A Jumbo-Mega Edition of the Dividing Line (Two Hours 45 Minutes)

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00:33

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line, my name is James White, good to be with you. We have a lot to cover today, breaking news right now amongst the

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Southern Baptists, interesting stuff going on in the SBC executive committee, stuff hitting media right now in regards to basically telling the

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Pastors Conference they're not going to have a place to meet if they don't change direction within a week, and I don't know if you've been watching any of this, and I'm not a

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Southern Baptist, but I first served in a Southern Baptist church, graduated in Southern Baptist University, Bible College then, taught in Southern Baptist seminaries until Baje Patterson had me fired, and still minister in a lot of Southern Baptist contexts, and so as the

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Southern Baptists go, it's an indicator of where other things are going in our society.

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And what is the name, the church on the, is it the church on the Gables or something like that?

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What's the name of that? I'm sorry, but I mean this stuff has been coming out and,

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Glades, Glades, Gables, Glades, has something with a G in it, on the golf course, whatever.

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Wow, I mean, have you watched any of this stuff? A little, yeah.

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And the thing is, as soon as you post any of the videos, you just know what you're going to get is going to be all these people going, well, you know, maybe, like Tom Buck posted that comment from the

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Pagan dude, who attended and was like, wow, that was a great party.

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And I just, I retweeted that and said, if you are reaching for the keyboard to post something about creating relationships, stop, and grab a

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Bible, and start reading in Acts, and listen to the sermons, and then ask yourself a question.

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Are we smarter than the apostles were? Because, I mean, just as, you know,

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Paul talks about conviction coming upon those who might visit the worship service, not entertainment, not a good

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Yelp review, but conviction, and oh, goodness. Um, but there was a video of the pastor of the church of the

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Glades, on the Glades, near the Glades, smelling like Glades, I don't know. There was, that's what they need.

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It's more like a disinfectant, Lysol, church of Lysol. But he was, he was doing something about what he was eating, or something, and he was wearing what looked like saran wrap green puffy pants.

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You missed that one? You would have remembered that one. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you would remember that one. Yeah, somebody was, somebody was, somebody made some comment about, um, you know, would, would

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Jeff, would Jeff Durbin wear, wear those pants? And I said, if somebody can find them, I'll buy them. If, if, if Candy can give me the right size, we'll, we'll give it a shot.

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You never know. You never know. What? No, I'm just over here laughing.

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Well, you, you, you pulled, you pulled the, uh, you pulled the microphone. No, I just got to keep it ready here, you know, because, but, uh, you know, actually pants like that, you need to get the right size and then order a size lower.

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Well, no, no, no. These were, these looked, these were puffy. These were sort of like puffy pants. Oh, so they were, um, um,

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Oh, what was the guy, the rapper? I don't remember. I don't know things like that. I'm sorry. Uh, you're, you're going the wrong direction with that one.

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Um, all I know is they, they were really, really freaky. And then there was one where he, they built a huge couch on the stage and, and, and it had trampoline in it.

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So you could jump on the couch and he started his sermon by jumping up and down on the trampoline. That was supposed to be a couch.

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And I'm not making any of this stuff up. And so, you know, this is supposed to be a pastor's conference, you know?

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And so this is one of the guys that's coming to tell you how to do it. Um, and that's aside from all of the,

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I mean, they did a Billie Eilish song that is just utterly profane.

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They changed a line because it was too profane to do.

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But it's still like, there's such a fascination with the world on these parts. We just want people to feel comfortable.

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And I remember folks, I remember the late 1990s, the late 1990s,

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I was teaching a Greek exegesis class in Ephesians.

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I think for Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. And I had a student who was taking that class and a, it wasn't, it may have been missions.

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That wouldn't make any sense. But anyways, was taking more than one class and he was telling me about how at that time they were teaching everyone that there are certain words we don't want to use in our culture so we don't turn people off.

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And one of those words was repentance. You don't use repentance. And back then there were people going, this is going to result in this.

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No, here we are. Here we are. You've got

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Southern Baptist pastors, or maybe he's not Southern Baptist. I don't even know if he's Southern Baptist. I don't know if there's churches in Glades that's even

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Southern Baptist. I don't know. But you've got people in, he wasn't wearing puffy pants that day, but wearing puffy pants and jumping on trampolines.

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And that's where it goes. That's where it goes. And people now look at that and they go, that doesn't look anything like what the apostles did.

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How did that happen? It's been happening for a long time. It's been happening for a long time.

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That's pretty tame compared to, or no, what's pretty tame compared to that is just what, 10, 15 years ago, we'd hear stories about pastors who would ride their

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Harleys up on the stage and then preach with the Harley behind them. Yeah, same thing.

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They thought that was cool. It's got to be cool. Yeah, it's got to be cool. It's a fundamental lack of confidence that the truth of God brought to life by the spirit of God is still going to do anything.

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And that's a theological issue. I mean, that's literally a theological issue.

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And you would think that people who have a Bible in their hand might already be aware of the fact that the worldview that it presents and the worldview being adopted by our culture are two completely different things.

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And trying to get the culture to think that we're cool means you have to rip 1

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Corinthians 1, rather, your Bible, along with a whole bunch of the rest of the New Testament, but especially that one.

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1 Corinthians 1, I mean, this is exactly, I mean, we are trying the wisdom of the world and the result is pretty ugly.

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And why would we want to go this direction is the next question I want to ask, because we are having right now further perversion of worldview and human relationships, not only modeled for us, but then we're being told that this is how we should be.

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Um, I have a, um, yeah,

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I've got a, I got a screenshot here. Uh, this is from, uh, this morning and, uh, so Dwayne Wade's powerful message on Good Morning America and, uh,

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Dwayne Wade spoke with Robin Roberts about his daughter Ziya's gender identity.

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He has a son. He has a son, um, who has bought into the insanity of our culture and wants to be referred to as a female.

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And so this powerful message, well, what is this?

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What is this powerful message? Well, here's, here's, and we would expect

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Ellen DeGeneres to be super excited about this, but this is, this is the world we live in.

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This is the worldview of the people we work for. Um, there are people close to me who work in secular jobs and they have to, one of their, um, assignments this year is to incorporate and report upon how they're incorporating specific kinds of, of inclusivity, which of course means excluding the old ways and including perversity, sexual perversity, um, and things like that.

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We're all facing this, except I don't, I'm not gonna be facing this, uh, not working here.

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Uh, we as a ministry will, will face exclusion, uh, from, from social media and everything else.

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In fact, I had the first one of my posts, uh, smashed by Facebook. It's funny, they did it three or four days after I posted it and it had already gotten, as I recall, hundreds of likes and comments and everything else.

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And then like three or four days later, it's gone. And it was a little

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Facebook thing I did with a picture of Pete Buttigieg and his, um, illicit lover, um, biblically illicit lover, um, and how he would be introducing him when he became president as America's first gentleman.

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And I just made this straight up statement in a, there is, in no possible biblical worldview is this man a husband to anyone.

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There is no husband here, there is no wife here, there is no marriage here. To say otherwise is to stick your middle finger in Jesus's face.

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If you're a Christian, that's what you're doing. You think you're so wise and you're so cool and Jesus just didn't know.

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I've never understood this. And, and I, I asked, I asked Graham Codrington this and he didn't have an answer.

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Nobody has an answer. Didn't Jesus know that a small percentage, but still a percentage of those crowds that he addressed?

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I mean, if 3 % is the number, uh, in the feeding of the 5 ,000, that's 150 people, 150 people who in that culture were oppressed.

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And he, who rescues us from our oppression, never said a word. In fact, he reestablished and confirmed the bigotries because that's what we're being told.

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It is the bigotries that oppressed these people who was

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Jesus. You see, I'm sorry, but someone like Graham Codrington, uh, who's now gotten into all the gender stuff too.

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And I'll, I'll debate him on that. I mean, uh, there's, there is no way, there is absolutely no way that you can hold this book in your hand and promote transgenderism.

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You can't do it. You, you have to take this book and say, these authors were

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Neanderthals. They were behind the ball, the eight ball. They didn't know what they were talking about. And Jesus was nothing more than the product of his time of his day.

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That you, what else do you have? How can you, how can you look at the

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Bible and not see that the God of this Bible is the creator of all things?

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He made them male and female. That's in the first chapter, second chapter,

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Jesus says it remains true. So I, so people like Graham Codrington, the people who go that direction,

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I have said, give them 10 years and they will not even pretend to think that this is, has any sense of consistency, any higher existence than mere human literature edited over time.

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That's the only way you can go. That's the only way you can go. And we're seeing that, we're seeing that a lot.

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So on the screen here is Ellen DeGeneres and Dee Wade.

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Just, just listen to what's said here at the beginning. First of all, I just, I think it's what every, you know, every parent should be is what you're being right now, which is unconditionally loving your child and supporting your child and whoever they are.

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I mean, unconditionally. Okay. She's, she's not a parent. She never can be because she has chosen not to be.

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In a true sense, she's not going to bring anybody into this world or anything like that. In the natural way of doing things, having a relationship with a man, providing the examples of a male and female, the things that God designed us to do.

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But somehow she knows exactly what parents are to be and what parents should be, unconditional loving of their children, whoever they are, no, whoever they choose to be.

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You know, I am so thankful that my parents didn't just sit back and go, well, who would you like to be?

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I don't mean that my parents forced me into ministry. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.

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So they, they never, ever said a negative word about that. They supported whatever

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I want. I'm not talking about career choices or anything like that. We're talking about who you are as a human being and unconditional love now means unconditional moral bankruptcy.

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So it's, it's, it's unconditional love to not provide guidance.

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Well, first of all, protection to your children from the insanity of the world that would cause this kind of confusion.

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That's first thing, but then it's unconditional love to support the confusion itself and the, the fantasy that you are something that you're not.

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This is, this is unconditional love. These folks don't have a clue what unconditional love is.

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When you're a father and you have a son, a young son, and that young son, maybe you didn't protect them, whatever, but all of a sudden they decide that they want to be a female.

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Your job is to help this young man find out who God made him to be as a man.

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I mean, are they really seriously talking about going the whole route here? We're talking puberty blockers, destroying the boy's body, never be able to be a father, never be able to be a mother, massively increased suicide rates.

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That's what we're talking. That's unconditional love in our society now. Really? No, it's unconditional insanity.

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It doesn't matter how much money you got. He's got all the money in the world and obviously nobody in his life seemingly is able to speak to him and provide him with any kind.

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I'm not talking about the boy. I'm talking about D. Wade here. He's old enough to know better than this, but this is what the insanity of our society is.

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Wokeness creates brokenness. The media doesn't want to talk about it, but there are all sorts of people starting to speak up who went down this road and now they're like, that is messed up.

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Now I am messed up. I'll never be a father. I'll never be a mother.

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I'll never have a natural relationship again. All because I bought into this stupidity and now my health is ruined.

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I have pumped my body full of hormones and drugs and we're actually going to outlaw forms of vaping, but we will, with a, with court authority, allow and force certain parents to allow eight -year -olds to be given puberty blockers, which we know have 10 ,000 times the detrimental impact upon their health.

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Massive increases in cancer and everything else. And yeah, that's okay.

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We have to, we have to be woke. Talk about simply putting your fist in the face of God and saying, we will destroy life.

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You may be the source of life. We will destroy life in the name of our own happiness.

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Even though we really know, if we would stop and think about it, that this is pure stupidity.

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I don't even know what to say. You can tell it is very hard for people in my generation.

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I know there are people my age that have bought into all this stuff. I get it. But for most of us, it's just like, really?

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You're really? Wow. It's stunning. Well, yeah, it's cultic.

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You bet it is. It's very cultic. Yeah. Real quickly, because I've got a big, long thing we're going to be doing today.

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Real quickly. So Pope Francis last week informed us all that tax cuts are sinful.

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And so I'm going to start, and I bet there are some Roman Catholics that would get on this bandwagon.

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I'm going to start a movement to, because see, Francis is not

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Francis the first. I was confused about that at first.

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He's just Francis. If another Pope comes along and chooses the name Francis, they'll be

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Francis the second. And then he'll be referred to as Francis the first, but of course he'll be dead by then, which, well,

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I would think so, but who knows? Maybe he'll resign and then he could resign. The next guy could decide to be

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Francis too, I suppose. I don't know. But the point is he's right now, he's just Francis. And so I'm going to start a movement.

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And I think that we should now be referring to him as Francis the

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Marxist. Because you have, you know, some Papal names are descriptive, like Innocent, who never was, but Innocent.

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But Francis, what does that say? So I think we should just refer to him as Francis the

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Marxist. And all you Roman Catholics who for years have been going, hey, you know, we've got the

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Pope to tell us, we've got the Pope to tell us, and now you're going, oh, but I'm not going to listen to this Pope has to say, you're being inconsistent.

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But I fully understand why. Because your current Pope is a loon. And he's a

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Marxist. And he doesn't understand economics. And his viewpoints will actually exacerbate poverty.

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And, of course, unbiblical, complete contradiction of any meaningful biblical understanding of something called work.

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Fairness in pay, yes, but not equity. There's nothing, there's nothing ever.

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In fact, the one place where Jesus talks about pay, everybody got paid the same, even though people work differently.

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And it was the master's choice to do what he wanted to do. It wasn't, not exactly a

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Marxist perspective. Anyways, but to our Roman Catholic friends, you, you've got, you got a problem.

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You've got a problem. And his name is Francis and he is a Marxist. I am gonna throw out a something here.

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Um, I listened to a 55 minute video.

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Uh, let me see if I can get the name here. I was gonna, I was gonna contact him before, um, before doing the program.

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And I, I just got uh, rather, rather busy and I didn't get a chance to do it, but I I'm, I'm gonna contact, um, this fellow.

