May 9, 2006

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is

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The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And the strains have run from the battle, we are returned from the battle, and that is the battle at Biola University this past Sunday evening, and that's what our report is going to be about today.

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I'm signaling for a little less in the headphones there, thank you, sir. And it was quite the experience.

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Hopefully the server will survive as we give the report today, because five minutes ago it decided to turn over and die for a few minutes, but it came back.

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And I was, ironically, over in Los Angeles at the same time, in fact,

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I was out with some students from Biola, and we went to El Torito for dinner, and there were televisions there, and I noticed that the crowds were, the folks there in LA were rather quiet, and that they weren't saying a whole lot during, you know, while we were having a good old time, but the people watching the game, you know, there wasn't any applause or anything like that.

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So I looked over and I got close enough to see what the score was, and I was able to very quickly discern why they weren't overly excited, because the

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Phoenix Suns just, I mean, it wasn't even much of a basketball game,

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I mean, game seven, you know, it's supposed to be close, it's supposed to be a nail -biter, and it was a 31 -point blowout, and so, you know, hey, what can

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I say? Five straight victories over Los Angeles teams over the past, you know, week or so, that's up.

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No more Lakers, soon the Clippers.

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And that actually came up at the debates, but I didn't bring it up. I was a good man, I didn't bring it up,

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I didn't pull that off, somebody else did, and I laughed and applauded when they brought it up.

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But anyway, oh man, we let anybody in the studio audience say, don't we, wow, man,

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I thought we were going to screen people, especially after debating, you know, the Muslims, I thought we'd need some security, you know, something, and now the studio audience just, we, is he looking for food?

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Yes, really, we need to have a little, you know, homeless pantry type thing where we can give food to people that came to walk in, so, man,

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I tell you, anyway, nothing like that. Isn't he like a vice president around here or something?

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I don't know, I haven't seen him for, when was the last time I saw him? I don't know when I last saw him, I haven't a clue when

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I last saw him. I challenge you, right now, I challenge you, tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, 6am,

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South Mountain Park, you and me, to the top and back down. You'll be there? All right, I got you,

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I got you. You're lighter than I am, you're still lighter than I am, but not by as much as you were a year ago, let me tell you something, buddy,

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I've been up South Mountain about 25 times since last November, so, I'm ready to go, so, let's do it.

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Anyways, sorry, folks, everybody's going, what are they talking about in there? Well, don't even worry about it, this is a live webcast and we have fun, and yes, if you look on our website, you'll see a guy named

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Sean Hahn mentioned and he just wandered in to see the Dividing Line. Anyway, let's talk about, actually, now

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I could use this a tad bit more for some odd reason, let's talk about what happened Sunday night. Let's start with the fact that I don't even remember what started all this,

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I remember being contacted, I think Bo Boyd contacted me, and as I recall, there had been some challenge in regards to bring

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Shabir Ali and something along those lines, and I was contacted and asked if I would be willing to debate

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Shabir Ali, I had already, I believe, started listening to him on some level, and I had already made the decision,

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I wanted to debate him, but I wanted to debate him farther down the road, and so, when the challenge came to do this before the end of this year, that is in May of this year,

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I very clearly and at the very beginning stated the fact that I could only address

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Christian issues primarily. I wasn't going to do a debate specifically on the Quran, I wasn't going to do a debate on the

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Hadith or Muhammad or something along those lines, because I think to do justice to those areas requires a person to be able to utilize, at the very, very least, utilize well lexical sources so as to be able to deal with Arabic terms, terminology, phrases, so on and so forth.

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If you can't necessarily read it fluently, okay, but as long as you can interact with it,

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I think you need to have that capacity, and so, since I did not and still would not say that I really fully do have that kind of capacity,

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I did not want to get into those topics, I wanted to, instead, as I did when I debated Hamza Abdul Malik, I wanted to debate a

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Christian topic and respond from a Christian perspective, and so, from the very beginning, that was the intention, and so, when the thesis of the debate came up for discussion, then

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I said, well, here's the books I've written, these are the subjects that I've addressed before, and so, why don't we start logically, since I would like this to be one of a number of debates, logically with defending the

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New Testament, is the New Testament we possess today inspired? Having listened to a number of Shabir's presentations, I knew this would be something that he would feel comfortable with, he's addressed this many times with a number of different people, and so, that's how it all started.

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Now, I mentioned last week that there was some concern expressed concerning the fact

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I was on the defensive, and there was some concern about the debate itself, and I can understand that.

