Bishop Swan’s Racism, Pronouns Matter, Jeffrey Riddle’s Abuse of P46

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:31

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. Good to be back here in Phoenix. I'm very thankful that it's no longer 85 degrees here.

00:38

I think the high today would be like 64 or something like that, so that's nice. Real quickly, thanks to everyone in Atlanta, the folks that put the debate on,

00:49

Shabir Ali for coming down. It will be interesting when it gets posted, you will notice that there were a large number of Unitarians in the audience, which

00:59

I find strange, because Unitarians and Muslims, there you go, that tells you everything you need to know, including

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Sir Anthony Buzzard was in the audience, and he sent one of his people up to ask his favorite question, which has been answered 47 ,000 times before,

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Psalm 110, and his elevation of the

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Mazarites to a position of inspiration. But anyway, it was a different debate than we've had in the past, and that's good.

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I think it'll add to the conversation and discussion. I will leave it to those who examine it as to whether Dr.

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Ali's responses were consistent or sound. Obviously, I don't think they were, but there you go.

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And so we will link to that once it is posted. I haven't seen it being posted as yet.

01:54

They said it would be about a week, so that would have been today, but anyway. So thanks, everybody, for that, and I had fun the second day getting together with some old friends, and we had lunch together, and you've seen some of those pictures.

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And on one hand, I should say that it's nice to have some people who will still be seen with me in public.

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On the other hand, some of the people I'm willing to be seen in public with are pretty shady, too, so there's that, too.

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But some people like Red, you know, we've...the

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guy's called...how many times has the guy called in his vying line, and then we just wouldn't put him on the air? It's like, no, we're not talking to you. I mean, it's just pretty common.

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I talked to him a couple of days afterwards, I think it was, and he actually said this to me.

02:50

I'm not kidding. He actually said, I wasn't quite sure. It's been a while since I've seen James in action, but he's still got it.

02:58

So you apparently have his approval still. Well, that's good. I'm glad to know that.

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Actually, he and I and some other guys saw a guy there. Not going to go there.

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Just can't. Oh, man. But I have pictures. I have pictures.

03:19

That's all I can say about that. Anyhow, then we flew to England and London and got together with Ash, and he and I had a good old time talking for a number of hours, and I ended up doing a talk at Selhurst Evangelical on the

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Trinity on Saturday morning, and a real nice run along the Thames after dark on Friday evening.

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That was fun in the cold and getting some nighttime pictures of the

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Battersea Power Station, which is being converted into, I guess Apple's going to have its new headquarters there and stuff.

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It's really, really, really interesting. Anyway, and I wore one of my Coogees. This is a very calm

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Coogee in comparison to what I wore at Selhurst. The one at Selhurst was neon, and that was fun.

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And I got some pictures, met some brother there. I started following on Twitter, and he posted some pictures of he and I in my

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Coogee cardigan. And then Sunday morning, I was there again preaching at Selhurst, and then folks from Grace Life were kind enough to pick me up.

04:32

Well, actually, I ubered to Grace Life, just barely made it in time. Long, long drive.

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The trains weren't working out there, and barely made it in time. Had a good time at Grace Life, talked about the reliability of Scripture, which is really difficult to do in 45 minutes, talk about, you know,

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Canon and all sorts of stuff like that. But we did, and I linked to the sermon on Sermon Audio yesterday,

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I think, either on Facebook or Twitter or both. Maybe both. I don't remember which. What's on both?

05:05

Okay. Yeah, that'd be good. That'd be good. It'd be good.

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I went to Houston Rail Station and appreciated that, and did my first sleeper car trip.

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And if you've ever wondered what it's like to try to sleep on a train in a bed,

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I would put it this way. It's like flying on a plane in moderate to heavy turbulence.

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And then, every once in a while, you hit a pocket of absolutely smooth air, and the engines turn off.

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Because every time the train stopped, you stopped moving, and it becomes absolutely silent.

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And I'd wake up every time. You know, because, you know, you know, if that happens at home, that means the power's gone off.

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You know, during the summer, you've got to start doing whatever you need to do to, you know, keep the stuff in the refrigerator from melting or whatever.

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So it was tough. You know, when we were moving, actually, it was quite nice.

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And they break the train up at certain points. To go to London, London to Inverness is pretty much straight north.

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And so when the train started, from my bed's position, we were going that way.

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And when I woke up, we were going that way. Because the train had been split up and then basically swung around somehow or something, going the opposite direction, but we weren't going the opposite direction.

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So anyhow, so that was a first time experience on that. And so snuck up to Inverness and surprised

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Dr. Needham. I'm sort of proud of myself of having been able to pull that off.

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But sometimes you have to go see friends, and Nick's a friend of mine. So we went and saw Nick, and hopefully he found that to be encouraging.

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And there's actually a little something in the background of the dividing line that only

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Nick and I know about, that is my way of saying, Hey, Nick, every time the camera hits that. So good brother, and I pray for his health.

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And there's much, much left for the renowned

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Dr. Needham to do. So back less than 24 hours ago. No, I landed right about now, about 24 hours ago.

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So the first day after a trip like that is easy. Tomorrow is going to be the rough day. In all probability, sleeping tonight will be what's difficult.

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Not last night, I did all right. So we'll see. But so much stuff going on while I was while I was away.

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And so I want to try to catch up with some of it. We're going to do another program tomorrow. Wanted to start off while it's

08:13

I think it started just before I left for Atlanta. But it was it was almost painful for me to watch.

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Dear Michael Brown, encountering the buzzsaw of woke

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Twitter, experiencing things that I've been experiencing for years all at one time.

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Once again, anyone who has listened to Michael knows what

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Michael does, where Michael goes, that would accuse him of being a racist is clearly using the faux definition of racism and not the meaningful one.

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And unfortunately today, you can't tell which is which. Well, you can. You have to define them. But in our society, people just use them interchangeably.

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And it has become the methodology of seeking. Well, it's another new phrase, cancel culture, cancel culture.

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You use this terminology to smear someone's reputation, assuming that the former rational meaning that its guilt can be attached to the new, empty, vacuous utilization of the term that has since it has no connection either in rationality, logic, and most importantly for Christians, God's law, since it is simply you're a part of that group, it doesn't matter if you've ever acted on a evil intention ever, you're just a part of that group, you're an oppressor, therefore you're a racist, period.

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By definition, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't be redeemed from it. You just are what you are.

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If that's true, then it's an irrelevant phrase. It doesn't mean anything. It's like saying you're right -handed.

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Yeah, so? But the woke folks want to keep the old term that everybody knows is reprehensible, no matter who you are.

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If you're a racist, it's reprehensible. Because that's cheap thinking.

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That's treating people as if they're part of a group, which is exactly what critical theory does.

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That's the essence of critical theory. Critical theory is a racist theory, no matter how you cut it.

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It violates biblical parameters by simply seeing people as oppressors or oppressed, either one.

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Their moral attributes and actions as a person are irrelevant. It is utterly opposed to the

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Christian faith. And so when Christians appropriate that thinking, they end up saying incredibly and insanely false things.

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So anyways, Michael was just getting lambasted, and he ran into Bishop Talbert Wesley Swann II, who was banned last year permanently, haha, from Twitter.

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That was two weeks. Um, because hey, if you're oppressed, then you can't be an oppressor, right?