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I, I listened to a fellow by the name of Matt Fradd, who is an

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Australian, uh, Roman Catholic apologist of some sort. Um, and he was on a program with a gentleman who identifies on the program.

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I think it's his name is Cameron, Cameron Bertuzzi. Maybe, maybe that's who it is here.

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Um, that he, he identifies as a Protestant, but did not know, uh, what a

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Protestant yeah. Cameron Bertuzzi clearly did not know what a

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Protestant actually is. Uh, seems to be in the

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William Lane Craig general camp, uh, theologically speaking, I guess. Uh, but I listened to it yesterday and I thought about just going through the whole thing.

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Um, because there was so much there, but there are other, other things to do.

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But I would, I would love to actually have Cameron on if he'd be willing to do it. Um, because certainly everything that his

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Roman Catholic, and he said, we're very ecumenical here. Okay. Um, but everything that his

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Roman Catholic guests said, we have responded to literally for multiple decades.

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Um, there, there was, I don't believe there was a single thing, you know, they talked about prayers to saints and to Mary, uh, you know, we've done entire debates on these subjects with leading

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Roman Catholic apologists. Um, but it, it really seems that the interactions that we did over the years are just the younger crowd,

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I guess, has the feeling that if it was done more than 10 years ago, it can't possibly be relevant anymore.

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Because I don't think they were using 1080, uh, cameras or something like that.

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Um, but what really caught me in listening to this was the guy who's supposed to be the

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Protestant who doesn't know why he's a Protestant. And you know, that, that's someone who is, who their boat is within three feet of the shore.

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They're not in the middle of the Tiber. They're, they're within three feet of the shore on the far shore. Um, I, I, I'm going to contact him and see if, if, if he'd be willing to address the same issues and questions here.

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And that might be interesting because I, I just, I don't know how many times we have talked about the reality that a large portion of non -Roman

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Catholics today are only non -Roman Catholics on the matter, on the basis of taste, not on the basis of conviction at all.

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Um, and so anyway, uh, yeah, there we'll, we'll, we'll do something along those, those lines.

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One last thing before we dive into the big subject for the day. And the first we've already spent that first half hour, uh, word came out a couple of weeks ago.

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I didn't talk about it, but, um, it has, it should be in the past now, or let's see today's the 18th might actually still be coming up.

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Uh, maybe it was this coming weekend. Is that what it was? Anyway, um, the reality, yeah, here it is.

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And the date on this, uh, looking real quickly here.

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Uh, I'm not seeing it coming up, but anyway, um, that there was going to be a

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Roman Catholic mass said in St.

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Pierre Cathedral, which was the, the, the big church in Geneva. Um, specifically, uh, where, uh,

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Calvin, uh, preached many of his sermons and, you know,

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I just wanted to make reference to it. We, we know that the vast majority of people in Geneva there, there are sound believers there, but the vast majority of people there have little knowledge whatsoever.

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I mean, you may have seen, I may have even shown on the program that recently, uh, gay activists climbed up on the reformers monument and poured multicolored paint, uh, over the statues.

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Um, Switzerland just, just voted to make homophobia, uh, a crime.

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And so you, you see where the Swiss are going. And so it's not overly shocking that there would be,

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Hey, let's, let's get together. And to be honest with you, it's not really a

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Roman mass. And the reason I say this is the article points out that they're going to invite the

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Protestants to participate. That's not a Roman mass. Rome has said from the start, for as long as I can remember, um, that the mass is, and if you, if you understand anything about Roman Catholic theology, this is the only way it could be, is only for baptized

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Roman Catholics. And so to, to go, Hey, we'll, we'll, we'll just let everybody participate.

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That basically means it's not really a Roman Catholic mass either. It's just an ecumenical feel good thing.

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But if you obviously know anything about Calvin's theology and what he actually wrote, then, you know, he, despite all of that, he would still be more than slightly upset.

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Now, will he know about that? I don't think so. Uh, Calvin is absorbed in, in fellowship and worship with his savior.

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And, um, one of the subjects that came up on that program

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I was just talking about was about, well, you know, I'm just asking, I'm just asking the saints in heaven to pray for me.

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That means you're dragging the saints into all the sinful stuff going on here on earth. Cause you may every single day, there are

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Roman Catholics that ask saints to pray for things for them that would actually be sinful. So what you're saying is that when saints die, they don't get to escape the pollution of this world until the end times,

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I suppose, because they have to be constantly being bombarded with sinful requests.

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Yay. Yeah. There's lots of that in the new Testament. Huh. Anyway. Um, but yeah, you may have seen the, um, um, you may have seen the announcement of this and certainly it saddens us.

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It would be wonderful if 500 years down the road, it's not quite 500 years, but, uh, toward the end of my life, we will be celebrating the events of the 500th anniversary of Calvin's life and ministry.

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And certainly given Calvin's willingness to stand in front of people and keep them from partaking of the

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Lord's supper. Um, there would have, and they had swords, um, there, there would have been significantly more violent reaction of, against Roman Catholicism and its attempt to bring the mass in and all the theology that underlies that.

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I think one of the reasons, well, there's a couple of reasons why Protestants don't really care about this anymore. Uh, A, they don't have a meaningful theology of the cross anymore themselves.

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Um, and B, they know nothing about Roman Catholicism and know nothing about what Roman Catholicism teaches.

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And so when they hear it, they're like, oh, well, that's interesting. Hadn't really, cause they have no convictions that there's, oh, well, that's, that's interesting.

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I hadn't really thought about that way before. Oh, yeah. And that's why this kind of stuff can, can take place.

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And those of us who actually know these things and recognize how central they were in history and realize that many of our, our leaders of the past were willing to give their lives about these things are left shaking our heads and going, those who forget the past are going to be doomed to repeat those things.

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Um, so with all of that said, uh, you'll notice I have some of my, you know,

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I've finally gotten into the flavored water stuff. Well, it's actually good.

33:57

It's actually good. I've got to get used to it because, um, it's a long story that I'm not going to bore you with now.

34:06

We have a lot to get to. Um, I think that the video that was produced by Talking Christianity Apologetics a couple of weeks ago, uh,

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I would just like to say to a bunch of people, welcome to my world. Welcome to what

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I've been dealing with for many, many years now. And it is very encouraging for me to hear, um, other people saying what

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I've been trying to say and have said with a great deal of clarity. Um, when this whole movement really started getting up some steam.

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And, um, that reminds me, I'm going to, uh, grab my Jeffrey Rice, Tyndale House Greek New Testament.

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I haven't shown this to Peter Gurry yet, but he's a young man.

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He could snatch and run. And I don't know, I could catch up with him, but, uh, I'm sure he's never seen a

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Tyndale House Greek New Testament this nice. Um, so we'll have to, I'll have to show that to him.

35:23

Um, and my Anessiolans. So the only thing I don't have is an SPL one, but anyway,

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I'll grab my Anessiolan when I have an opportunity. There was a discussion about how we should deal with the subject textual variation that included

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Dr. Peter Gurry of Phoenix Seminary. Now, Dr. Gurry is actually younger than my son.

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Um, so he is a young man, but he is already widely published. The recent book on myths and mistakes in New Testament text criticism.

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He co -edited that particular work, uh, about the only semi -accessible to layman introduction to CBGM is written by himself and Tommy Wasserman.

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Uh, his dissertation from Cambridge on CBGM is obviously a fuller discussion of that particular subject.

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And, uh, so, uh, and he's also a co -director of the

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Text and Canon Institute out at Phoenix Seminary. They have a big thing coming up this weekend. I'm teaching in Nevada this weekend at, in, um, in the

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Gardnerville area. And, um, so, uh, but in other words, he's doing a lot of work in this particular, uh, this particular area.

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So he was invited on along with James Snap Jr. Now, I don't know what caused

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James Snap to decide that he would aim his artillery at me for about the past 20 years or so, but, but he has, um, but I'm just gonna say straight up, if he sees this,

37:03

I was really impressed with James Snap. Um, I, I felt he was fair.

37:12

I thought the stuff that he had to say, in fact, I just realized I forgot I was going to cue up a really fascinating observation that he made about a early medieval manuscript in comparison to P72.

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P72 is the earliest handwritten copy we have of 1st, 2nd Peter, and Jude. And the number of words different between P72 and the

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NA28 and this medieval manuscript and NA28. It was a very valid observation.

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I think it's an observation that probably mirrors in many ways what

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CBGM would reveal to us, but we won't get into that right now.

37:55

So, so you had Peter Gurry, you had, uh, James Snap Jr. who's, who describes his perspective as a, um, as a form of eclecticism, um, not reasoned eclecticism.

38:10

What was the term that he used? He basically said that his, his methodology is fully eclectic in that he says that the

38:20

Nessie Allen platform isn't really eclectic. It's way too heavily weighted toward a now dated phrase called the

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Alexandrian text. I'm sure he's well aware of the fact that CBGM, uh, has not yet actually established, um, the existence of an

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Alexandrian text to begin with. That's another subject we can get into. Anyway, those were the two textual critics in the conversation.

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And like I said, I thought James Snap's, uh, contributions were extremely helpful.

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Uh, he, uh, vindicated himself quite well. I'd like to get to know the man. I don't think we're ever going to agree directly, but I, I wish

39:06

I am absolutely convinced. Let's put this way. I'm absolutely convinced that James Snap Jr. believes he is seeking to be consistent in everything he's saying.

39:15

And I've got, you've got to honor that. You've got to, even when you disagree. And even when

39:21

I think he's been rather unfair to me over the years, um, maybe he had his reasons.

39:27

Maybe, maybe there was something I said or did in the past that I don't know, but anyways,

39:32

I was impressed. And I would, and obviously we're going to link to this and you can find it yourself as easy to find.

39:39

The only thing I would say to James Snap is he needs to be a little more aggressive. He needs to be a little more aggressive.

39:45

There, there were numerous times where I, I wanted to hear what he had to say about something, but he, there are certain people where that kind of a context just isn't their thing.

39:57

He, by nature, he thinks before he speaks more slowly than some other people do.

40:08

That doesn't have any reflection, unfortunately, in the TV age it does, but it has no meaning for reflection upon a person's actual intelligence.

40:17

In fact, one of the smartest guys I ever met in my life, you would ask him a question and there would be times when he would literally sit there silently for 30 seconds before responding because he was formulating it all his mind.

40:30

Now, when he did, it was a tsunami of information, but in our day, the speed with which you speak and respond is taken as indicative of how well you know the information.

40:43

Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's just simply a personality thing. But James, if you see this, you just got to speak up a little bit more, because there were, there were six or seven times where either

40:55

I could tell you wanted to say something or I wished you had added something, and you just got talked over.

41:01

You gotta, you gotta push a little bit harder. Were you, were you agreeing with that? I was. I just, I, that was the one thing about him that really stood out to me.

41:08

I was going to characterize it as a man who exercised tremendous patience with the conversation.

41:14

And yes, like you, there were a number of times where I really wanted to hear, what does he have to say right now, right smack in the middle of everything?

41:22

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you recognize the name, but he's, he's been sniping at me for decades.

41:28

Yeah. So, but the fact of the matter is, credit where credit is due.

41:34

I, I was, I was impressed. Anyway. And let me, let me just say, by the way, people need to understand something here.

41:46

Before we dive into this, this is, this is a big area. We, we have talked about this area for forever, but more and more people are being brought into it.

42:00

So we continue to address it because it's important. If you take

42:09

James Knapp's material and what he would view the New Testament as the best readings of each of the variants in the

42:19

New Testament. Okay. He tends to, his beginning presuppositions would tend to result in the idea that you're going to have a majoritarian perspective, not majority texts specifically, but it's going to be more majoritarian.

42:43

So there's good, there's sort of a built in, um, preference for wider attestation than for earlier, but unique attestation,

42:55

I think would be a fair way of putting it. Anyway, you take his New Testament, you take

43:00

Tyndale, which basically says it has to be in the first five centuries. We need to have it in the first, in the manuscripts, the first five centuries.

43:10

That's what's what this is. This is based by, which is really very different, um, from where James Knapp would come from.

43:18

And then you take the NA28, which is different from the Tyndale. You can take the

43:23

SBL if you want. I don't have a printed edition of the SBL. Um, have it in Lagos and Accordance, stuff like that.

43:30

Um, you take these texts and I'm going to tell you right now, once again, if you apply the same rules of hermeneutics and interpretation to all of those texts, all those printed collated editions of the

43:55

Greek New Testament, you are not going to have a different faith. You will have a slightly different list of verses that you would go to, to establish particular things, but you will not have a different faith.

44:14

So James Knapp's New Testament is going to be, is going to communicate with clarity the gospel of Jesus Christ.

44:24

So does the NA28. So does the Tyndale. So does the TR. In fact, when you look at the stuff that we constantly beat each other's senseless over, almost none of it has any overwhelming doctrinal, um, weight to it.

44:47

Administration versus fellowship at Ephesians 3 .9. Well, there is a difference. I'm not saying it's not important.

44:54

I wouldn't have written a big, long response to Jeff Riddle if I didn't think it was important, but that's not, it's not going to change your theology.

45:03

The Prick of Adultery is not going to change your theology. The long writing of Mark, if you live in the

45:10

Appalachians, it will, but pretty much every place else it won't. Um, and I would argue strongly that the

45:20

Kamiohonium, since it had no place whatsoever at the

45:27

Council of Nicaea, um, clearly is not the foundation of the biblical doctrine of the

45:34

Trinity by any stretch of the imagination. So you might be hearing me say, and then why have you spent so much time on this?

