it was a conversation with Bart Ehrman. And I've certainly seen it and we've mentioned it.

Excuse me again. We've mentioned it. When I see most people interacting with Bart Ehrman they want to be seen as being a part of the conversation at the table. And so they grant to him things that shouldn't be granted to him.

They don't challenge him on his naturalistic presuppositions. I've seen Laconia do that. I saw Craig Evans do that. But both are clearly compromised as holding to consistent biblically mandated supernaturalism in the presuppositions of their methodologies to begin with.

We've talked about that on this program. We have within the past six months, four months, specifically said in regards to Mike Laconia's claims. In regards to the gospel of Mark and the whole Andy Stanley thing.

And all the rest of that stuff that came up. Look, just to be straight up front. Mike Laconia does not believe in the inerrancy of scripture. Believe me. I've been doing this a long time. I taught in a Southern Baptist seminary for years.

And you had to sign a thing that said, you know, I will not teach against the Baptist faith and message. And I believe in inerrancy. Look, I've seen the ways that people can come up with to find a way around inerrancy.

The redefinitions of that term. And I know that for majority of like continental scholars and the like, inerrancy is that silly American doctrine. And so I can recognize redefinition of a term, of a phrase all the time.