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He had, I understand, called Candace Owens a coon, and so was banned permanently for two weeks.

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Words don't mean what they used to mean. Permanently, two weeks, yeah, I know. Anyway, um, he started coming after Michael.

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And immediately, of course, anyone who opposes Bishop Talbert Wesley Swann II is a white supremacist.

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Which again, makes the phrase white supremacist utterly meaningless. It has no meaning.

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When you use it, and then do not have the integrity, the humanity, the scholarship to demonstrate that there is substance to the accusation, then you're just stringing together words that have no meaning.

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There's nothing there. Except for your followers, who will then act upon your slanderous accusations that are empty.

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So I was watching this, and I was commenting a few times going, Michael, Michael, Michael. You know, because he's, he's responding like a scholar.

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He's responding like a rational person. He's responding like someone who says, look, I try to get along with everybody.

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And he does. That's, he gets in trouble for trying to get along with everybody. So now it's the other side saying, you're a white supremacist.

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Like, where? Prove it. And I keep going, Michael, Michael, Michael. The punishment is in the accusation.

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It's in the process. There doesn't have to be anything behind it. They don't care about truth. They don't care.

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None of this stuff is relevant to these folks. They are virtue signaling themselves.

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That's how they prop themselves up every day is, I did something good today because I blasted that person who's a part of the oppressors.

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And so, I mean, your feed, if you want it to be, can be filled with these people every single day.

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I was watching some video briefly of some people trying to get into an Ann Coulter event last night. And these people are locking arms.

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They won't let people through. And they are just firing F -bombs. And I mean, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

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And, oh my goodness, they're all over the place. And I was just watching another thing. Some guy, you know, holds up a sign that says all lives matter.

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And this woman just smack, rips the sign out, smacks him and starts cussing him up one side and down the other.

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And it's all about, I don't feel safe around you. I don't feel safe around you. We have, we have created, woke people are not adult humans.

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They, we have created a mindset that tells them that it's good to remain at two and a half.

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Because that's how they respond to everything. It's me, me, me, me, me, my safety, my safety, my safety.

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And safety doesn't mean safety anymore either. Safety means I don't hear anything that says anything other than what

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I want to hear. No society can be run by two and a half year olds.

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Two and a half year olds cannot be run by two and a half year olds. And the whole lot of the woke, this is where they are there.

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I was trying to tell, I'm just trying to nicely say to Michael, Michael, I hear you, brother.

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I you're right. If they're going to make accusations, they should back them up, but they're not gonna because the accusations are empty.

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They have no substance, but the rest of the culture will act on them.

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So the past few weeks, I won't go into the details, but opportunities of ministry closed in my face because of the slanders of people like Eric Mason and other woke people who will never face me face to face because they know in that situation,

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I will destroy the accusations factually and logically. And all the, the woke posturing doesn't help when someone's looking you in the eye, but it's effective.

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It's very effective. And in the church, what it does when, when you're going out and you're seeking to prepare people for ministry, you're seeking to prepare people to do evangelism.

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You know, Friday night when I got to London, I went out with some of the guys from, from Grace Life, met them at the

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Canning Town tube station. And we went out and witnessed to folks, passed out tracks.

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The weather was horrible, but we did it anyways. Found some Jehovah's Witnesses hiding under a bridge.

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I mean, think about it. We got, we got the one Jehovah's Witness out at the end of the pier in Durban, South Africa, a couple of months ago in the dark practicing preaching and who walks up behind him in the dark.

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So now you've got these two, two little Jehovah's Witness ladies with their watchtowers and their little stand.

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And they're sitting there huddled up like this in this terrible weather under a bridge overpass and walks up to him.

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It's funny. Anyway. So, you know, we're going out there and we're, and, and out there again, as I was leaving, it struck me that our group from Grace Life was half black and half white.

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It didn't matter out there. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the church.

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We had one purpose. We had one goal. We had one message. And all this other stuff is just simply meant to divide the church and destroy the church and destroy the ministry and everything else.

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Thankfully, no woke people out there. We were just there presenting the gospel of people.

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But the point is, there are a lot of, when, when I'm going out doing things like that, any church that's going to have me in is going to get pushback from these people based upon false lies, slander, things that these people will never say to my face.

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Every single one of you that calls those churches and contacts those churches, you're a coward because you'll never say it to my face.

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And you know it, you know it, because you know you're lying, but you've bought the lie of critical theory, and so that salves your conscience.

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You're doing a greater good. Well, that greater good has nothing to do with scripture. So anyway, I see all this stuff with Michael and this

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Talbert Swan, and then day before yesterday, something like that, he's removed it now.

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I saw no apologies for it, but as far as I can see, he's removed it now.

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But he posted what we simply have to identify as one of the most obvious Black racist comments

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I've ever seen. If it had been posted by a white person, that person would have been running for the

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Grand Wizard of Ku Klux Klan. But when a Black person posts it, they don't even think it's racism because of what the society says.

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The society says they can't be a racist. So if you buy the idea that racism requires power, the redefinition, that's not a biblical concept.

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That is as far from scripture as can be, but once you accept that, if you start telling a whole group of people you can't commit that sin, that's one of the best ways in the world to make sure that they will.

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And so he posts a tweet saying if heaven's going to be filled with white evangelicals, he'll take his chances on hell.

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And while that wasn't quite as, you know, I'm thinking back to someone in 2016 that said,

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I'm afraid to go worship with white people after Donald Trump was elected. It's the same thought, just not as boldly expressed back in 2016.

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That wasn't him, it was somebody else. But it's the same thought. It is a fundamental denial of the biblical teaching that the body of Christ is made up of men and women from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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And that what unites us has nothing to do with skin color, ethnicity, the history of your great -great -grandpappy and my great -great -grandpappy.

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All of that is dung. And it is worthless in comparison to the surpassing greatness of the call of Jesus Christ, which comes because of the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ.

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We all stand before God in the same way. And the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit of God. There is no way to put wokeness like that together with the gospel.

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One's got to go. And Bishop Talbert, Wesley Swan, the second

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Bishop of Nova Scotia, he's sitting on a throne, he's got his big old thing on and his orange stuff and yeah.

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He is encouraged to express that statement, which is simply nothing but black racism.

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It reflects prejudice and hatred in the heart. It reflects everything the Bible says we're not to do in the sense of prejudging, judging on a different standard, different weights and measures and all doing so based upon something that scripture never tells us to take into consideration.

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And that is who your great -great -granddaddy was and the melanin count of your skin. That's sin with a capital

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S and you can commit it as a white person and you can commit it as a black person.

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But in our day, you can be accused of as a white person with no evidence.

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And you can have all the evidence in the world, such as with Talbert, Wesley Swan, the second, that you are a black racist and it's okay.

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And you will be plotted for it. In fact, why didn't

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I, oh, wait a minute. It might still be here if I go backwards to it. Then again, maybe it won't.

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Too many pages, too many things in Twitter here. I was going to look it up, but maybe this will come up because Talbert is not exactly the most common.

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There it is. Pinned tweet. Pinned tweet. So this is what he himself has chosen to be the first tweet you see when you go to his thing.

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White evangelicalism is nothing more than white supremacy masked as Christianity. It's the first thing.

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So all white evangelicals just, you're just all in one big old group.

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That's racism. That is racism. That is the old style. The Bible says it's sin, repent of it, racism.