45:44

Because I seek to defend the text of the New Testament outside of our context, outside of the

45:56

Christian faith, against unbelievers, whether religious or non -religious, unbelievers.

46:06

And so it is important. We need to have a consistent methodology, but it needs to be a methodology.

46:14

And that's why I said there were two textual critics there who each had a differing methodology, Peter Gurry and James Knapp Jr.

46:23

It probably would have been better to just have them talk and to flesh out the specific differences between them.

46:30

I think that would have been useful. That happened a little bit, but there was a third, and I say a third, not a third textual critical position, but there was a third person participating, and that, of course, was

46:47

Dr. Jeffrey Riddle, whom we have addressed many times in this program and played his statements.

46:55

And back in early December, I believe it was, I posted, you may recall, we dealt with the text and canon conference that they had, and we played audio, and we interacted with what was being said, and we made the argument that TR -only -ism, it's not confessionalism, this is not what the confession teaches, it is not what the confession teaches.

47:19

And I think we'll see that today. It is a minority, extreme interpretation of the confessional texts that is in no way, shape, or form demanded by any meaningful interpretation of those texts.

47:36

But it calls itself confessionalism. I hate that because it makes the 1689 look bad.

47:44

Like the 1689 is saying, hey, you know what? God providentially brought the printing press into existence, and then he providentially dropped these certain manuscripts in Erasmus' hand, and a few others in Stephanus' hand, a few others in Bayes' hand, and the result of all of that, even though that was a reconstruction situation, even though anybody who's read anything about Erasmus knows that Erasmus over and over said, well, leave it up to the reader.

48:16

And Jeffrey Riddle likes to talk about the Build -A -Bear Greek text, that's what we have. Erasmus is going, leave it up to the reader.

48:24

He was doing the exact same thing. Doesn't matter, there is no consistency here, absolutely no consistency whatsoever.

48:31

You have a different standard for everybody but yourselves. TR -onlyism is King James -onlyism with one step of Greek thrown in the middle, but it functions in the exact same mindset, and we will see this.

48:44

We will see in a few moments Jeffrey Riddle saying, when you're reading the Textus Receptus, when you read this, you are reading the autographa.

48:53

Even though we can go to Ephesians 3 .9 and go, no, once you've made that commitment, as we pointed out in this conversation, the facts don't matter.

49:06

There is no fact that could be shown to Jeffrey Riddle in this conversation that would change his mind, and he admitted it.

49:14

Yeah. And so Peter Gurry's like, so why are we talking about this? What's the use in talking about this?

49:21

Well, don't you want to convince me? How can I? You've made up your mind, and all facts are irrelevant to you.

49:30

And it was so plainly clear. Very, very useful. Even though, as far as I can tell, the host of the program was on Riddle's side, which is really interesting.

49:42

But that's what this is all about. And so there were only two positions presented.

49:48

The third position is not a textual critical position. And in fact, when you hear Jeffrey Riddle say, we're not trying to reconstruct the text.

49:55

We believe the text has been preserved. So the point is, from their perspective, this printed text, and as James Snapp kept saying, the majority of church history didn't have a printing press.

50:13

How can we have a view of the text that basically could not have possibly been held by anyone before 1500?

50:26

How can you say that's the only position to hold when the

50:33

Council of Nicaea hashed out vitally important things about the person of Christ, and they didn't have this.

50:44

And there is no evidence that this is what they were using. How can you dismiss the thing that really, really, really was shown in this video is the ahistorical nature of Riddle's position.

51:01

And I could call it confessionalism. It's not confessionalism. It's not even close to confessionalism. It's a modern

51:07

TR traditionalism. It's all it is. But it is utterly ahistorical. It does not care what the historical evidence is.

51:17

It doesn't care what's been discovered since the Reformation. It doesn't care about what's going on at the

51:22

Council of Nicaea or Chalcedon. It doesn't matter what text Gottschalk had in his hands. It doesn't matter about Wycliffe or Hus.

51:29

It doesn't matter about all that stuff is irrelevant. What it does do in a frightening fashion is elevate the

51:37

Reformation to a period of revelation. Now, that's scary because I've met

51:46

Calvinists who would go that far. You want hyper -confessionalism?

51:54

You want to see the danger of not recognizing it?

52:01

Preaching here again. Sorry. Two years, not quite two years ago.

52:08

No, it was over two years ago. Good grief. Has it been that long ago? When we took the cruise, not the cruise, the trip to Germany, I came back and I told you all that one of the things that startled our people was how brutally honest

52:26

I was about the deficiencies of the Reformers. First night in Berlin, in my lecture,

52:35

I just lay out the reality that I know that the men, especially

52:43

Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, would never have extended the right hand of fellowship to me.

52:53

They probably would have had me minimally kicked out of the city, if not that imprisoned, if not that executed.

53:04

I know that. I can still appreciate what God did with them, but I also recognize that when

53:11

I read their writings, I'm going to encounter things that are going to trouble me.

53:19

I was reminded about this. Oh yeah, I was going to do this. I didn't do it. I'm getting a bunch of people writing to me who obviously don't know we're on the air right now.

53:40

There's a bunch of stuff going on, so I'm not angry with them. I'm just saying, sorry guys, I can't exactly respond right now.

53:46

We're a little busy. There was a certain individual who made some comments about Reformed Baptists recently, and one of the terms that he used was protest,

54:00

Protestant. I know it's been a couple years now, but I pointed out back then, and I'll point out again, people who go, well, you know, we are

54:12

Protestants, and so it's our nature to protest. That's not where the term came from.

54:19

We don't know our own history. We end up saying really silly things. That's not where it came from.

54:25

I can't tell you how many people I've heard say that. Where'd the term come from?

54:31

There are things called diets, the diet of verms, the first diet of verms, the second diet of verms, the diet of spire.

54:38

These were what we would call meetings of Congress, in essence.

54:45

Meetings of leaders in the Holy Roman Empire who had power over certain areas, electors.

54:55

After the Reformation, there was a period of time when the non -Catholics gained sway, and then when the

55:05

Catholics got power back. Charles, the emperor, once the

55:12

Catholics get power back, he starts rolling back the freedoms that the non -Catholics had given themselves, and in the rules of the

55:24

Holy Roman Empire, when the majority did something, the minority could file a protest.

55:33

Not a stand with a sign outside of Supreme Court protest, but it was a technical term in a legislative sense to try to protect rights of minority groups within the diet.

55:55

And that's where the term came from. The non -Catholics protested the majority action in the diet of the

56:06

Holy Roman Empire. It was a political thing. When I was young,

56:12

I was honestly taught that on October 31st, 1517, there's a church service going on.

56:21

It's a Roman Catholic church service, and Luther walked up to the door during the service and pounded the 95 theses on the door, interrupting the service, and that those 95 theses were all about how

56:34

Rome was wrong. And I guess I figured how Baptists were all right, not knowing anything about church history as a young person.

56:44

But that's the idea. No, that's not what happened. Not even close. As popular as it may be, as the pictures of him pointing to the 95, never happened.

56:56

Never happened. And the term Protestant was a legal judicial term that had to do with, as I recall, it was the

57:06

Diet of Spire. It might have been 1527, 1529. I forget when it was. Didn't even bother looking it up. Look it up yourself.

57:11

You'll see what I'm telling you is the historical fact. So there's all sorts of stuff about the

57:22

Reformation. I was reading an article that a friend of mine posted this week, and it was about Zwingli and Bollinger.

57:32

Now, who were Zwingli and Bollinger? Zwingli was the reformer in Zurich. Now, Zwingli was only a reformer for, even if you put him absolutely concurrently with Luther, he's probably just a little bit afterwards.

57:47

He claimed he was earlier. But let's say 1518. When does he die? Dies at the

57:53

Battle of Kappel in 1531. He does not have a long period of time. And so it's relatively simple to find stuff in his theology that we would go, yes, a reformer's theology.

58:13

There's all sorts of stuff in Luther that most reformed people would go, and of course,

58:21

Lutheranism is Luther interpreted through Melanchthon and through centuries of interpretation of that.

58:27

So there's all sorts of stuff you can find in Luther. But Zwingli held to a form of inclusivism.

58:36

He did. Now, we look at inclusivism today and we go, until we read

58:45

Zwingli, who we respect, even though he drowned

58:52

Anabaptists off the bridge there in Zurich, we have an exceptionally selective view of church history.

59:05

We really do. And it's because of this that when people don't realize the breadth of theological expressions that have been given out there, you go back and you start reading people in history and you're just left going, if you think that what you're going to read is like picking up an

59:30

R .C. Sproul book and it's going to be everything that I believe is going to be said by someone way back then, you're going to be in for a surprise.

59:41

You're going to be in for a big surprise, which is why solo scriptura is so important. But it also helps provide a context for solo scriptura because while we do stand upon the shoulders of giants, we do not stand upon their shoulders by accepting every single thing that they said.

59:58

What becomes clearer and clearer over time is the consistency of scripture, not the consistency of human beings.

01:00:09

And the only way for me to communicate all this is to do a massive study in church history and the theology that comes through that and the threads and everything else, and we would have no audience left at the end of all that,

01:00:27

I can assure you. So one of the problems that we are facing big time here is that in Jeffrey Riddle's position, there is a hyper -exaltation of the

01:00:49

Reformation in such a fashion that, as will be pointed out in the discussion, doing textual criticism was okay up until then.

01:01:01

Once this came into existence, we're done. No reason for it anymore.

01:01:09

It doesn't matter what manuscripts are found. This is it. So there was a providential action of God.

01:01:18

And when you ask, why then? Why not Nicaea? Why not Chalcedon? Why not a period after that?

01:01:28

After the Reformation? Why not the Great Awakening? Why not the conservative resurgence in the

01:01:35

Southern Baptist Convention? No, it was the Reformation. And yeah, the

01:01:41

Reformers never talked about doing this, and they never said they were doing this, and nobody after them really believed that this had actually happened until us.

01:01:49

We've come up with this. But yeah, that's when it happened. And that's our final authority. And that's why you should read what you read in your testament.

01:01:57

And there are people going, hey, that sounds pretty good. And I just want to go, do you really want to take that out into the world?

01:02:07

Because you can't even have a conversation within conservative Christianity with that as your foundation.

01:02:14

You think you're going to take that outside to anybody else? And I guess some people are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do that.

01:02:23

We'll do that. Is there a reason why? Oh, okay. All right. So I am really, really happy to announce that this program that I got last year that I used a couple of times, the one feature that I wanted in it, and it's not like I've opened it up every time.

01:02:41

Who really even looks at what updates anymore? My iPad,

01:02:48

I open it up once a week, and there's 117 updates to do.

01:02:55

But they did an update, and it now does exactly what I wanted it to do, which was

01:03:02

I can now watch a video, and then I might type in a note. I can go back later on and just click on the note, and it takes the video to exactly where it was.

01:03:11

So it's almost as good as Audio Notetaker, but now for video. So it's like, yay.

01:03:17

It's called Note Studio, if you're wondering. Let me click on it here and make sure that... Yeah, Note Studio.

01:03:23

So when someone does a good program, we'll let people know. So it's called

01:03:29

Note Studio. That's what we're going to be using. And so here is...

01:03:34

Let's start off with Jeffrey Riddle talking about... And by the way, things had quieted down a great deal since December.

01:03:45

The reason being I was blocked by everybody in that group. That's what I was going to say.

01:03:50

It was November 3rd you reviewed this. So it was a month earlier. Okay. Yeah, but then...

01:03:56

I didn't review this. I reviewed the TextCAN stuff. And then early

01:04:02

December is when I published the PDF of the

01:04:08

Material on Ephesians 3 .9. I got blocked by everybody, and then

01:04:14

I was informed that a two -hour video response was put out, but I've never seen it.

01:04:21

So they don't want the other side to interact anymore. They've just got their thing. And so, yeah, it gets pretty quiet because you've just got a little group back there and behind closed doors.

01:04:31

And they don't want to debate. That's what they said at the TextCAN thing.

01:04:36

They don't want to debate. It's like, good. I'm glad. I would encourage you not to. But this happened, and there is a clear call to accept this perspective so as to benefit the

01:04:52

Church. And I think it's anything but a benefit to the Church. So let's listen to the definition because each of the gentlemen were given an opportunity to define their position at the start, which is good.

01:05:03

So let's listen to some of that here at the start. Baptist confession of faith. This confessional text position holds that the authoritative text of the

01:05:12

Bible is found in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the

01:05:18

Texas Receptus of the Greek New Testament. We furthermore believe that it is best to use vernacular translations of the

01:05:27

Bible based on these texts and to use a formal correspondence method in making such translations.

01:05:35

This view does not hold that it is our task to reconstruct the elusive original autograph or autographs, but it contends that the true text has been faithfully kept pure in all ages by God's singular care and providence.

01:05:54

Okay, so you don't have to reconstruct it. It's always been there. So this was at Nicaea.

01:06:01

This is at Chalcedon. Wickliffe had it. Huss had it. If it's been pure in every age, that's going to come out and he's going to say, no, no, no, but what else could it mean?

01:06:12

If you're saying, we don't have to reconstruct it. Every word in this book, this is the

01:06:17

Texas Receptus, was reconstructed by Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza. So one of the definitional incoherencies of the ti -only position as being expressed here is, okay, that was reconstructed, but that was the last time.

01:06:36

But it couldn't have been reconstructed if it has been preserved the whole time, see? So words tend to get really squishy here.

01:06:45

So our method stresses preservation rather than reconstruction, and I think that differentiates my position from both that of Peter and that of James.

01:06:56

We believe that there is what Richard Brash has called a practical unificity between the divine originals, the autographs, and what has been preserved in the copies, the autographs, best represented by the printed editions of the traditional text.