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That's all there is to it. I mean, people attack me. Well, you said something about the black church.

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I said exactly what black people said about the black church. And I also said that there were all sorts of good men who were fighting to present sound theology and church history and sound doctrine and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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I made the appropriate distinctions so the category could be a meaningful category and meaningful discussion could take place.

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There is nothing meaningful in this tweet. White evangelicalism is nothing more than white supremacy masked as Christianity.

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That's just simply a lie. There has not been enough thought put into that to even express it in a meaningful fashion.

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It's black racism. It needs to be called out as black racism. And if you're offended by that,

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I simply ask you, where in scripture do you have grounds to be offended by that? If that's truthful, you show me where in the

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Bible. Because I know where you're getting it from. I know exactly where you're getting it from. You're getting it from a worldly perspective called critical theory.

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Which I understand a certain, which was the, which state was it in the

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Southern Mass Convention? They just had a state convention and they specifically rebuked the national convention for, may have been

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Kentucky, for Resolution 9 and rejected it themselves.

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So there you go. There is black racism out there. And interestingly enough,

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I was noticing our protester that, last year we had a protester that started appearing outside of Apologia Church.

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Once it got nice and toasty, she disappeared, but she may be back. She told my daughter that I'm a stone racist.

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And when someone from a different race than I am, with whom I had had conversations over the weekend in London, said, what evidence do you have?

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Well, look at what he said about Bishop Swan. So if you say, hey, that guy over there is saying wild and crazy things.

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If he's black, that makes you a racist, even though he's the one saying the racist stuff. You couldn't, you couldn't have made this stuff up even 10 years ago, but now it's what we live in every single day.

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And it's, it's a shame. Speaking of, speaking of the fact that the front door of the

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Reformed camp got kicked in March of 2018,

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J .D. Greer posted a blog discussion on the subject of, under Ask Me Anything, episode 49,

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J .D. Greer Ministries. J .D. Greer is the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention. When talking with a transgender person, which pronouns should you use?

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And so what he breaks it down to is there is a spectrum of generosity of spirit versus telling truth.

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And he says, I tend toward generosity of spirit. And he quotes from Andrew Walker and Preston Sprinkle, who heads up the

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Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender. He calls it pronoun hospitality.

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He actually tries to base this on the Bible appearing to use accommodating language in Acts 17.

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Wow, Acts 17 is abused by so many different people. It's amazing.

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I just, I just want to, just want you to think about something for just one second. Just, just thought experiment.

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Do you believe for one second that if the

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Apostle Paul, you know, the guy who wrote Romans 1 and 1st would be asking what your chosen pronouns are and then using them?

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Can you see Paul going zir and zee, they, when speaking of singulars?

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And if you can't, is it just possible, maybe, that the reason that you can't even imagine that happening, and I can't imagine that happening, the reason you can't imagine that happening is because you recognize that what's driving

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Greer and Sprinkle and these others didn't drive

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Paul. Paul was not driven by cultural, cultural approval.

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He was not driven by what would be considered to be helpful in the communication with his culture.

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Paul was driven by the overarching reality that God in Jesus Christ had done something amazing, was building something called the kingdom in the body of Christ, and that this was made up of Jews and Gentiles.

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And so, Paul was very focused upon destroying anything that could possibly divide that body.

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That's where so much of his focus on justification by faith is, because if you don't have justification by faith, if you do not have the imputed righteousness of Christ, which makes us all even before the throne, then there's all sorts of grounds and basis for division.

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And that, he knew, was death to the Church. And so, we know that Paul would never give even the first thought to utilization of correct pronouns or pronoun hospitality, because what would have driven him and what needs to drive us is the fact that Paul knew, especially in the pagan context of ancient

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Rome, Paul knew that the reality of God as creator, the one true

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God as creator, had to be the grounding of everything else he was saying to anyone.

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And therefore, he is going to first and foremost uphold God's truth in what he says.

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Even when he knew it would result in his being shut down on Mars Hill, he had to talk about the resurrection.

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He knew the people weren't going to like that. They were not going to be hospitable to the idea of resurrection, but he had to do it because that was part of the content of the message to which he had been called as a steward to proclaim to all people.

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And so, Paul would have honored God as creator first and foremost, and that's what we must do.

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This presentation by Sprinkle, then moderated through Greer, he says, that is,

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I believe that all Christians can and should use pronouns that reflect the expressed gendered identities of transgender people, regardless of our views about gender identity ethics.

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Let me repeat that. That is, I believe that all Christians can and should use pronouns that reflect the expressed gender identities of transgender people.

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Biblically, transgenderism is an open, unapologetic rebellion against God as creator.

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It flows from a worldview that has no creator. It flows from a worldview that has no creator.

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It flows from a worldview that makes you the creator of your reality.

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It makes you the autonomous determiner of your own reality. Capitulating at the start, at the foundation of the battle, is suicidal and foolish to its core.

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Foolish to its core. There is such a diminished, minimized understanding of the centrality of a

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Christian worldview in so much of what expresses itself as evangelicalism today.

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It's stunning. And we are seeing it in the capitulation of these individuals who become involved in this re -orientation of the entire church's perspective on sexuality.

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The Revoice Conference and everything that goes with it reflects the fact that there has been, for decades, a utter lack of meaningful application of a

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Christian worldview in the moral and ethical thinking of generations of Christians. So that when this attack came, it hit the soft underbelly.

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It shouldn't be a soft underbelly. If you understand that God is the creator of all things,

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God made them male and female. That's Jesus' teaching. And it is good, and it is proper.

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And a person who rejects that gender binary, the created gender binary affirmed by Jesus Christ, who we say is our creator and our maker, you reject that, and the result is utter moral and ethical chaos.

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The chaos that we are seeing today, the chaos you saw in the videos from the high school where the board decides that the boys can use the girls' bathrooms if they act like if they say they're girls, and the quote -unquote transgender girl, who's actually a guy, is going, oh yeah!

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And the girls are in tears because they're not gonna be able to go to the bathroom all day at school.

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This is evil insanity, but it is the inevitable result of this absurdity.

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There is no such thing as a transgender person, people. We do not have the capacity of changing the genetics.

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And even if we did, that would be a horrific attack upon the creation and utterly destructive of it.

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So, from whence comes this absurd desire on the part of Christians to just capitulate and go along, instead of saying, no, wait a minute, wait a minute,

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I'm talking to a person made in the image of God. Well, you know what? You know what part of this is?

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Part of this goes back to our apologetic. Presuppositionalists recognize that the point of contact is the fact you're dealing with a person made in the image of God.

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Those who are not presuppositionalists assume that there can be a moral neutral ground, and that's where this is. That's where this is coming from.

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That's where the problem lies. So, there is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people who actually experience gender dysphoria, and they should be pitied and helped to get over what is clearly a mental problem.

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But the vast majority... Do we need to bring up the YouTube video when

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I was on Dr. Drew? And then a few weeks later, the same guy, dressed as a gal, former army dude, helicopter pilot, is sitting there next to Ben Shapiro and puts his big old man hand on Ben's shoulder and threatens that Ben's got to be removed in an ambulance, in a nice, deep, masculine voice, all while claiming to be a her.

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Do we need to go there? That's not gender dysphoria. That is perversion. That is sexual, autonomous perversion.

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Nothing more. And we will pay for saying that right now.

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We may pay for it. This video may be gone in a day for daring to say that, but that's what it is.