01:07:14

Now listen very carefully here. Listen to what is said here. We read the received text, we are reading the autographs, and we do not have to reconstruct them.

01:07:26

Okay, so I want you to hear that, because sometimes, well, you're misrepresenting them, and da -da -da -da -da.

01:07:34

Okay, let's hear. And what has been preserved in the copies, the autographs, best represented by the printed editions of the traditional text.

01:07:44

So when we read the received text, we are reading the autographs, and we do not have to reconstruct them.

01:07:53

With the Protestant Reform— So if this is the autograph, then anything that is found since 1633 is automatically evil, because if it's a departure from anything in here.

01:08:18

So any of the papyri, you know, as he calls them, the much vaunted papyri, etc.,

01:08:23

etc., we don't need any of that. There's no reason to study that stuff, not in the sense of establishing, because here's the autograph, this is it.

01:08:34

Case closed. Where have you seen that before? You saw it in London when

01:08:41

I debated Adnan Rashid, and Adnan holds up the

01:08:47

Arabic Quran, and despite the fact that I've pointed out that there are variations between the text that was originally collated and that of Uthman, his idea is, hey, if this is what

01:09:05

Uthman had, good enough for us, this is it. No questions, we're done.

01:09:11

Same attitude. It's exact same attitude. And hence, there can be no meaningful dialogue between those two positions, because it's just, no, we're not concerned about the facts.

01:09:24

Our position is not based upon evidence. Our position is based upon the conclusion that we've already made.

01:09:31

And that's how that works. Okay? So, we're reading the autographs, do not have to reconstruct them.

01:09:39

All right, let's get into the discussion between all the guys.

01:09:47

And when I get into the second video, I didn't have time to take notes in the second video, so I'm going to use a different program to play it, and I'll be yet to play this faster.

01:10:00

That would be my next hoped for feature, would be a 1 .1,

01:10:07

1 .2 type thing. I can do that with QuickTime, but I can't do it within this program yet.

01:10:13

There might be a way, and I just haven't found it yet. So, we'll see. But let's, in this next section, and I remember,

01:10:25

Dr. Riddle had quoted from Dr.

01:10:31

Gurry's book that he co -authored with Tommy Wasserman at the Text to Canon thing last year.

01:10:39

And he had made the argument that what Dr. Gurry and Wasserman was saying, they're admitting that there is so little early evidence that if this was a national park, that it wouldn't be a topographical map, it would be a watercolor painting.

01:11:02

And I didn't bring the book with me, but if you actually go read the

01:11:10

Wasserman -Gurry book, you will see that they're talking about genealogical stomata.

01:11:19

They're talking about the whole reason for CBGM is that we have a manuscript tradition where the large majority of the manuscripts have been lost over time.

01:11:35

That's what you have with anything from the ancient world. And so, how do we establish relationships, not between manuscripts, between texts?

01:11:48

CBGM deals with texts, not manuscripts. That is a distinction that the vast majority of human beings just don't make.

01:11:54

It's not intuitive. It's counterintuitive. But if you think about what we wish is we had original, this copy, this copy, this copy, this copy, and then this was copied over here, and then we could trace this line, and then this line, and this line.

01:12:10

And then sometimes there's pollution where someone has two copies, and then the line goes down. We wish we had all those steps, but what we've got are just one here, one here, one here, one here, one here.

01:12:21

And what we're trying to do is recognize what those lines are on the basis of coherence.

01:12:29

And there's something called pre -genealogical coherence, which is just the rough numbers.

01:12:36

It's not rough in the sense of an estimate, but just the basic numbers of if you take this manuscript and this manuscript, and you compare them where they differ, what's the percentage of agreements versus disagreements?

01:12:50

Just how much do they agree with one another? And then the more complicated form of coherence, genealogical coherence, is when you then include something called text flow.

01:13:02

And text flow is somewhat subjective. It's not, I think, nearly as subjective as some people would automatically think, but editors look at the readings and they make decisions that say, this reading is derived from this reading.

01:13:20

In some instances, that's really easy to do. In others, it's not. But I'd say in the large majority, it's pretty easy to do.

01:13:30

And so the text flow can give you a general direction between two manuscripts.

01:13:36

Which manuscript has readings that tend to look more like they came from the other one? Now, you can go online.

01:13:44

I'm not going to do this right now. You can go online, and you can access the

01:13:49

CBGM materials, and you can create the text flow diagrams where you can see that between these two manuscripts, 70 % of the time the text flow goes this direction, 30 % the other direction.

01:14:08

Well, that's not always scientific in the sense of specific. It can't be because we're dealing with handwritten manuscripts.

01:14:16

But it does give you a trend upon which you can then start to create relationships.

01:14:23

When you compare chapter after chapter, and this was some manuscripts, book after book, and you start, the computer is able to start seeing these relationships.

01:14:33

So the point in the book that Gurry and Wasserman wrote was that CBGM is not going to give us a computer spit out like when

01:14:50

Apollo 13 was coming back to Earth. They're this far away at this angle, and so they need to burn at this thrust for this long.

01:15:00

Those are specific numbers. You miss those numbers, and you either burn up in the atmosphere or bounce off and die in outer space.

01:15:08

There's nothing you can do about it. We're not talking about that kind of computer analysis.

01:15:14

The data does not allow that kind of specificity. But it can start giving you the watercolor picture of what the relationships are rather than the topographical one that says this high, this high, et cetera, et cetera.

01:15:26

So their point had to do with the production of local stomata, global stomata, coherence.

01:15:37

It's a CBGM thing. Now you would think, wouldn't you?

01:15:48

Wouldn't you think that when you're talking to the author that you might accept the author's interpretation of what the author wrote?

01:15:58

Now, I've experienced where that doesn't happen. Remember when I debated

01:16:03

Robertson Jenis in the late 90s, and he quoted from The Fatal Flaw, and then I'm like, but that's not what

01:16:10

I meant. And he wouldn't accept my interpretation of my own words. So I have encountered people who actually thought that they knew what

01:16:23

I meant in what I wrote better than I knew what I meant in what I wrote. So there are people like that out there.

01:16:31

You just hope you don't get stuck with them, you know, when you're in the window seat. Anyway, so here,

01:16:40

Dr. Riddle is quoting from Dr. Gurry's book, and he won't accept

01:16:47

Dr. Gurry's correction of his misunderstanding. And in the process, Riddle demonstrates he does not understand

01:16:55

CBGM. He does not understand how CBGM works. He doesn't.

01:17:03

That's just a fact. He may criticize it. Everyone so far that I've encountered that made fun of CBGM couldn't tell me the difference between pre -genealogical and genealogical coherence either.

01:17:16

And if you can't tell those, you don't know what CBGM is about. So let's watch and learn.

01:17:24

Watch and learn. You know, I read, when I was at the Texan Canon Conference last

01:17:31

October, I read a quote from Gurry and Wasserman's book, in which they talked about the difficulties, the challenges, just historically, of attempting to reconstruct anything, given the paucity of evidence.

01:17:52

And if I could read just a little bit of what they said.

01:17:58

This is from Peter Gurry and Tom Wasserman's book on the CBGM. They said, what is left behind are fragments, chance survivals from the past.

01:18:10

We are trying to piece together the puzzle with only some pieces. In the case of textual criticism, this means that we have only a selection of the manuscripts that once existed, and sometimes incomplete scripts.

01:18:27

And then they go on to say, it is more like a watercolor painting of a great national park than a topographical map.

01:18:38

We might be able to identify key landmarks from the watercolor, but we would not want to use it to find our way through the forest.

01:18:47

Yeah. Can I clarify that, Jeff? Sure. Because I have a feeling you're going to go somewhere it was not intended.

01:18:53

When you're saying it's a watercolor, right? What are we talking about is a watercolor? Are we saying the original text is a watercolor?

01:19:00

No, we're not. What we're saying is attempts to map the relationship of manuscripts genealogically, that map is more like a watercolor map than a detailed topographic map of how our manuscripts are related.

01:19:13

If that quote is given in the context of saying, see, they don't think we can get the original text, that's just a misreading of what we're saying.

01:19:20

What we're talking about is genealogy, right? And attempts to map the relationship of manuscripts that we have, which has been done for hundreds of years in text criticism, right?

01:19:28

And what we're warning against people is saying, hey, these diagrams in CBGM look really detailed, be careful that you don't read them as some kind of, you know, photocopy of what actually happened, right?

01:19:40

They're not, they can't be that specific, because we've lost too many manuscripts in the process.

01:19:47

And again, the problem, we don't know how many we've lost, right? That's not a metaphor about the original text. I can test out the authorial intent, because I'm talking to the author.

01:19:57

I appreciate your clarification there. But in the context, though, you were also talking about the paucity of evidence.

01:20:08

We only have some of the pieces. Some of the pieces for what, though,

01:20:13

Jeff? Some of the pieces for what? What's the puzzle in our metaphor? Some of the pieces for reconstructing the text.

01:20:21

Some of the puzzles for reconstructing the relationship of manuscripts. But isn't that reconstructing the text?

01:20:27

No, you can reconstruct the text without knowing how every single manuscript is related to every other single manuscript. Of course you can, yeah.

01:20:33

The better we can do it, the better confidence we might have. But isn't the purpose of, isn't the purpose of reconstructing the relationships among manuscripts to trace a line of descent to get back to as close as you can the original?

01:20:48

If you know who my parents are, does it matter that you don't know who their grandchildren are? Or not?

01:20:55

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Now listen, now listen to Riddle's response, because he does not understand

01:21:01

CBGM. He does not understand the concept of coherence. He doesn't understand stamata. He doesn't understand how this process works, even though he said he read the book.

01:21:11

And what I think this might illustrate is how tradition, you know, if you think that CBGM is some evil, terrible, horrible thing, and people think that since I've talked about it,

01:21:22

I've tried to introduce people to it. I'll be talking about it up in Gardnerville, Menden this weekend.

01:21:28

I'll be doing a layman's introduction to CBGM, just surface level. Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you to tears, but I want you to understand basically what's going on with it.

01:21:38

Because I've spoken positively about it, because at the very least, even if you don't like it, the amount of data that is now available to you, if you haven't played around with the

01:21:49

CBGM modules for Acts, for example, and Lord, please, Mark, soon, please, quickly, then you've just got no idea how much information is available on the manuscripts and their relationship to one another.

01:22:06

So if that's all it was, you could disagree with the underlying presuppositions, but the information is incredible.

01:22:14

I really appreciate the work that's going on in CBGM. My question is, let's improve it.

01:22:23

Let's make sure, especially the historical, there's a sense in which

01:22:31

CBGM somewhat dehistoricizes the text. It breaks the connection between the manuscript and the text that it contains and the context in which it was written.

01:22:41

And my work in does that really end up having a negative impact? And I haven't come to any conclusions on that yet.

01:22:52

But the point is, you can come at something with such a negative bias that you end up not even hearing what's being said.

01:23:04

And I think that's the case here. Dr. Riddle doesn't get, and he's talking to the author, okay?

01:23:11

And the author is saying, I'm talking about genealogical relationships. I'm talking about the relationships of texts, not manuscripts, but texts to one another, determined by the analysis of their readings.

01:23:27

And so he gives an answer. Let me back it up just a second here. He gives an answer about, can you know my grandparents without knowing their grandchildren, which is a relationship answer.

01:23:43

Now listen to what Riddle says, because it demonstrates he doesn't understand what the answer was actually saying.

01:23:48

Grandchildren are? We're not talking about people. We're talking about manuscripts. But we're talking about genealogy of manuscripts, right?

01:23:56

So if you know who my parents are, does it matter if you don't know how their grandchildren are related? Okay. Dr.

01:24:03

Curry is right, though he said the word manuscripts, which I'm sure he'll say it was late at night.

01:24:10

Because that's a no -no. It's not manuscripts. It's texts. But so did, and maybe he was just taking that from Riddle.

01:24:21

But the point is, here the author is telling somebody else, no, that's not what we're talking about.

01:24:29

And it is inappropriate to apply our words to the reconstruction of the original text.

01:24:35

We're talking about something else. But Dr. Riddle won't accept it.

01:24:42

So is the purpose, is the purpose that a CBGM just to describe existing manuscripts?

01:24:49

And what else could it be? Did you hear what he said? What else could it be? Because you can't describe manuscripts that we don't possess or texts that we do not possess.

01:25:01

What else could it be? This is a case where you got to deal with the cards you've been dealt. And one of the points here is that we have a deck of cards that is minimally 10 times taller than the deck they had in the 16th century.

01:25:21

What do you do? Riddle's position says you get rid of those cards you got since the 16th century.

01:25:28

That's the only possible logical outcome of what's being said.

01:25:34

Well, what it could be, what it would have been in the 20th century, was an attempt to discover the autograph.

01:25:41

No, he does not understand the point that's being expressed to him.

01:25:46

He just doesn't. In the 20th century, it would have had to... See, there had been an earlier discussion about initial text,

01:25:55

Ausgang's text, autograph, et cetera, et cetera. And there had been an interesting conversation.

01:26:00

Dr. Greer had pointed out, well, look, if you don't like one perspective, take Tindall House. They're trying to get back to the autographs, et cetera, et cetera.

01:26:09

There had been a discussion about that and disagreement over where not all critics are on the same page as to what they're looking for.

01:26:20

Dr. Greer had gone through how certain people have this perspective, certain people, you know, Michael Holmes versus this person, that person.

01:26:27

It was interesting. I invite you to go listen to it. It's well worth the time to do so.

01:26:33

But there is a... There's seemingly, in the TR -only position, you have to conflate categories to get your system to work because those categories continue to be conflated even here.

01:26:46

Well, that's your initial text. So the one reconstructed text in the CBGM, as you may know, is what?

01:26:52

Is the initial text. So there is one reconstructed text in the CBGM, and it is the initial text, which again, the editors of the

01:27:00

ECM are explicit in saying they think there is no reason to think there is a gap between their reconstructed initial text, the

01:27:06

A text, and the author's text. You might think there's a reason to think there's a gap, but they don't.

01:27:12

Now, you see, I'm watching this. Are you watching this? No, I'm watching. I'm looking right above Peter Greer, and there's poor

01:27:19

James Knapp, and he's like, I want to get in here.

01:27:26

How do I get in here? James, you just got to get in there, guy. In person, evidently on camera,

01:27:35

James Knapp is just way too nice. You just got to time when you're going to get, you've got to step on the last guy's last syllable in a situation like this.

01:27:46

It's an acquired skill. I'm not making fun. Like I said,

01:27:52

I was really, really impressed with James Knapp and all of this, and Peter Greer, obviously. But that's up to you.

01:27:59

Along the way to that text, though, is the extrapolation of relationships among manuscripts, which is very important.

01:28:06

I'm not trying to deny that, right? I'm just saying it sounds like Jeff wants to read our metaphor there as the painting or the puzzle is the original text, and it's not.

01:28:14

In the metaphor we're trying to use there, the painting or the puzzle is that map of manuscript relationships, right?

01:28:22

In some textual traditions of, say, classical authors, you can develop quite a detailed genealogical map.

01:28:30

I mean, I was focusing more on your emphasis in that passage, and we don't have to parse what you wrote.

01:28:39

It's what you wrote, but your emphasis in that passage on actually how little evidence we have.

01:28:49

You say in the case of textual criticism that this means that we only have a selection of the manuscripts that once existed, and sometimes incomplete manuscripts.

01:29:01

But we still have a lot, right? And you only need one good one to have a good text.

01:29:07

I always try to remind my students of that, right? It's easy to think, oh, if only we had 10 more manuscripts. Well, I mean, sure, which of us wouldn't want more manuscripts and more evidence to look at?

01:29:18

But to have a good authoritative text, you only need one good authoritative manuscript, right? And I think we have more than that.

01:29:25

Agreed, agreed. That's why I believe with regard to affirmation of the textus receptus, that looking at the empirical evidence and finding that a passage doesn't have a lot of extant external support doesn't necessarily negate its value or its authenticity.

01:29:45

But what if there's a lot of extant evidence on the other side? I see this as a challenge, and I see you guys are both approaching things from a reconstructionist position.

01:29:57

I'm the only person here that's not coming from a reconstructionist position, but a preservationist position.

01:30:04

But this seems to be a fundamental problem with the reconstruction method is you only have the things that are extant.

01:30:15

The thing about this for just a minute, where did this come from? It's TR. How much material did

01:30:24

Erasmus and Stephanus and Beza? Because those are the only meaningful inputs.

01:30:32

There's no I'm unaware of any meaningful manuscript input before the 1633

01:30:41

Elsevier edition, which is pretty much the

01:30:46

TR develops between the initial edition from Erasmus.

01:30:53

So it's about 115 years, give or take, round numbers. So there's no more manuscript input.

01:31:04

So how many manuscripts do we have here in comparison to how many manuscripts we have here?

01:31:12

So the guy who says you need to use this, that had 20, 25 very late manuscripts, none before the turn of the millennium, is complaining that the editors of this are using a 250 times that amount of material.

01:31:44

And not even including versional stuff. So let's just stick with the Greek. 250 times that amount of material that goes as much as 800 years earlier than the earliest used here.

01:31:56

And this is based on few manuscripts, but this is preserved. And I think he gets away with that because this just floats down out of heaven.

01:32:09

This is providentially, see, and the angels were involved.

01:32:15

And you don't have to worry about all of those times where Erasmus said, it could be this, it could be that. You don't have to worry about when

01:32:23

Beza goes, well, there's multiple attestation for this when he actually only had Bezae Canterburgiensis and was looking at Stephanus, and Stephanus also had that, but he didn't know

01:32:33

Stephanus had that. All that historical stuff that demonstrates that this is a reconstructed text, we don't have to worry about that.

01:32:43

That has been providentially brought down on the angelic wings.

01:32:49

And so it doesn't have to fit in the same categories as this here.

01:32:55

So there you go. To study and, you know, when it comes to,

01:33:01

I read, in thinking about getting together today, I read

01:33:06

James's very helpful research. Okay, next section is

01:33:12

Kamiohanium. That's very important. I think that really illustrated some stuff.

01:33:18

So before we do that, we've already gone for an hour and a half.

01:33:24

And so I warned Rich about this. And I said, remember those old commercials we had from around 2002?

01:33:32

We still got those someplace. And so we're going to take a brief break, stretch our legs, and we'll come back and we'll continue this.

01:33:44

So let's jump into that. Breaking news from the

01:33:58

White House and the issue, gay marriage. For a lot of people, you know, the word marriage was something that evokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs.

01:34:07

I think same -sex couples should be able to get married. The NAACP has passed a resolution endorsing gay marriage as a civil right.

01:34:15

This comes two weeks after the president announced his support for same -sex marriage. Under the guise of tolerance, our culture today grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.

01:34:28

Anyone opposing or questioning this is quickly shouted down, called a bigot, a homophobe, a hate monger, threatened and accused of discrimination.

01:34:37

It's become commonplace to see people who take a biblical stand against homosexuality ostracized to the point of losing their job.

01:34:43

How soon will it be before we will also see people losing their freedom? Now more than ever, Christians need to be equipped to be an approved workman of God, correctly dividing the word of truth, as we are told in 2

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And don't forget to search for other resources like debates and past dividing lines dealing with this very provocative issue.

01:35:40

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01:36:39

Thank you. Answering those who claim that only the King James Version is the Word of God, James White in his book,

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01:38:47

All right! We're back, and we are listening to an encounter that took place a little while ago on Talking Christianity Apologetics.

01:39:00

There were two textual critics involved, Dr. Peter Gurry and James Snapp Jr.,

01:39:08

who I just noticed. I'm just now looking at this, and there's a Captain America shield on the wall behind James Snapp.

01:39:16

I didn't see that. Who would have known? And I'm thinking that almost looks like a weight rack on the right -hand side.

01:39:30

Hmm. I had not looked, but they went late into the night.

01:39:35

They went like one o 'clock in the morning, because they're on the East Coast. But we're listening to a discussion of textual variance.

01:39:48

Remember what I've said for a long time. TR -onlyism is not a textual critical methodology.

01:39:56

TR -onlyism cannot produce a text. It can only promote a text.

01:40:03

It has to have a pre -existent text that it ignores its history of.

01:40:09

It cannot defend its history because its history to come into existence, all the historical evidence demonstrates that this is a reconstructed text.

01:40:20

There is no single manuscript in the world that reads like this.

01:40:26

Therefore, this is a reconstructed text. So for you to stand around and say, we reject

01:40:31

Reconstructionism. If you believe in Reconstructionism, all your people can become Roman Catholics, which could be said later on.

01:40:38

Well, not said. That's why people are leaving and becoming Roman Catholics. When your own text is reconstructed, it is one of the many incoherencies of TR -onlyism, which is why it's indefensible in debate, as will be demonstrated especially in this.

01:40:58

Now, what's about to start is the discussion of the Kamiohonium. What's interesting here is that when talking about the

01:41:08

Prick of Adeltery, which is normally called the PA, Longer Ending of Mark, James Knapp, who has majoritarian emphasis in his weighting of sources in his eclectic methodology, has written in defense of the

01:41:28

PA and Longer Ending of Mark. But he has also written, and this is where he's consistent anyways, he's also written in demonstration of where the

01:41:41

Kamiohonium came from. And he's right. The time period in which it arises, it arises in Latin manuscripts.

01:41:51

It is a gloss, an explanation. Many of these manuscripts very frequently have glosses in them.

01:42:03

What's interesting is the fact that there isn't an interpenetration into the

01:42:13

Greek manuscript tradition from the Latin for quite some time, even after it has become prevalent in the

01:42:19

Latin manuscripts, which is a good thing, actually, when you think about it. Anyway, so on the

01:42:26

Kamiohonium, you have Gurry and Knapp on the same page, basically, against Riddle, whereas on the others.

01:42:39

But again, remember what I said earlier. You list these texts, the

01:42:48

PA, Longer Ending of Mark, they do not change the faith.

01:42:57

They just don't. This has to be emphasized. That does not mean that they are not important things to study, but they do not change the faith.

01:43:09

Okay, so let's listen to some of the Kamiohonium stuff. I'm going to have to cut some things out, or we're going to be here for a very, very, very long time.

01:43:20

I think YouTube has a limitation, so. ...article on the Kamiohonium. And, you know, there are only, what, five manuscripts?

01:43:34

This is the first one, five, seven. And that's not a lot. I mean... I want to base a position on what we don't have, though.

01:43:44

So I'm just saying... ...base a position on what we do have. I'm just saying, I think a lot of people who are laymen, when we talk about this, a lot of times they're thinking, well, there are thousands of manuscripts that exclude the

01:44:00

Koma that are, you know, and we have ones from the first century, the second century, the third century, and...

01:44:08

What would we need to convince you it's not original, Jeff? Because I kind of suspect there's nothing that would, right?

01:44:14

Probably not. Let's catch that. Let's catch that. What would you need,

01:44:19

Jeff, to be convinced that it's not original? And then Peter's like, I'm assuming there's probably really nothing.

01:44:28

And Jeff's like, yeah. Yeah, I'm not open to discussion of this.

01:44:35

I mean, obviously for Peter and I, if all of a sudden we found, let's say we, let's say they're renovating an ancient site in Italy.

01:44:52

And because of the way in which a room was sealed off, it was sealed off with almost no humidity in it.

01:45:02

And hence there are manuscripts in there from the middle of the third century.

01:45:11

Greek manuscripts have not been touched and have survived. That's why they survive in the desert and don't survive in other places.

01:45:20

And James Knapp made a very, I think it's one of the most important points on that subject, which we haven't gotten into.

01:45:26

But again, this could be the indication of the soon coming of Armageddon, is that I've said numerous very kind things about James Knapp today.

01:45:37

I think we would actually enjoy having dinner together. I really do, because just his beard alone is just pretty, pretty super stuff.

01:45:48

But I do want to find out about the Captain America thing. So it's still there.

01:45:54

Anyway, so let's say we found in that treasure trove of manuscripts three manuscripts of 1

01:46:07

John from the third century that contain the

01:46:12

Kamiohonium as a natural part of the text. Not written in the margin, direct natural part of the text.

01:46:23

For Peter Gurry and I, and for James Knapp, that would be highly relevant.

01:46:30

Irrelevant to Jeffrey Riddle. But what if we found the same treasure trove?

01:46:39

Ancient manuscripts from a location we've never found stuff from before. 1

01:46:45

John, third century, papyri. No comma to be found. Any impact on Jeffrey Riddle?

01:46:54

Nope, because his position is not based upon facts. It's not based upon evidence.

01:47:00

It's, I've got my text. I'll do with it whatever I need to do with it to defend it. So the rest of us would be impacted by that.

01:47:12

And this is one of their arguments. Well, I don't want my New Testament changing. We want a

01:47:17

New Testament that reflects what the apostles wrote. That's the big difference. That is the big difference.

01:47:24

The TR -Only position is saying, this is what the apostles wrote. Don't question it.

01:47:30

Don't question it. This is it. You're not allowed to. And how is that different than Adnan Rashid holding up his

01:47:41

Arabic Quran saying, here it is. Don't question it. Arguments from authority have that nature.

01:47:52

So why does it matter? It's a red herring. Well, no, it matters because the point is that—

01:48:00

Yeah, that got split up, and I apologize. So— Red herring.

01:48:07

No, it matters because— Right, get in your position. —proper century. What would we need to convince you it's not original,

01:48:16

Jeff? Because I kind of suspect there's nothing that would, right? Get in your position. Probably not. Yeah, so why does it matter?

01:48:22

It's a red herring. Well, no, it matters because the point is that there's not enough extant evidence, empirically, to verify what is authentic.

01:48:38

Well, why should you get to tell me how much evidence is enough? I mean, we have hundreds of manuscripts that don't have it in Greek, and none of them are pre -Middle

01:48:48

Ages. I think we don't have hundreds.

01:48:53

I mean, most of them are after the 10th century. Well, yeah. And there are 500, 700.

01:49:00

So I'm just saying it's not a lot. But then there are hundreds after that that don't have it. Hundreds.

01:49:06

So if you want to say the text has been kept here in all ages— It's maybe 250, I think. No, we have over 500 manuscripts.

01:49:13

Just to—regarding the quantities involved—yeah, about five have it in the text, and there are little quirks, even within that text, of whether they do have the articles or that they don't.

01:49:26

So if you're looking and you're saying— if you're going to say that the Western Confession of Faith requires the comma johannium to be preserved, exactly down to the last detail, the form must be kept pure in all ages, and that means exact replication, then—

01:49:41

No, it doesn't mean—that's the problem, though. That kept pure in all ages from a confessional perspective doesn't mean replicated exactly in all ages.

01:49:51

So you're saying it doesn't refer to the exact replication of the text? Does it mean just something that gets across? No, it means the divine preservation of it, that God preserved it, even if you don't have an extant replication of it.

01:50:09

So would you—is your position— See, the James Snap is expressing the same frustration that we all would, because words are supposed to have meanings.

01:50:21

If you're going to say it's pure in all ages, if you're going to say it has been preserved in all ages, and then turn around and say, okay, yeah, there are lots of differences between— when it does finally show up, whether the article's there.