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And when any society gets to the point where you can't even say that any longer, that is a society that's on its last legs.

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When I say last legs, last legs could be two generations, but the fall will be great.

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The fall will be great. And what are we supposed to do? We say, repent!

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Turn around! You're going the wrong way. There's destruction ahead. Oh, that is so countercultural.

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Yeah, just like Jeremiah got chucked in a pit for saying the same thing. You expect better?

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You expect better? We do, don't we? And that's why we won't say what the prophets said.

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That's why we won't do what prophets said. What? What?

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I keep thinking about things that have transpired in the past with a very different reaction from the people who held these seats then.

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And I keep thinking, as you're reading J .D. Greer, I'm thinking Danny Cortez. And I'm wondering, how would

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J .D. Greer respond to that situation if it actually occurred now? That tells me it would be a very different response.

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It wouldn't be just a, I don't want to talk about it. That would be a full embrace. The downgrade is undeniable.

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It is without dispute. It's super fast. The speed is stunning.

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It truly is. Well, all right, so there's the preaching part.

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But you've heard other people saying what I've said so far in this program.

39:17

I just got to join in. So the first 40 minutes, reaffirming what a lot of people are saying and getting into trouble with all the woke folks out there in the process.

39:29

Now we get to something that you're not going to get on almost any other webcast. And that is,

39:36

I am in the process of writing a full refutation of Dr.

39:44

Jeffrey T. Riddle's article on Ephesians 3 .9.

39:51

Right as I was leaving for Atlanta and the debate with Shabir Ali, I raised on the last program the issue of Ephesians 3 .9,

40:04

went through the textual evidence, and I basically said, look, by any meaningful parameters of textual critical study, the original reading of Ephesians 3 .9

40:19

is well known to us. The TR contains an error. That error comes from, now we know, manuscript 2817.

40:32

And there is no other evidence in the first thousand years, more than a thousand years, of the existence of the epistle to the

40:43

Ephesians that any other reading other than oikonomia, dispensation, plan that is found there, ever existed.

40:58

While the textus receptus, the TR, has koinonia, the fellowship of the mystery, rather than the administration plan of the mystery.

41:10

I had thrown that out and basically said, look, this is sort of a good test to see whether you're talking to someone who you can even attempt to reason with, or whether you simply have to go, there's no reasoning with this person, so that's really a problem.

41:30

At least amongst Reformed men, we're supposed to be able to reason. And once you get past that line,

41:39

I think that will end up leading to serious bibliology issues in the future.

41:48

People normally don't just stop there. And so,

41:53

I asked Robert Truelove, where do you stand on Ephesians 3 .9? And a few days later, first he just ignored it and said, well, you should know, just listen to the conference.

42:08

How about answering the question? So finally, he links to an article that was just published, obviously written in answer to this, by Dr.

42:19

Jeffrey Riddle. And so, I hope by the weekend to have a full refutation of that article.

42:28

I got a number of hours done on it on the plane on the way back from London.

42:34

It's a long flight. I hope to get some more done on it today.

42:42

But in the course of the discussion, Elijah Hickson, I should have brought the book in, who co -edited, along with Peter Gurry, the recent book on myths and mistakes in New Testament textual criticism, and we hope to have

43:02

Dr. Gurry on in a matter of weeks, engaged

43:08

Dr. Riddle in the comments on his blog. The first thing that was interesting was the specific number of the manuscript that seemingly is the source of Erasmus' reading was brought to light, number 2817, and it's from between 11 and 1200s in that time frame.

43:35

And seemingly, it was one of those it's a Katina manuscript. It's not a regular manuscript where it's just simply the body of the text of Ephesians 3 .9,

43:43

it's portions. And if, as Dr. Hickson pointed out, it is a part of two other manuscripts, a group of three, the other two manuscripts don't have that reading, which is very significant.

43:58

We'll probably address that a little bit in the article. The other thing that happened, and this is what

44:04

I wanted to get to here, and this is, I was looking at our downloads. I almost never look at downloads, but I was doing something for some other purpose, and I noted that on the last program, we had had about 24 ,000

44:21

YouTube views, and just over 20 ,000 sermon audio downloads.

44:27

That doesn't count anything on iTunes. So, it was right around 45 ,000 between the two.

44:37

So, almost 50 % of everybody who listens to this program does on audio, and that's how I normally listen to stuff too.

44:42

I don't have time to be sitting around watching video. The preceding portion of this program, fine to listen, but at this point, you're going to need to watch.

44:55

It's not going to make sense. I can't deal deal with manuscript P46, auditory, audio only.

45:04

I need to show you some stuff. And so, if you normally do the sermon audio download, you might just want to make a note.

45:12

If you think, if you listen to this and find it important enough, you might want to grab the YouTube video, if the

45:18

YouTube video is there, given the other topics of the program. Doesn't matter. Yeah, right.

45:29

Because what developed in the conversation was a second article was posted by Dr.

45:42

Riddle called, A Closer Look at Papyrus 46 and Ephesians 3 .9. And Dr.

45:50

Riddle mentions a individual who goes under the, just called

45:59

C .C. And C .C. had pointed to P46 and Ephesians 3 .9

46:07

and said, take a look at P46 in the NTVMR, that's the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room.

46:16

It seems to me that it only reads, Konamia, a case could be made that the exemplar had

46:21

Koinonia, Omicron rather than Omega, and the I got squished into the

46:26

N, and the second N, well, Nu, and the second Nu became Mu. The transcription includes the

46:33

Omicron Iota in red brackets, but those letters aren't actually on the page. And then

46:38

Dr. Riddle says, and indeed, when I took a look at P46, the evidence in favor of the MCT, modern critical text, is not as clear as it first seems.

46:48

Here's the larger picture of the section in question. Here's a close -up of the section at the end of the line. And here is a close -up of the beginning of the next line.

46:57

Here's the conclusion. This closer look reveals that P46, the earliest manuscript of Ephesians 3 .9,

47:03

is at the least not a clear witness to the Oikonomia reading. Textual scholars will say the possibility, will suggest the possibility that the

47:11

OI, the beginning, Oikonomia, was either omitted by error or that it was there and the ink was rubbed away.

47:17

C .C. suggests an alternate possibility, the exemplar had Koinonia, Omicron rather than Omega. This would, in fact, argue in favor of the

47:24

TR reading of Koinonia. My friends, this is dangerous and it's as false as it can be, and we are now going to refute it completely in the hopes that any fair -minded person will recognize that this kind of dogged attempt to read an error from over a thousand years after the original into the earliest manuscripts against all the evidence, if they're willing to do this, is there any reason to think that any of the argumentation they're bringing forth has any merit at all?

48:07

This is an abuse of the papyri, which they attack anyways as being,

48:14

Dr. Riddle couldn't say papyri at the conference without saying the vaunted papyri.

48:24

I've been trying to warn people for years and now we're seeing this movement's becoming more and more radical as it goes on.

48:35

And here's an example. So we're going to demonstrate where the error...

48:42

Now, I don't have any evidence. In fact, there were comments that Dr.

48:49

Riddle made where he was thanking Elijah Hickson for helping him to navigate some of the online resources.

48:59

Most of us who work in this field use those online resources pretty regularly and wouldn't need help navigating them.