01:50:35

And that's one of the things I noticed, and I've talked about this before. Just before Codex Manfortianus was published online in high -quality digital photography,

01:50:48

I had access to it in the reading room at the Trinity College in Dublin. And one of the things that I immediately noticed in looking at it was the variations that exist between even that, which was relevant to Erasmus's insertion of it into his third edition, even that and what's in the

01:51:09

TR. So where is it perfect? Where does that come from?

01:51:17

How do these words have meaning? And of course, Snap, not being from a

01:51:22

Reformed perspective, is probably sitting there going, I'm really getting tired of having a

01:51:29

Baptist confession that was primarily, in most of its aspects, built off of the

01:51:37

Westminster Confession with the Savoy and a few things like that, having influence later on from the 17th century, determining what the final text of the

01:51:46

New Testament is supposed to be, when none of those individuals who wrote that were textual scholars, or even had access to 1 ,500 of the information that I have.

01:51:59

And there is a reason to be frustrated by that. There really is. Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, go ahead.

01:52:05

Just a moment. How can you say that you're a preservationist when you're arguing for readings that are not preserved?

01:52:12

They are preserved. They're not Greek texts! We're talking about a Greek text! That's what the Westminster Confession of Faith is talking about, isn't it?

01:52:20

Does it say the Greek text, except where it's not preserved in the Greek, but it is preserved in these little versatile passages that we kind of like?

01:52:29

That's not what it says. It's talking about exact replication. If you're going to say, on doctrinal grounds, it's been kept pure in all ages, and that means the exact form, how can you then just throw away all the

01:52:41

Greek evidence that you have and point in a different direction? It means that it was preserved providentially so that...

01:52:49

Where? ...so that it could be preserved in a text that would be printed during the

01:52:57

Reformation and post -Reformation period, become the basis for all the vernacular translations of the

01:53:03

Bible, How would that have come up with this position? ...become useful in the spread of the Gospel? You couldn't hear what

01:53:10

James Snapp said there. Well, yes, he does need a better microphone. But what he said was, how could it have been preserved prior to the printing press?

01:53:22

He's going to expand upon this a little bit later on, but he makes a very, very good point. The TR -onlyism can only exist after the printing press.

01:53:31

There's no other way to do it, because the reality that everyone faced prior to the printing press was the existence of variation because there are no two manuscripts that are identical to one another.

01:53:44

And people today are so accustomed to cut and paste and to our modern situation that they struggle to wrap their mind around what it was like before the modern period, when you did not have that photocopy possibility.

01:54:05

And the TR -onlyism is a modernistic, it depends upon modernistic presuppositions that no one before the invention of the printing press would have ever been able to comprehend.

01:54:19

Wait, you're telling me that the final authority is going to be in a text made by a machine a hundred years from now that's not identical to any of the manuscripts we have right now?

01:54:39

No, they wouldn't have any way to even begin to cogitate upon such a thing.

01:54:45

And that's why I say it's ahistorical, because it doesn't care about what manuscripts were being carried by the church fathers at the

01:54:56

Council of Nicaea who are dealing with issues such as the very deity of Jesus Christ.

01:55:03

They don't care. No, they don't care what was going on back then. That's way, way, way, way, way back then.

01:55:08

That's too far. No, no, no. Reformation. The guys we read all the time. This is what happens when you're reformed and you lose connection with the history before that.

01:55:19

It really is. It really is. It's dangerous. The point wasn't,

01:55:27

James, to talk about the number of manuscripts that hold the coma. Actually, it is preserved, that particular example, in some extent, manuscripts.

01:55:36

The point was to talk about the paucity of early manuscripts of any sort that are references to 1

01:55:45

John. This settled on me a couple of years ago when

01:55:51

I heard Dan Wallace talking about the coma Ionaum. At the time,

01:55:57

I hadn't looked much at it and don't consider myself an expert, necessarily, about it now. But I simply asked him, well, how many manuscripts do we have?

01:56:08

How many early manuscripts do we have of 1 John in a

01:56:13

Q &A, in a presentation? Okay, there's some other things. Let me show how this works.

01:56:19

I'm very happy I can now do this. And boom. Yeah, go ahead. And I'd really like to hear your answer on this.

01:56:27

Given your position on your own position being confessional, right? So the impression I've gotten from talking to confessional bibliologists is that there's no evidence that could change your conclusion because your conclusion doesn't start from evidence, right?

01:56:41

In your mind, is there any point in people on your side actually talking to people on my side?

01:56:48

Because usually when it comes down to it... Let's remember something, folks. Once...

01:56:55

Remember, when they announced they were going to do the Texan Canon Conference, I offered to fly there at my own cost to debate their two primary speakers on this topic.

01:57:11

What? Yeah, he's... Oh, yeah, Jeff Rose, one of the two of them. On this topic to start their conference off.

01:57:20

And of course, they said no. And then once the audio recordings were distributed, were made available, and I started interacting with what was said, and then especially once the issue of Ephesians 3 .9

01:57:36

came up. And I wrote, I think it's a 27 -page paper on the issue from what their perspective is saying about Ephesians 3 .9.

01:57:50

What did they do? They stopped talking to me. They shut it down. And so it's a completely meaningful question.

01:57:58

Why should we be having this discussion? Now, from our perspective, from my perspective, the reason we're having this discussion is mainly as a warning.

01:58:07

It's a warning to my fellow Reformed believers that it's possible to be

01:58:13

Reformed and lose your balance. To abandon a meaningful...

01:58:20

Now, the vast majority of Reformed scholars do not buy into this stuff. Now, the vast majority of Reformed scholars have never heard of it, have never encountered it.

01:58:29

But this is not what you're going to be taught at RTS, any campus, or other places like that.

01:58:38

But you go into any... If I post anything, almost anywhere on Facebook, the followers of this perspective will land on top of me.

01:58:54

I can post something about cycling on Facebook, and someone will comment about the textual issue from this perspective.

01:59:02

They're zealous. They're very, very zealous. But the question is a proper question from Dr.

01:59:11

Gurry. What do you want to accomplish here? What I found interesting when you first linked me to this video was that Dr.

01:59:21

Riddle is here at all. Because as I recall, Pastor Truelove was fine with the idea of doing the debate.

01:59:28

It was Dr. Riddle that vetoed it. Right. So I was surprised that he... Well, this isn't a debate, technically.

01:59:35

Well, I'm surprised that he's involved in this at all. Yeah, I was too. I was too. I was too. I get this response that, well, we're confessional, and you just don't understand our presuppositions, which to me sounds a lot like just saying, hey, you're never going to understand us until you accept our view, at which point then

01:59:51

I want to say, well, okay, then fine if that's your view, but then there's no point in us actually talking about it.

01:59:57

Does that make sense? Would you disagree with that? I hear you, but I mean, don't you want to convince me of your position?

02:00:04

I mean, no. You don't? I mean, I would like to, but I don't have any hopes. I mean, frankly, I've got a full -time job and stuff, so I figured...

02:00:12

I haven't lost that much sleep over your personal convictions about this, but I mean,

02:00:19

I do think it is... Did you catch that? Did you see that?

02:00:26

Let me roll that back here, just for Peter's sake. Because I'm a cat owner myself, so...

02:00:34

Sleep over your personal convictions about this, but I mean... And right there we have...

02:00:40

Okay, I need to find out from Peter the name of the cat that made the appearance in the film here, but that would happen to me, believe you me.

02:00:51

The toughest thing for me to do this from home would be we have a cat named... I call him

02:00:57

Coper. It's technically Cobra. Does anyone really care? But I call him

02:01:02

Coper, and when he comes in from outside, he is just a real vocalizer, okay?

02:01:10

He wants everybody to know that he's there, and it would make, especially something long like this, almost impossible because he's just so loud.

02:01:19

I have the cat that wants to lay on the keyboard while you're in the middle of typing. Oh yeah, oh yeah. He wants your fingers and he will have them.

02:01:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's... So we now know that Dr. Gurry is a cat person, and man, a lot of people hate cat people.

02:01:34

I mean, when I say I've got two cats and no dogs, they're like, well, we've had dogs before.

02:01:40

The simple fact of the matter is we can leave our cats at home when we travel, and they will be there when we get back.

02:01:46

Dog, not so much. Remember that time when I debated Staples in Southern California and I had to drive back that night because Lexi had broken through the door?

02:01:59

Yeah, yeah. That's what happens when you have dogs. I mean, I do think it is...

02:02:06

I mean, I don't think it's an insignificant matter. I mean, this is about... We're talking about Scripture.

02:02:12

We're talking about the Word of God. And I think it does have huge implications pastorally, experientially.

02:02:23

You know, we're talking about... Let's go back to the Tyndall House Creek New Testament. Is the

02:02:29

Prick of Pei Adulteri part of the Word of God or not? They have relegated it to the footnotes.

02:02:37

I mean, do you think that... That's the assumption. They've relegated it to the footnotes where I could just as well say, but your

02:02:43

Bible elevates it to the Word of God, where it shouldn't be. See, you've already assumed the conclusion.

02:02:50

Aside from many theoretical discussions of that, do you think that the Prick of Pei Adulteri is

02:02:56

Scripture? I do not. You do not. So, see, you and I are in the same position, right?

02:03:02

You think I'm reading a text that is faulty at that point, and I think you are reading a text that is faulty at that point, and several others, right?

02:03:10

Okay, so my question to you is, is there any point us even discussing it if the presuppositions are so significant that I can't even seem to understand your position, or at least

02:03:20

I can't even, like... You see what I'm saying? Like, every time I talk to confessional bibliologists, there usually comes a point where they say, it's because I'm confessional, right?

02:03:29

And I say, I get that, and I'm trying to say that your confession is wrong at this one point. Now, the only reason

02:03:36

I went that far is, I just want to say that's not what the confession says. I just want to make sure everyone understands that those of us who believe that confessions are vitally important should not be painted into this camp.

02:03:53

The vast majority of people who hold the 1689 London or the Westminster Confession of Faith do not become this tightly wound in a tight logical circle to where we attribute to the framers a perspective that would require them to have information they did not possess.

02:04:14

This has been my criticism from the start, that the framers, whether it's

02:04:19

Westminster or the London Baptist Confession, would not have come to the conclusions that these men are coming to had they had the information that we have today.

02:04:28

It's ahistorical. It's an abuse and misuse of their position.

02:04:34

So I want to make sure that everybody gets that. There was an observation that James Snapp made, and so let me jump to that one and pick that up.

02:04:43

Yeah, sorry, James. On the question of what is Scripture, clearly what is genuinely

02:04:51

Scripture was Scripture before the invention of the printing press. But it seems like if you define things according to the

02:05:00

Westminster Confession of Faith saying that pure means the form, not just the message, but the form, not that, for instance, there are variants where lots of manuscripts will say, he said, but the

02:05:14

TR might say, Jesus said. Just like the NIV will sometimes spruce things up and make it more specific.

02:05:20

It's a natural tendency. Without the printing press in the equations, okay, well, it's just going to make, just make

02:05:28

Gutenberg disappear. How do you come up with your position? Because it seems like whenever I look at Confession of Bibliology, it's completely interchangeable with the

02:05:39

TR is always right, and the TR exists because of the printing press. Take the printing press out of the equation, and how do you possibly reach the position that every reading in the

02:05:50

TR is always right? Because when you, you said, I believe, something like, when you're reading the copies, you're reading the original.

02:05:58

Well, if you read the copies of 1 John, no CJ, except for the ones that are influenced by Latin.

02:06:06

When you look at Latin, you can see the CJ follows like a puppy dog, the transposition that comes along in verse 8.

02:06:13

And you can see, and for this part I have to throw you to my blog articles, the five essays on the

02:06:18

Common Johannium, starting with Cyprian and the Common Johannium, where you can see how it would naturally arise as a gloss, an interpretation of the three, what we know, with the

02:06:29

CJ as the earthly witnesses, throwing an allegorical interpretation on that, once they're transposed to water, blood, and spirit.

02:06:40

After that transposition comes into place, then comes the interpretation, oh, water is the father, blood obviously the son, and spirit obviously the spirit.

02:06:48

And we see that happening in Old Latin, we don't see it happening in Greek, we don't see it happening anywhere where the transposition doesn't happen.

02:06:56

So you can pretty easily zoom in on that transposition and see how the

02:07:01

CJ emanates from the same transmission line, which isn't in Greek, in other words, isn't in the original text, but is in the

02:07:09

Old Latin, a text which is known for glosses. Okay, so I'm going to jump in here real quick.

02:07:15

Okay, so I wanted to make sure that those comments got aired, because again,

02:07:27

James Knapp is not a fan of the Nessie Olland, and so on and so forth, but the facts are the facts about the

02:07:38

Kamiohanium. And when I see

02:07:43

Reformed men running around saying, oh yeah, I think that's original, there's an inconsistency and an incoherence.

02:07:58

And on the one hand saying, we have to believe all the scripture says about teaching about the sovereignty of God, so you've got that sound theology.

02:08:04

And then being willing to accept something so far out of any meaningful range of consistency in the handling of historical information to then embrace the concept of the

02:08:19

Kamiohanium. It's frustrating to a major degree. Okay, what I'm going to do here is, real quickly,

02:08:29

I thought I already had this up. I didn't. Okay, so that's a mistake on my part, but it is here.

02:08:39

I just need to get over to it in Dropbox real quick. There it is. And so here is the...

02:08:49

They had... Something happened. I think they lost their stream or something, which

02:08:55

I can certainly understand. But this is the second part, and it took off pretty quickly, but now that I'm in a different program,

02:09:05

I can speed it up just a little bit. So I'm going to take it up to 1 .2, and there's some good stuff here right at the beginning.