49:05

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of Dr. Riddle's published works, he's written over 20 book reviews and 8 articles, almost all of which have been published in journals very friendly to a particular narrow reform spectrum.

49:22

I know of no books. I know of no graduate or postgraduate teaching. He is an adjunct in humanities at a community college.

49:33

And so the comments here need to be refuted because they are in error.

49:43

Now, if I'm guessing correctly, Dr. Riddle will not watch this.

49:49

He will take second -hand descriptions from somebody else and respond to that.

49:56

Because for some reason, it seems like he will not use my name. He calls me the

50:01

PIA, the Popular Internet Apologist, which is better than being the

50:06

UIA, the Unpopular Internet Apologist. And I've just gotten the distinct feeling, given how the few times in the past he's tried to respond, he won't do scholarship.

50:24

He won't do original sources. He won't look at it. I think he feels like that would somehow be giving me credibility that I don't deserve, having only written 20 books, taught textual criticism numerous different places in the graduate level.

50:35

Doesn't matter. He won't do that. So we're going to look at it.

50:42

And we're going to, I'm going to put together a little presentation. We're going to dig into a papyri today.

50:49

So let's start with this. Let me show you. This is a screen from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

50:55

This is P46, a CSNTM. Yeah. Let's pop it up. Here, I want you to see something here.

51:04

These are the various images of P46. Okay. Now, are you seeing something?

51:11

Look at the form and the shape. This is in Romans 16.

51:16

The form and the shape of the manuscript. On the one side, it's called recto inverso.

51:24

So on the one side, you'll notice, here's the top. See where the pointer is? So at the top, the normal, if you have a full page of a

51:35

Codex Papyrus. So here would be your binding right here.

51:42

So this is the outer margin. And you can see at the upper corner, and then much more so the lower portion is where the damage takes place.

51:53

And that makes sense. See? So let me go down to Ephesians 3. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Go over, zoom in on this side.

52:00

On this side, see how it's just the opposite. So here's where the binding was, and here's just the opposite.

52:07

All right? So let's go down to Ephesians. Notice that comes right after Romans, whatever that means.

52:16

But here is Ephesians 2 .10. All right? So you can see, same formation.

52:24

Here's Ephesians 3 .11, and here's Ephesians 2 .21, which goes down to 3 .10.

52:32

This is our page right here. Well, these are both the same. One has a black background, one has a white background. But notice, here's the margins.

52:41

But notice how much of the page is now missing out here. And then the bottom here.

52:46

And then some damage up toward the top, though very frequently, the upper corner damage doesn't necessarily impact the text, because of the fact that it normally doesn't go nearly as far into the page as it does on the bottom.

53:02

Because you think of a book, if you look at your own books, where's the damage? That's where the damage is going to be, especially if you put it on a shelf, that the weight of the book is pushing on that side.

53:13

So here is the page that we'll be looking at right here.

53:22

And the nice thing here, you'll notice you can zoom in. And in fact, there is the term right there, kanamia.

53:36

Kanamia. Let me blow it up even more. Kanamia to musterio.

53:44

All right. Now, if you are, and by the way, there's a nominus sacra.

53:55

Chi, rho, upsilon, with an I. That's Christu, the genitive form. Tu Christu.

54:02

Now we're going to have to keep these big. We're going to have to keep these up. Nobody needs to be seeing me anyways. So if you are used to reading your

54:13

Nessie Allen 28th edition, or UBS 5th, or the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, by the way,

54:18

I haven't told you this yet, Rich, but I'm getting a little something for Christmas.

54:29

I'm going to have, and we're going to have it. Yeah, this is going to be something that's going to be, it's just going to live right here in the studio.

54:40

It's going to be the normal thing I pick up. But I've been talking with Jeffrey Rice.

54:51

No, no, not, not, no, no. I'm doing this. I'm doing this.

54:59

But one of my favorite Bibles that I got from my mom after she died, and you realize

55:07

January will be 10 years. Hard to believe, isn't it? Rich knew my mom.

55:13

Rich came over and had my dad's turkey and dressing and stuff like that. And 10 years, yep, 2010, 10th anniversary anyways.

55:23

Anyway, so one of the things

55:29

I got from her was a red lambskin New Schofield Bible.

55:35

And I remember as a kid, I remember as a kid,

55:41

I loved to hold that Bible because it was so soft and smooth.

55:50

That was one of the few things I got from my mom. And so,

55:56

I started talking with Jeffrey and I'm like, you ever worked in lambskin?

56:02

He says, yeah, I can get, I can get lambskin. So I have gotten a very nice, it's already leather bound.

56:10

It's very nice, a Tyndale House Creek New Testament. So it's got the, the gold pages and he is going, he's binding that.

56:21

And he, he said he got the leather yesterday and he said, this is a whole lot better than I expected it to be.

56:27

This is awesome lambskin. So I'm going to have a

56:32

Jeffrey Rice bound red lambskin

56:37

Tyndale House Creek New Testament. This is going to sort of live somewhere right around here.

56:44

I'm not sure when I'm going to get it, but I'm looking forward to it. Anyway, this wasn't written on lambskin in case anyone is wondering, how did he take a right hand turn there?

56:57

I just, I just took a, took a little bit of a turn there. This manuscript, if you're used to your

57:07

UBS or your Tyndale House or whatever, that's where the, that's where the turn took place. You have a hard time reading this.

57:14

You have a hard time reading this. And the reason you have a hard time reading this is this is, this is in technically, the term is maguscule text versus minuscule, but it's often called unseal.

57:31

Now unseal is technically a certain distance, but let's not argue about it. All capital forms, no spaces between words and almost no punctuation.

57:43

And this is how the New Testament was copied for the first 800, 900 years of its, of its life.

57:51

And so what you're looking at is line after line of capital letters, no verses, no, sometimes you'll have paragraph breaks in some manuscripts, sometimes you don't, sometimes they're different.

58:04

So you've got the Eusebian canons, that's all, all of this stuff. But as far as actually reading it, most people who've only taken seminary level

58:13

Greek, just enough to get by, would just look at this and go, no, what, what, what is this?

58:23

Most of the letters actually are fairly recognizable, but you just have to know what the capitalized forms are. You have to know the final form sigmas.

58:30

Here's, here's a sigma over here. It doesn't look like a sigma that most people would recognize. It looks like a

58:35

C. You know, so there, there are issues like that.

58:43

So you look at this and what you need to realize is, okay, here's the margin.

58:51

Now, if I bring up, let me see here.

58:59

Okay. How do I, thank you. Let me, let me pop something up here for you.

59:10

Let me show you, oh, good grief. Don't tell me

59:15

I didn't, yeah, I upgraded the cordons after the last program. Let's hope it works.

59:23

Let me, let me show you what the reading is in my

59:30

New Testament textual window here. I got to get to it first.

59:38

Ephesians 3 .9. Okay. So let's look at the, let me see what the textual interlinear would, no, textual interlinear is not going to do it.

59:54

Oh, New Testament manuscripts. That's what I want. That's what I want. Now performing search.

01:00:03

That's great. That unfortunately takes a moment. I want to be able to show you the various manuscripts and what they look like.

01:00:13

And I should have had this up and ready, ready to give it to you. I have a presentation

01:00:19

I'll show you here in a moment in Keynote so I can drag the text right onto it. But what you will see when you compare the, this is, this will show the parallel between Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, I have

01:00:35

Washingtonianus in it, but Washingtonianus doesn't contain Ephesians obviously, Alexandrinus, and then in the right hand column will appear the

01:00:45

Greek New Testament papyri, which will sometimes be more than one papyrus that contains a particular section.

01:00:53

It won't be for Ephesians 3 .9. This is taking an exceedingly long period of time to do this.

01:00:59

I don't know why, but it is, but we're slowly getting there. At least it won't have a little hourglass going around, around like we used to have.

01:01:09

Get a drink of water while we're waiting. I'm hearing the

01:01:15

CPU running feverishly in the background. I'm not sure why this is, it's normally much, much quicker than this.

01:01:23

Maybe I have too many programs open. And I, as you'll notice, there's nothing in Genesis 1 .1. That's, there shouldn't be.

01:01:29

Okay, Ephesians 3 .9. I'm going to take Washingtonianus out here for the moment. Looks like a bunch of small, small, small stuff to everybody.

01:01:37

I get that. But here in Ephesians 3 .9, here in Sinaiticus, you have the oikonomia, the plan to musteriu of the mystery.

01:01:56

Vaticanus, oikonomia. Alexandrinus, here's oi, but notice something.

01:02:02

You have oikonomia. So, one thing you need to understand about unsealed text is unsealed text will break a word, does not use a dash when it does, it will simply break a word and continue on the next line when the scribe gets to where he thinks the outer margin should be.

01:02:30

This is how the writing is done. You can look all the way through these manuscripts and you will find words being broken up over and over and over again.

01:02:50

Now, so for example, Ephesians 3 .14, you have down here,

01:02:58

Sinaiticus, you have campto. But in P46, it's cam, next line, to.

01:03:07

Cam, pato. So, there, you don't put any emphasis on breaking its syllables or using any of the modern types of conventions that we would normally utilize in that situation, all right?

01:03:31

Now, why is that important? Well, that is important because the fact that when we look at the preceding line, we notice, let's just notice a couple of things here.

01:03:48

And if we can sort of make that as big as we can, here is your outer margin, okay?

01:04:02

So, if I were to do this, here's the outer margin.

01:04:08

Well, you're noticing there's, you know, if we look, for example, right here, you can see that there was writing here, but this letter is almost completely gone.

01:04:20

And if we look carefully enough, we will see, you see this, like this, and it goes like that, and it goes like this, and it comes around here like this.

01:04:32

You know what that is? That's a water stain. That's where the manuscript has, and whenever anybody picks on the manuscripts because they have damage, my statement worldwide when presenting this stuff always is, what are you going to look like in 1800 years?

01:04:49

You ain't going to look nearly as good as these papyri are. That's right.

01:04:56

So, but the point is, see this here? There's a border, border, border.

01:05:01

That's where water has come. Now, when water comes onto a manuscript like this, it takes ink off.

01:05:06

How do we know that? Look over here. Let me back it up a little bit. Look at this whole section right here.

01:05:13

Goes up to here, goes up there, comes down here. What's happened? Somebody spilled their

01:05:19

Starbucks or whatever else it was, their tea or whatever at some point, and you can see the letters in this area are severely degraded, severely degraded.

01:05:34

And when you get over to the margin, some of them are just gone. And what happens to be gone?

01:05:41

The first two letters of oikonomia. Now, let me go to the presentation

01:05:47

I put together for you on the plane, and I'll show you what

01:05:55

I'm talking about. All right, I'll get this. Now, I can't go to the presentation thing because then my mouse won't drag stuff around.

01:06:06

So, all right, so here is P46. By the way, P46 is the earliest manuscript we contain that has

01:06:13

Paul's writings. It is between 180 and 200.

01:06:21

Some people would date it a little bit after that, but most people are right around 200. As such, it's extremely important.

01:06:28

It's in the Chester Beattie Library in Dublin, Ireland. I've told a number of stories about getting in trouble with security because I got down on my hands and knees to look up at the manuscript to be able to read it because the light was at an angle, and I figure the people in the security booth thought we were worshiping the manuscripts.

01:06:43

We weren't, but anyway. Now, we read the speculations of the

01:06:52

TR -only people that this might have read koinonia. I do not know of a single textual scholar who actually works papyri in the world, in the world, that would say that, and I'll show you why.

01:07:12

Number of years ago, a number of years ago, I happened to locate and have been using in my teaching and research for a long time now fonts that had been built upon the early papyri.

01:07:32

And one of the fonts that I have is P46. And so, it is a font that is based upon the normative formation of letters by the scribe of P46.

01:07:50

And so, I have spelled out here kanomia, which would be the spelling of the word, the oy at the end of the line.

01:08:05

We're going to look at that in a moment, see where it went. But oy kanomia is the reading of all the manuscripts other than 2817, all the manuscripts of the first thousand years.

01:08:17

Every translation into every other language, the Latin, the Syriac, the Boheric, the Sahitic, the Coptic, they all say the same thing.

01:08:25

None of them say koinonia. Not a single Christian for a millennium ever saw koinonia in their text.

01:08:33

There's no evidence of it. None. There is no evidence. But the

01:08:39

TR only eyes are still out there and they've got their text and they'll do with the facts anything they've got to do with the facts to come up with something.

01:08:51

And so, we read and we heard Dr. Jeffrey Riddle. This closer look reveals that P46, the earliest manuscript of Ephesians 3 .9,

01:08:59

is at the least not a clear witness to the oy kanomia reading. Really? Folks, remember the last time we did something like this?

01:09:07

Remember the last time I put a, this may not have been the last time, but it wasn't that long ago. It was within three years,

01:09:13

I think, that I put a manuscript up on the screen and we did this kind of blow it up and look at it.

01:09:20

Remember what it was? It was P66 at John chapter 20.

01:09:28

You remember why we were doing it? Because a Muslim pointed out that John 20, 28, my

01:09:34

Lord and my God, is not in P66, but that's because P66 is fragmentary at that point.

01:09:41

And so, we dove into it and explained if you have the consistency of all the manuscripts and citations, and then you have a fragmentary manuscript that's simply been damaged in time, as almost all manuscripts have, especially they're that ancient, you have no basis for ever assuming that the damaged portion somehow has some reading other than what's found in every other source that you have contemporaneous or within a reasonable period of time of that original writing.

01:10:18

Same thing here. So, here's kanomia. I put it in P46, the

01:10:24

P46 font. And so, I'm going to drag it on up here and let's see if it...

01:10:31

Oh, look at that. It's identical. There are no omegas in there.

01:10:40

There are no iotas that have been squished into a new. It says kanomia.

01:10:47

Yeah. Yeah, we already knew that. I'll just put down below it. Yeah. That's exactly what it reads, isn't it?

01:10:58

Kanomia. Now, notice the

01:11:04

Omicron's a little small. It's a little bit larger here. It's similar to that one, but they're all formed the same way.

01:11:15

The news, yeah, look at that new. There's a new there. Mu, well, you got this one here.

01:11:22

You got this one here. That's the beginning of musterion. And you've got the up, over, up, over, out, up, over, up, over, out.

01:11:34

Same form, just like you have in the font, because that's how this scribe writes

01:11:40

Muse. There is no evidence of an omega. There is no evidence that this was an iota squished into something else.

01:11:50

There is absolutely, positively no reason outside of a wild -eyed dedication to the textus receptus to see this as anything other than kanomia.