02:09:14

We'll just go as far as we can go before I see Rich pass out in the other room or something like that. And we'll go from there.

02:09:22

If I can remember exactly how I... And that's all right. We're going to pick up where we left off and just go straight to a few of the questions that had been coming in.

02:09:30

We'll take about 15 minutes and toss around as many questions as we can get through. It'll end up being an hour.

02:09:36

And then go to closing statements, and that'll be it for this episode. And then we'll go from there.

02:09:42

But I think this has been a really good conversation to have something that has been challenging on both sides for a lot of different reasons.

02:09:49

And probably the last 30 minutes, Jeff has been holding his own because I think there's been a focus on First John 5 -7 and kind of where the direction goes when there's not a manuscript support for a particular variant.

02:10:01

And where's God at in the conversation of the whole thing? I think at the end of the day, the question that we're trying to ask...

02:10:09

The question that we're trying to get an answer to is what is God doing when it comes to the text of the scripture? And why do we have these variants?

02:10:15

How do we determine what is the actual scripture? And this, to me, has been a really good conversation. I've sat back and just listened to a lot of it.

02:10:22

I actually hold the TR position like Jeff does, but I'm not a confessional text advocate.

02:10:28

So I don't look at it from a confessional perspective. For me, when we're looking at passages like First John 5 -7, my own perspective, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll just throw it out there.

02:10:37

And I don't think we need to talk about First John 5 -7 anymore tonight. But I wonder where the early translations are at in the conversation.

02:10:47

I wonder where the quotations from the church fathers down through the centuries are in the conversations. To me, you can see the evidence of what

02:10:54

God has providentially preserved and what people actually use, and even if it's not in the Greek manuscript support.

02:11:00

And that may be dangerous to some people to say, well, we're going to go in that direction to decide where the text is going today. But for that particular variant, that's something that I think is something to consider.

02:11:08

But anyways, let's go to some of the questions that we've got. I lost all of the questions that came from the 11 different video streaming platforms that were coming in all at once on the last stream.

02:11:20

So what I do have is the questions that came in from the Watch Party and the NT Textual Criticism Facebook group.

02:11:28

And let's just read a couple of these. And we'll spend about 15 minutes to answer those the best we can. And then we'll go to closing statements.

02:11:34

So all right. So Wayne Story says, I'm enjoying this. Peter, what TR would you recommend? I like the

02:11:39

TBS TR by Scrivener, but I realize that some readings, some readings he footnotes may be better readings.

02:11:45

A reading in his text may have only support for Erasmus, while the footnote has a better reading supported by both majority and CR text.

02:11:53

This is a question for me? Yes. Yeah, it was. I mean, this is my copy of Scrivener right above me.

02:11:59

That's not good. I did not do that just for this show. You know, I use Scrivener all the time. I love it. And in fact, you know,

02:12:05

I just finished writing an article where I defended four TR, sorry, not TR. I should call them TR, although they are in the TR, four

02:12:11

Byzantine readings in the Gospel of Matthew, where I think the critical texts are wrong. So, you know, to James's point,

02:12:18

I'm very happy to follow the Byzantine manuscripts, even against the early evidence, when I think the internal evidence is very strongly on their side.

02:12:25

In each of the four cases that I argue. Okay. So I almost can't do 1 .2

02:12:31

with Peter because he speaks so quickly. But, you know, what he's saying is, now

02:12:37

Peter really emphasizes, see, within reason to collecticism, you also have different camps.

02:12:44

You have those who emphasize, who would lean toward the side of external evidence, and those who would lean toward the side of internal evidence.

02:12:58

External evidence is more objective, at least in the sense that you're talking manuscripts, dates, locations, things like that.

02:13:11

The internal can become more subjective in the sense that you may be arguing author style, standard scribal error issues,

02:13:26

Homoyteleuton, haplography, whatever. And so it can be taken multiple ways.

02:13:34

You know, most people try to find some balance between the two. I think what I'm hearing Peter saying is he's more on the internal side by what he just said in taking a

02:13:45

Byzantine reading over against much earlier manuscripts. And that, in the history of textual criticism over the past 50 years, you've sort of seen that balance swing a little bit, depending on who you're reading and what's in favor at that particular point in time.

02:14:05

For my article, that's exactly why I do. So anyways, yeah, but to the question,

02:14:11

Scribner is great. If you find a reading, a footnote that you think is better, good, great.

02:14:17

You know, if it is, I mean, keep working on your judgment and your text critical skills. Okay, now we've got one more for you,

02:14:25

Peter. And then I'll see if I can find one for Jeff and James as well. But this is from Steve Bauer.

02:14:32

He asked this question about an hour and a half ago. Said he was going to, he's going to bed and wanted to get the question in.

02:14:39

Anyways. Hey, you haven't even questioned if you've gone to bed. Well, yeah, he said, well, I'm going to get my corn and see if I can watch this video sometime later.

02:14:48

But I'm going to get my question anyway. So anyways, Steve, if you get, if you get a chance to watch this, we did get your question.

02:14:53

And so, all right. So Peter, he says this. If as Royce has shown, I might not be pronouncing that correctly.

02:14:58

And somebody still, for whatever reason, anytime somebody types a new comment and it jumps me all the way to the bottom.

02:15:04

Okay. He says, if as Royce has shown in the early papyri, the tendency was to omit, is there a consensus as to what time frame the tendency to add through harmonization, for example, begin?

02:15:15

Now, that's a good question. And it's a, it's a very technical question. Royce's work on 506 papyri, the major early papyri, including

02:15:27

P45, which is what I've done most of my interaction with Royce on. But also P75 and P66 and things like that.

02:15:36

Royce's focus was upon what's called singular readings, where, for example, P66 would have a reading that no other manuscript has.

02:15:45

Um, uh, Peter, uh, criticized, not criticized, but interacted from a opposite perspective with some of Royce's material in, in his dissertation.

02:15:57

Um, uh, it, it, Royce is always something that has to be dealt with, but hasn't like taken the field.

02:16:03

I mean, it's a magisterial work. I mean, just the amount of work that went into it is astonishing, but, um, it hasn't taken the field in that most of us would feel that those singular readings are not necessarily the best way of analyzing what any particular, uh, scribal, uh, what any particular scribe's tendencies are going to be in the accuracy of the transmission of the text that they're, that they're copying.

02:16:28

So what the person's saying is Royce came to the conclusion that in the papyri, they tended to drop phrases.

02:16:35

And so he's asking, given that the later text is longer by a percentage point or two, uh, when did that change?

02:16:46

From the early, the period of the early papyri into, say, after a thousand, when you have,

02:16:52

I, my answer would be, it would seem that once you have monasteries doing copying, rather than that very turbulent early period where those, all those manuscripts came from the period of Rome persecution, once you don't have

02:17:06

Rome persecution going on, then I think you, you didn't have quite the pressure in the, um, in the making of manuscripts.

02:17:14

And then you would have more harmonization because it's being done by people who have constant exposure to the scriptures, maybe by having copied multiple copies before and stuff like that.

02:17:23

So, yeah, so the argument I just talked about, the article is actually on that point about whether we should prefer the reading or not.

02:17:31

And I argue, I don't think we should in principle prefer the short reading. I do think it's evident that scribes, uh, do have a tendency to add things to manuscripts, but I don't think it's necessarily stronger than the tendency, um, to omit things accidentally, for example.

02:17:46

But I do think what you find is over time, scribes are, if they're confronted with two texts and one is shorter and one is longer, I think their tendency very much would have been to preserve a longer reading and not risk.

02:17:54

Frankly, it's the same impulse that I think Jeff has, and that is it's a, it's a, it's a desire not to lose scripture.

02:17:59

There's a deep concern about that, um, on the part of scribes. And so if they have to choose, they'll choose a longer reading if, if they have to make a choice.

02:18:07

Um, if we can identify a certain period in which that switches, I'm not sure. In my own research, um, I, I approached with a different method than James Royce did.

02:18:15

So really what James Royce found was that the early papyri, the substantial early papyri that he looked at, six of them, show a tendency to omit in what are called singular readings.

02:18:24

And singular readings are readings found only in one manuscript, okay? And part of the big debate about his method is whether singular readings are really indicative of scribal habits as a whole.

02:18:33

And my co -editor, Elijah Hickson, his dissertation tackles that problem head -on. He does not think so.

02:18:38

In my own research, I don't think so either. So I don't think, uh, Royce's method is completely wrong by any means, but I also don't think it gives us a complete picture of what scribes did.

02:18:49

So James, you want to comment on that real quick? And then I've got a question for Jeff. If you look at Fitch by Alan Farnes and by Hernandez on Revelation, and they both point in the same direction.

02:18:57

Right. But if you look at some others, they don't. See, and that's part of the problem. So the question is, even if all the studies using singular readings point in the same direction on this question, we're still only looking at singular readings.

02:19:08

And we all know that scribes made more changes than just what's in the singular readings, right? So that's the question.

02:19:14

All right. So yeah, go ahead. All right. That'll wrap that up. I was going to say, singular readings because it's easy to tell compared to other cases.

02:19:22

It's not just because it's easy to tell, actually. I agree with this manifestation as well. Given the time, let me—I may skip some stuff

02:19:31

I really wanted to deal with. But let's— To your point, you were talking about, you know, people, churches that may have held to the so -called shorter ending of Mark.

02:19:40

I would say they were wrong. They were in error. Or as I was reading in Eusebius's Church History in Book 6 and Chapter 12 the other day about Serapion of Antioch writing to the church at Roses, who had accepted the

02:19:55

Gospel of Peter, and were reading it. And he had to write to them and say, no, Gospel of Peter is docetic, and you have to reject that.

02:20:03

So, yes— That's not an issue with the Woman Con Adultery. Yes, there were— That's not an issue with the Woman Con Adultery. It's not a question of whether it's heretical or not.

02:20:09

On all of our views, the Woman Con Adultery is good theology, is it not? Well, it's not— Don't you think it's good theology?

02:20:16

Of course you think it's good theology, but so do I. The example, though, applies, because the

02:20:21

Serapion of Antioch example, the Gospel of Peter, could be applied to if there was a church that was—

02:20:27

No, I'm not saying that if a church does something, therefore, it's okay. That's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is when you look at the history of the manuscripts, you realize with something like the

02:20:36

Kama Yohaneum, most Christians reading 1 John in Greek have not read that text. So even on your view, if you think that the

02:20:43

Kama Yohaneum is original, should be read by churches, you still have to recognize that there have been lots and lots of people in church history who have not done so, and my question to you is, do you think their faith was fundamentally flawed as a result?

02:20:55

First of all, I mean, there were a lot of presuppositions in that. I mean, first of all, you presume that because the extant manuscripts don't have it, that that meant that most

02:21:04

Christians— I don't know. Well, most Christians we have evidence for in Greek. That's what I said. Most Christians we have evidence for in Greek did not read the

02:21:11

Kama Yohaneum. It doesn't matter if most— You can't actually say that because you only have five manuscripts pre 700.

02:21:17

Now, hear what's being said here? So, he has no evidence, none, of the presence of that text in sermons, in—this is exactly what happened with Ephesians 3 .9.

02:21:31

So, once you start with this, then history becomes twisted.

02:21:38

What Peter's saying is that we have no evidence that anyone was reading these words.

02:21:45

Does that mean that they had a defective faith? And he's like, well, we don't know they weren't reading these words.

02:21:53

Even though I can't give you a shred of evidence that they were, you can't disprove it.

02:21:59

Well, that's, again, this is the luxury of not actually having a textual critical position that you're actually defending.

02:22:06

You're defending a conclusion. You're defending a text. You're not defending a textual critical methodology because you could never derive a text using this type of reasoning.

02:22:16

This is what we—TR -onlyism cannot produce a text. It can only promote a text. And here it is being—and you can see the look on James' face.

02:22:26

He's going, what are you doing? And it's the same frustration we all have.

02:22:34

You say that the people, you can say the people who had the extant manuscripts did not have it within theirs.

02:22:41

But even that, that doesn't mean that their faith, that doesn't mean that their faith in and of itself was flawed or that they weren't saved or converted.

02:22:49

But it does mean, it does mean that they were, they suffered a deficiency, that they missed out on a benefit that they might have received.

02:22:58

But they didn't. How big was it? How big was the benefit? They had the Trinity without that verse. Many people's manuscripts didn't spring out of the ground from dragon's teeth.

02:23:05

They're echoing earlier copies. So you can make the extrapolation. There's no reason to think the earlier copies of those echoes—

02:23:12

Well, we've already established that. But yeah, I don't think Jeff makes a sound good on that. The same way when a voice goes forth and the echo doesn't have the words,

02:23:19

But it is— You can deduce that the voice didn't have the words. But it is a problem— We hear the voice from the old magic.

02:23:24

I don't think we can convince Jeff of that. It is a problem. It is a problem. I mean, go back to the ending of the

02:23:31

Book of Revelation. You know, we're not supposed to, we're not supposed to add. We're not supposed to take away. And so there is—

02:23:37

Which has nothing to do with this at all. When I start hearing people grabbing for texts like that, as if that is a textual, critical statement, in defense of a text that does not appear in Greek manuscripts until well after 1000

02:24:02

AD, and it's really more like 1300 AD, I'm concerned. Because I've seen that from King James Onlyus for a long, long time.

02:24:14

But this man is a fellow Reformed Baptist pastor. Should know better.

02:24:20

Should know better. But is promoting something otherwise. There is an issue of the preservation of the

02:24:27

Word of God. And so, yes, there is a problem if there's a part of the

02:24:33

Word of God that's an inspired Word of God that is being omitted. Sure, but let's put that in context.