01:12:12

That's what P46 says. That's the reading. Anyone who suggests otherwise is doing so not because there's any factual or truthful reason to do so.

01:12:23

It's because they have an agenda, and they're willing to pervert the historical evidence to promote their agenda.

01:12:34

Christians should not be doing this, my friends. And when you find them doing it, you might want to stay away from them.

01:12:46

Now, they'll say, but it doesn't say oikonomia. Well, I suppose if you are not used to reading papyri, you might say, oh, like you are.

01:12:59

Yeah, I am. I'm in the second year of a PhD program in P45. Do you think

01:13:04

I haven't been spending hours in P45 reading the exact same kind of stuff I have?

01:13:11

As far as I can tell, Dr. Riddle never has. Never. Not once.

01:13:18

But he's the expert. No, he's not. Now, we noticed that there is damage to the ink here and here, the margin, and we see these faint lines, indications of some type of probably liquid damage that has removed some or all of the ink.

01:13:51

So, the line above what we're looking at right here, this is what the reading would look like.

01:14:01

And so, when we bring it up here, yep, fits real well. The only difference being, now, did you all, did you all, millennials,

01:14:12

I don't even know if you did this, but when I was in school, we had penmanship classes, both printing and cursive.

01:14:22

And we were, I heard back then that when, if you were writing on a unlined page and your line went upward, that meant you were happy.

01:14:37

And if it went downward, it meant you were sad. You were never told that?

01:14:45

That has nothing to do with that's not right, kid. It has to do with something else.

01:14:51

So, so maybe, maybe the author was happy because if we look at the line below, well, that's way, way down below.

01:15:07

Yeah. There we go. Right there. Yeah. That fits pretty well.

01:15:14

And this one fits up here. And then here is our line.

01:15:22

The end of the line before, and there's, there's what you see an upward on the last two words here.

01:15:35

Pontos, tis, hey, what is, hey, thee. And then if we look back here for a second at accordance and yeah, let's, let's, let me, let's get

01:15:57

Alexander's out of here and let's blow this up some. Oh, we'll get Vaticanus out of here too.

01:16:03

How's that? Doesn't get it. All right. So here is the transcription that has been provided of Ephesians 3 .9.

01:16:18

And I have been very, very, very impressed with the level of accuracy of the transcriptions in P45.

01:16:30

Cause that's what I'm normally looking at, but when I've looked at others as well, especially when you get to the margins and you get to the damaged areas that there has been transcriptions of materials and damaged areas and P45 is damaged more than P46 is.

01:16:45

Where I was, I was like, yeah, I see how you got that, but wow, that eagle eyes, man, this is obviously work for someone younger than me.

01:16:57

And so you will notice that in the transcription, you have pontos, tis, hey, that's what we were just looking at.

01:17:10

Then oi is in brackets. And then you have conamia to mysterio to, then we go on there.

01:17:18

Okay. So where did oi go?

01:17:24

Where would oi have been? Well, this is indicating that oi is missing because of the brackets.

01:17:30

That's normally due to damage. When you got a little dot underneath it, like that final mu there, that also indicates that there's damage to the manuscript or just loss of ink or something along those lines.

01:17:48

So why do I have that up there? I'm sorry. It's supposed to be right there.

01:17:56

So the oi for oikonomia should be right there because the line goes up.

01:18:07

So I'm going to drag this out of the way, put on the wrong line anyways. The oi should be right there.

01:18:14

Now I can't really blow it up any more than it's blown up.

01:18:22

Go ahead and get it big. They got to be able to see this. No reason to have it small. Okay.

01:18:31

So yeah, you got to drag that down a little bit. All right. So you see this right here, right there, and right there.

01:18:46

Now, if, now leave it right there. Now, if the omicron iota was there, I'm going to drag the font up.

01:18:53

Where would it have been? Right there.

01:19:01

So one of two possibilities, either what we're seeing in the discoloration is just simply the border of the liquid, because you can see it goes here, around there, up there, and up like this.

01:19:16

Just like you have over here, where very clearly letters have been damaged.

01:19:24

Now, when scribes wrote on parchment, which is animal skin, this would leave a mark in the animal skin, even when you wash the ink off.

01:19:40

That's why we can read what are called palimpsest manuscripts, is the nub of the stylus would damage the skin.

01:19:51

So even when they took the ink off, the damage was still there, and under certain lights, you can still read that. That's what a palimpsest manuscript is.

01:19:58

There are a few palimpsests. Now, papyri isn't identical to that, but when you would write, you would leave some type of indentation.

01:20:10

So is it possible that what you see right there is the outer portion, like right there, that's fairly dark, the outer portion of the omicron, and then there's this line, and when you match, and look, this font has matched up very, very well elsewhere.

01:20:31

So if you put it right there, there you go.

01:20:42

So there is no, and let's remind ourselves of something.

01:20:48

Remember, what we're looking at here is a zoomed -in part, but if we go back to,

01:21:01

I didn't close that, no, if we go back to P46, look, see, there's where it would be, and here's your outer margin.

01:21:12

If I were to draw a line straight down here, that would have been well within that outer margin. In fact, it would look weird if he hadn't continued writing out to that.

01:21:22

The margins are regular. The margins are regular, and you'll notice there clearly was writing out here, and look at the damage to the letters here, again, from damage over time, water damage.

01:21:35

So right here is where OI would be, and that's exactly where the outer margin would be to begin with.

01:21:44

So the reason that the professional transcribers of the papyri put

01:21:53

OI in brackets and have Oikonomia as the reading is because that's the reading.

01:22:01

There is no reason, none, to suggest, as Dr.

01:22:09

Riddle suggests, this closer look reveals that P46, the earliest manuscript of Ephesians 3 .9,

01:22:18

is at the least not a clear witness to the Oikonomia reading. Textual scholars will suggest the possibility

01:22:23

OI was either omitted by error, no it wasn't, or that it was there and the ink was rubbed away or washed away.

01:22:31

C .C. suggests an alternative possibility that the exemplar had Koinonia, Omicron rather than Omega.

01:22:37

This would, in fact, argue in favor of the T .R. reading of Koinonia. This is simply reprehensible from any scholarly perspective.

01:22:47

If I had a student suggest this in a paper in one of my text criticism classes, we're going to have a problem.

01:22:56

So why is this being done? Because the ultimate authority, to be honest with you,

01:23:06

I don't know why Jeffrey Riddle even bothers with this, and maybe after this he won't.

01:23:14

I don't know why he even bothers with it, because he doesn't believe in the T .R. because of what

01:23:20

P46 did or did not say. P46 has all sorts of readings different from the

01:23:27

T .R. and he rejects all of them. Rejects every single one of them as not being providentially preserved.

01:23:35

This is not a historical argument they're making. It's not based upon evidence, so it doesn't matter.

01:23:42

2817 doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where Erasmus got it. The point is Reformed men accepted it, and therefore, because Reformed men accepted it, there you have your stable text, and that's what we should use.

01:23:58

It has been providentially preserved. The history doesn't matter. What Erasmus said doesn't matter. What Bezos said doesn't matter.

01:24:04

What Stefano said doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the historical origination of this text was.

01:24:12

So I don't even know why they're bothering. I really honestly don't know why they're bothering, other than there's still a part in their mind that goes,

01:24:21

I need to. I have to. I can't because it's indefensible, but I can't just simply say accept it because I say accept it.

01:24:32

So they do stuff like this. In the same way, 2817, the manuscript that has

01:24:40

Koinonia, the source that Erasmus used, what if we look at it and find readings that Erasmus didn't use?

01:24:50

They don't care. It doesn't matter. That was providence.

01:24:58

It's irrelevant. The factual material, there is no consistency in the argumentation.

01:25:06

So if a single manuscript from 11th, 12th century has

01:25:16

Koinonia in it, no one had ever seen it before. Now, there are a lot of singular readings in manuscripts.

01:25:23

For years, decades, over 20 years, I've been teaching on this subject and one of the basic given things that you say to people is, now, of the variants that actually impact the translation and meaning of the text, there are only a certain number that are viable.

01:25:56

I'll explain. You can go back right now. You can go back and look at the Trinity Law School presentation. I talk about this. I use the term viability, explain what it means.

01:26:03

This is nothing new. And when I say viability means that it could possibly be the original.

01:26:10

And I'll use the example. I said, so if we found some 13th century manuscript, and I didn't know about 2017,

01:26:17

I was just using it as an example. If we found some 13th century manuscript, and I've made this joke.

01:26:25

You'll find this on recordings. I've been doing this forever. So you'll find this on recordings. And I've made the joke.

01:26:31

And let's say some poor scribe didn't get to go to Starbucks on his way to work this morning. And so he's really needing

01:26:39

LASIK and he left his progressive lenses someplace else, which of course he didn't have. And so he makes a mistake today.

01:26:46

He's not really paying attention. He puts down the wrong word. And no one's ever seen it before.

01:26:55

There are no patristic sources that know about it. There are no translations in other languages that know about it.

01:27:01

There are no manuscripts beforehand that have it. It's just a singular error that he makes.

01:27:07

Well, it's not viable. It couldn't have been the original. And so we don't even count them in the important variants that we need to be looking at.

01:27:17

And there are all sorts of non -viable singular readings in minuscule manuscripts written after a thousand years after the time of Christ.

01:27:29

This is one of them. It's not viable. I really doubt that you could find almost anyone that actually works in this area that would disagree with what

01:27:42

I just said, that it's not viable. And yet, because it happens to be picked up by Erasmus and then repeated.

01:27:57

Now, I have not found any evidence as yet. This is something I would like to look into.

01:28:03

I don't have time to. But you've got to remember 99%, 99 .99

01:28:15

% of the Reformed theologians and scholars that utilized

01:28:24

Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza had no access to manuscripts by which to do collations against the printed text.

01:28:37

They were just so thankful to have it. Luther was awful thankful to have it. They're just so thankful to have a mass -produced

01:28:45

Greek New Testament. How many of them had any opportunity to do any kind of examination of that text against ancient manuscripts?

01:28:59

Nobody. The Completentium Polyglot, which was sort of the scholar's version, it had been printed before Erasmus, but it didn't come out until after Erasmus because it had to work all the way through all the

01:29:12

Vatican's red tape. It didn't have Koinonia. It had

01:29:18

Oikonomia. Did someone notice that? Don't know.

01:29:25

But 99 .99 % of the people you're reading from history would have had no way of doing any type of comparison.

01:29:37

So they accepted this reading. They didn't know it was different. These Reformed men, they all, no, they didn't.

01:29:48

No, they didn't. The reality is if Calvin or any of these men were faced with the information that we have presented on the last two programs on this variant, every single one of them to the man would have accepted

01:30:07

Oikonomia. Every single one of them to argue that they would have accepted the

01:30:14

TR, whatever that would have meant to them, is absolutely without merit.

01:30:22

Utterly without merit. So there you go.

01:30:32

Do you see why I say this is becoming more and more radical? When you can start misreading the early papyri just to try to find anything to support the

01:30:43

TR. What's next? What's next?

01:30:50

I don't know. I don't know what's next. But there you go. P46, earliest manuscript we have.

01:31:03

So vitally important. Such a treasure. We should be so thankful for it. From their perspective, it's irrelevant.

01:31:11

Even studying it's irrelevant. And I'm going to bring this out in the article. There's no reason to study ancient manuscripts.

01:31:17

If you believe that the Textus Receptus is a providentially preserved text, why bother?

01:31:24

You've got the word. You've got the final. If you cannot find anything in the

01:31:30

TR that needs to be edited, not a single thing, then there is no reason for you to be doing any historical studying at all.

01:31:38

Because God basically re -inspired it and there it is. That's what you got, right?

01:31:46

You can say, oh no, no, you're misrepresenting. Show me functionally where I'm wrong.

01:31:52

Because I can show you where Dr. Riddle basically says that in his response to Elijah Hickson.

01:31:59

And it's in the article. And we will address it. So these papyri are a gift to the

01:32:10

Church. They are so tremendously valuable. We should be so tremendously thankful for them.

01:32:18

So to see modern reformed men for a tradition, undercutting their value and their witness, and then twisting their witness when there is no reason to do it whatsoever.

01:32:35

Well, most people would just keep on moving and not say a word about it.

01:32:42

I can't. I can't. Because I take this stuff out into the real battlefield.

01:32:50

The battlefield, those guys won't ever go into. And believe me, I'm not trying to get them to do so. I'm glad they don't go into it.

01:32:58

Please don't. That's good. But because they don't, they can get away with this kind of stuff.

01:33:04

And get away with it is the way to put it. So there you go.

01:33:10

If you weren't watching, I would imagine a lot of what I was just saying sounded really weird. But this one,

01:33:15

I'm sorry, you've just got to watch it. And if YouTube blasts us for this, I'll re -record all this and put it on another venue so people can see it.

01:33:24

Well, that's true. We can just cut that part out and post it someplace else. But you have to be able to see it.

01:33:31

And I love doing that kind of stuff. I love the papyri. I love that we have such access.

01:33:37

You've got to understand something, folks. You've got to understand we're the first generation of this level of access. We are the first generation.

01:33:44

No one's been able to do this before now. Can you imagine? We're sitting here. I'm talking to people in South Africa. Hey, guys in South Africa, way to go.

01:33:51

Rugby World Cup champions. Sorry, England. Still love you guys too.

01:33:57

It was just there. They actually let me in and out again. But I didn't wear my South Africa shirt either. I figured they'd put me on the wrong plane to Botswana or something.

01:34:10

But anyway, we're sitting here, in some instances right now, live with people around the world.

01:34:19

And what we were just looking at, you need to understand, no one could do that 15 years ago.

01:34:27

And 15 years in the history of the church is a blink of the eye. That's awesome.

01:34:35

It's really, really awesome to be able to do that and to be able to, within a few days, what is this?

01:34:43

Updated 11 -17, it's 21. So within four days of the posting this stuff by Jeff Riddle, we're able to provide a complete refutation.

01:34:53

That's cool. Because in the past, it would take weeks or months publishing things and now we can do it.

01:35:01

And that's amazing stuff. Really is. Really is. Okay, folks.

01:35:08

We're coming back at it tomorrow. We got more to do tomorrow here on The Dividing Line.

01:35:14

I forget what it is, but there's other stuff to do. There's other things to be discussed.

01:35:19

And I did mention, we need to open the phones too. We need to address all sorts of other things too.

01:35:27

And so we're going to try to get some open phones in tomorrow. So same time. So consider that if you've wanted to and we will see you then.