02:24:39

How big of a problem is it? Somebody just throwing something into the Lord of God from the old Latin that was made up by an interpreter. There's something, there's a problem there, too.

02:24:45

And that's— There would be a problem with addition as well. Right. And there's a problem with the addition of Hamanian.

02:24:53

Yeah. So this is what I'm trying to say. You can see Hamanian originate in Latin, and you can see how it's drifted into the

02:25:00

Greek from the Latin. You can see the mechanism that caused it to be created in Latin, and you can see that's nowhere except in Latin.

02:25:06

And yet suddenly we're supposed to think, well, we're getting a little into that specific where I think you wanted to wrap it up.

02:25:14

But you can see where the general picture is. I think the problem, the real problem is that confessional ecclesiology, even though it's often claimed we don't reconstruct the text, that's because you just pick your favorite reconstruction that was made in the 1500s and lock it in and say, that's the text.

02:25:34

Before the printing press, you couldn't do that. You wouldn't do that. You would look at the manuscripts and do textual criticism.

02:25:42

Ecclesiastical libidology is basically an excuse to not do the work. Saying, pretending that it's already been done.

02:25:48

So it's just laziness. We all know that it hasn't been done. Yeah, I wouldn't call it laziness. I don't think it's a matter of laziness.

02:25:55

It's a matter of confessional conviction. Well, can I jump in? The textual statement is wrong, because the text was purely not kept that way in that sense.

02:26:04

It's not pure in its exact form the way that you're defining that as. I really hate to see my confession being dragged around like this.

02:26:16

And one of the reasons I'm doing this, I'm hoping people understand, this is not confessionalism. This is a one -off, strange misinterpretation, misapplication.

02:26:26

It's ahistorical. The framers did not have the information we have today.

02:26:34

But again, Snap's exactly right. It just refuses to do the work.

02:26:40

But that's because it can't do the work. It has no foundation upon which to do the work.

02:26:46

That's the issue. That's the issue. Would you say that your confessional position is partly driven by a fear of the alternative position, namely mine?

02:26:57

And the fear of where it leads? I don't think so. I mean, I don't think there's something to be afraid of, in my view.

02:27:05

I think that there's nothing wrong with seeing dangers. And it's right to be fearful of something that's dangerous.

02:27:13

Right. So you're afraid of the dangers you see, in my view. Yes. But I also have a love for what

02:27:20

I think is right and true, and a zeal for what is right and true.

02:27:25

So just as I think—I mean, if I were to turn that around, I mean, and to say, so far, what

02:27:30

I've heard is confessional text advocates are lazy and fearful. What he actually said was they're not willing to do the work, and the person who said lazy was

02:27:43

Jeff Riddle. That was neither Peter nor James. It was Jeff Riddle who said, you're saying we're lazy.

02:27:51

And now he's repeating that as if that was actually what they were saying. But it is true.

02:27:57

They are not doing the work. They're allowing Erasmus and Stephanus and Beza to do the work, and then forgetting that they did the work, and not being willing to examine what work they did.

02:28:12

That's true. I mean, isn't this self -evident? I don't know how you guys can get around this.

02:28:19

That's why I said when—last year, when I started reading sections out of the book on Erasmus and Beza as conjectural critics, and I started reading what they actually said themselves about these texts,

02:28:36

I said, this is the end of TR -onlyism in a confessional sense, because it exposes where the text actually came from, and the methodology by which it came.

02:28:47

That's why I said it. You're still with me, huh? And to speak to the question of saying they're lazy, there's a big difference between laziness and avoiding the work because you know where it leads, and you don't want to do it because you don't like the conclusion and the path that it's going to take you down.

02:29:02

That's not laziness. No, no, that was unfair. That's actually maybe a little harder work than it would otherwise be.

02:29:09

They're lazy. So that's what Jay said. And I'm being a little rhetorical.

02:29:15

The method is lazy. I'm not going to—that would be like me saying to you, well,

02:29:22

James, you're just lazy because you haven't read Garnett Howard Milne's discussion of Kept Pure in All Ages.

02:29:28

You keep using an anachronistic term to describe it. And I could say, Peter, you're just fearful.

02:29:34

You're fearful of the fact that the confessional text position is right, and if it's right, then you don't have a job sifting through manuscripts or whatever.

02:29:46

Now, catch that. He would be exactly right. Because, again, he's going to say no later on, because Peter's going to challenge him on this.

02:29:56

Or maybe he already did, and we skipped it. I don't know. But there is no reason to teach

02:30:02

New Testament textual criticism if TR -onlyism is right. If you're reading the autograph with this, we don't need those manuscripts.

02:30:12

Shut down CSNTM. Turn off all the modules in accordance. Here's the autograph right there.

02:30:20

There's the autograph. Thankfully, not all of the ecclesiastical text is that way. And Doug Wilson and I are going to be addressing that yet again next month, in Moscow, Idaho, by the way.

02:30:33

And I'm going to take my 1550 with me. I'm really hopeful that Doug doesn't go there.

02:30:42

Really, really hopeful that Doug doesn't go there, because that would be bad. But see, the difference is, it's wrong for you.

02:30:51

It's wrong, and it's unfair for you to say that, because you don't agree with my position, that you're ascribing malice to me.

02:31:00

No, no, can I come back to this? Can I come back to this? Because I think you're misrepresenting. And it's my fault, actually, because I didn't make the point clear enough.

02:31:07

It goes back to what I was saying earlier. The theological danger, in my view, from your position is bigger than the theological danger of your position from mine.

02:31:16

And therefore, you have more to be afraid of theologically, OK, and rightly so, if your position is right. You have more to be afraid of.

02:31:23

Sorry, let me put it a different way. The dangers, of my view, from your perspective, are more significant than the dangers that I see in your view from mine.

02:31:33

Let me ask you this. Do you think that the rise of modern historical text criticism and the fact that many

02:31:45

Protestants and now evangelicals are embracing it, do you think this has led to greater health and strength within Protestant and evangelical churches?

02:32:01

Now, the only way I can understand this is that he's thinking primarily of Westcott and Hort there, and ignoring the fact that we demonstrated, and many other people have demonstrated, that Erasmus and Beza, but especially

02:32:16

Erasmus, basically used the same methodology, just without as much consistency and nearly as much information.

02:32:24

But he used many of the exact same concepts that we use in, quote -unquote, modern textual critical setting.

02:32:36

No, well, no, because I don't think it's really that powerful of a thing. That's part of the difference between you and I. I think, in your view, text criticism is kind of the root that's the problem of a bad tree, and I kind of feel like my discipline doesn't have near that kind of power over people.

02:32:54

I mean, frankly, most people have no idea about text criticism, and it doesn't affect their life. Peter, you're training pastors.

02:33:03

Yeah, and this is what I'm trying to explain to you. You're going to go out and preach Sunday by Sunday, and when they preach an expositional series through the gospel of Mark, actually, oddly enough, we have some agreement on Mark, because I know you don't believe it's original to Mark, but you think it's inspired, right?

02:33:20

You sort of like Metzger. Sort of like Trigellus, actually, yeah. Okay, but anyways, maybe it would be

02:33:27

John. You are very influential. Your views on this are influential, and it does have a generational legacy.

02:33:36

It has impact on people. And if I'm right, that's a good thing, right? And if my position is right, that's a good thing.

02:33:43

Well, what I'm saying is - What you're saying is the fruit is bad. What I'm saying is that if we observe, and again, I'm not about this just pragmatically.

02:33:50

I have a conviction about it out of principle, but I'm saying that pragmatically, the result of the introduction of the modern historical critical method, in this case, its application of text criticism, has not been salubrious for Orthodox Christianity.

02:34:10

I'm Orthodox with a small O. Well, I wouldn't agree with the premise of your argument.

02:34:15

I don't think text criticism, even if it's in its modern form, is a necessary part of the historical critical method.

02:34:22

Certainly, the methods were refined during that period, but I don't see anything fundamentally different between what I do and what

02:34:27

Origen or Jerome did. So it can't be - I know it's very popular to do, and very tempting to pin it all on the

02:34:35

Enlightenment, but I wish it were that simple, and it's just not that simple historically. So, James, let's get you - To your question, to your question.

02:34:41

I don't think it's harmful. I think it's helpful to people to actually explain to them the evidence that we do have, and not try to say, you know, ignore the evidence in a case like 5th

02:34:50

John, 5th, 7th. No, but in 1st John, 5, 7, from my view, you are ignoring the evidence. I'm not saying ignore it.

02:34:56

You are. Of course you are. Of course he is. Of course he's saying ignore the evidence.

02:35:02

If this is it, then there is no evidence to look at beyond this. Or the only evidence to look at is that which substantiates this.

02:35:11

So, but of course he's saying, let's not worry about the evidence. He's not starting with evidence, and he admits that in other places.

02:35:18

So, look, we've gone a long, long, long, long time, and I apologize for that. But you can look it up.

02:35:26

I'll link to it. I write the blog entry, so I will link to it. So, because it's two parts,

02:35:32

I'll link to both parts. So you can listen to the whole thing yourself. Nothing else that we didn't play is going to change anything of the fact that you had two textual critical scholars who were consistent in their own perspectives, and as a result had to say that the third perspective, which is not a textual critical methodology, is incoherent.

02:36:02

It's just incoherent, because it says the TR is it, therefore the

02:36:07

TR is it. And that really, when you boil it all down, is exactly what

02:36:13

TR -onlinism is. You can complicate that, you can try to, but it's your starting place.

02:36:21

And well, you have to have that, and that's when they try to tie it into some type of transcendental argument. And I'm sorry, the work of Erasmus, a

02:36:31

Roman Catholic priest, with Stephanus doing a little bit of stuff, and then

02:36:37

Beza, to try to turn that into, well, basically what the

02:36:44

King James Onlyists say took place between 1604 and 1611. A providential establishment of the autographs.

02:36:52

Because that's what King James Onlyism is. King James Onlyism is, in English, this is it.

02:36:58

This cannot be improved. That's what we're hearing from Jeff Riddle in Greek.

02:37:04

This is it. Cannot be improved. Let's not worry about papyri, the new unseal that's discovered in the library someplace it's never had access to.

02:37:13

Doesn't matter. If you're reading the TR, you're reading the autographs. By definition.

02:37:21

And so, yeah, there's no reason to have all those people doing textual critical studies. It's all a waste of time.

02:37:27

We didn't get to the part where he was talking about, because there's been people who've gone off into Eastern Orthodoxy, gone off into Roman Catholicism, all because of an uncertainty about the text.

02:37:36

And that's not why I think people end up going into those things. It's not about uncertainties about the text. And the funny thing is they're not getting any more certainty over there.

02:37:45

I mean, Rome as a whole has a significantly less conservative perspective. The Roman magisterium and Roman scholarship has a significantly less conservative perspective on textual critical issues than someone like Peter Gurry or the people at Tyndale House by a long shot.

02:38:05

And Eastern Orthodoxy just simply, I'm sorry, given, well, that's a whole nother issue.

02:38:15

But it doesn't have anything to do with textual critical issues. So, wow, we've gone for two hours and 40 minutes.

02:38:22

That's beyond mega. I don't even know what that adds up to. But jumbo mega, or whatever it is.

02:38:30

But lots of stuff has happened even while we've been discussing all this stuff. Most of you have gone to sleep. I realize that.

02:38:36

But for those of you who stuck with us all this time, you're doing this because you've seen this tearing of our churches.

02:38:41

You've seen it causing division. You know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that anywhere I go on Facebook, I can comment on a cat video and TR -only guys will jump me on a cat video.

02:38:54

It has happened. Let alone any discussion there was in a presuppositional, yesterday, yesterday, day before yesterday, in a presuppositional group on Facebook, someone posted a

02:39:08

King James only meme. And boom, there they came. Just that fast.

02:39:14

As soon as I, you know, someone said, how do I respond to this? I gave a link to my book. It's almost like they have a search thing set up.

02:39:23

Look, James White's out in the open. Get him, you know, type thing. That's seriously, that's what they're about.

02:39:31

And so they are very zealously promoting this. But the only way to promote it is to promote to people who do not understand how we got the

02:39:42

Bible in the first place. If you have any idea about the history of the manuscripts of the

02:39:48

Bible before 1500, you are not going to be buying this. You're not going to be buying it.

02:39:54

And I think that was shown very, very clearly. I'm very thankful to both Peter Gurry and to James Knapp.

02:40:00

And I want to find a time to have dinner with James Knapp and James. Here, let me throw this out just because someone's probably already told you that you need to log on because James White has said a dozen nice things about James Knapp today.

02:40:19

I don't think it would be wise for you and I to do something like this because we are set in our ways.

02:40:25

But the thought crossed my mind after I watched this the first time, given your position in a

02:40:33

Campbellite -type tradition, I wonder if we could do a debate on something like John 6. Not on the text issues, because there really isn't,

02:40:42

I'm unaware of any particularly meaningful textual issue in John chapter 6, but we could discuss soteriology.

02:40:50

Maybe something outside of where the battle is always going, but we both have very strong feelings in that area.

02:40:57

Maybe that'd be something that we could do in the future. All I know is

02:41:02

I very, very, very much appreciated the information.

02:41:12

At the same time, anyone who's watched this program is sitting there going, yep, heard that before.

02:41:18

But this was just another way of shining some light on it. And for all of those, for all of you who have decided this is how to save the day or make yourself different, if the

02:41:37

TR Only position fares that badly in the face of extremely conservative, believing

02:41:45

Christian criticism, just think how badly it will do out in the real world of apologetics.

02:41:55

Keep it in mind. Keep it in mind. Well, my voice is about to go. So it's been a long one.

02:42:02

So appreciate you're sticking with us for all this time. I think my goal for tomorrow is