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I have heard people debate Shabir Ali who never should have debated Shabir Ali. I've heard

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Shabir Ali crush people, I've heard him embarrass people, because, especially conservatives who don't interact in the scholarly realm with liberal scholarship, are going to find him extremely frustrating, because he's going to throw this stuff out, he's going to be quoting from Bart Ehrman, as he did in our debate, and he's going to be quoting from all these different sources, some of his favorite sources in the past have been like the

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Interpreter's One Volume Bible Commentary, or the Introduction to the New American Bible, the

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Roman Catholic, leftist, liberal version, and a lot of conservatives don't spend much time doing that.

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For crying out loud, I went to Fuller Seminary, there wasn't anything else I could do, so I'm accustomed to that stuff, but a lot of other folks are not, and so they don't really know how to respond to it on the fly, and discuss it in a debate context, and so I've seen people that have just been run over, in essence, with Shabir Ali, and so I can fully understand why there'd be people who didn't know who

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I was. Now, the odd thing to me was, this is a Biola University, and Biola's one of the only places on the planet that has an

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MA in Apologetics, has an entire Apologetics program, and so in essence, nobody except some of the students at Biola had a clue who in the world

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I am. Now, that's fine, but it still seems a little bit odd, because whether you like me or dislike me, the fact of the matter is,

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Sunday night was the 59th moderated public debate that I've done. I have debated a wide variety of people,

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I've debated BYU scholars in Salt Lake, I've debated John Dominic Crossan, I've debated

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Gregory Stafford of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and just about every

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Roman Catholic apologist who's willing to debate anyways, and so whether you like what I've done or not doesn't matter, it would just seem to me that if you've got an entire

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Apologetics program, you would at least know the people who are the most actively involved in doing

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Apologetics, especially on a frontline debate type format. But evidently, almost no one did, despite the books,

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King James Only Controversy, books on Mormonism, Forgotten Trinity, Justification, Sola Scriptura, still, basically no one had ever seen any debate

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I'd ever done. And so you put together, well, we know Shabir Ali is good, and we haven't a clue who this guy is, and so I can understand why some would be going, man, we're going to put 2 ,500 of our students, or 2 ,000 of our students and 1 ,000 other people into our gymnasium and let a very sharp

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Muslim carve them up, and then we've got to take care of the problems after that? That's not a good thing.

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I understand that. You know, if I was, if the roles were reversed, I can completely understand all that, but it still seemed odd to me that no one had a clue, that I take debates very seriously, had spent the past 11 months or more very seriously listening to Shabir Ali and to interacting with his perspectives, had written a number of things on the blog, anyone could have gone on the blog and just put in Shabir in the search, gone to Google, put in Shabir, and you'd see all this stuff where I've interacted with him,

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I've gone into the Greek Septuagint text about stuff that he said, etc., etc., but that didn't happen.

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So there was some concerns, and I could tell that, and it certainly made me feel a little odd.

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I didn't really feel like I was the home team. I didn't feel like there was a home team, to be perfectly honest with you.

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I sort of felt like a bit of an outsider, and certainly I'm sure Shabir did, when you think about it, as he showed up at that,

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I don't know how many Muslims were there, I would say maybe 30, most of them were not dressed in cultural dress,

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Shabir Ali was, and if you haven't looked at the blog, I would direct you to that, because on the blog is a link to other blogs that have other pictures, and so there's a fair amount of representation there you can take a look at.

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So anyway, I got over there, and Beau Boyd and Jer and Marissa picked me up at the airport and met some of the other guys, and we all got together and went to El Torito's and had a great dinner, and well,

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I actually, I imagine a few people know this, almost ate nothing other than chips and salsa, because I was talking so much, that happens a lot, it's a great thing, it's called the speaker's diet, it's where you're the one who's going to be doing the speaking, so you do all the talking, and you end up not really doing a whole lot of eating in the process, it's a good way to lose some weight.

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But we went to El Torito, had a good time together, and they took, for some reason they had to take a picture of me in a hard hat,

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I'm not sure if that was like some initiation thing or just what it was, where that picture's going to show up, what's been photoshopped to it,

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I don't know, it's sort of scary, but you know, we do what we got to do. And so we had a good evening, and then on Sunday, then got to,

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I'm not sure when did you get there, about 3 .30, something like that in the afternoon or something like that. And the first thing, the first funny thing, you can see now, when you listen to Dividing Line, you get all the back scenes stuff, you know, when you watch the

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DVDs and listen to MP3, that's one thing, but you listen to Dividing Line, you get all the stuff that took place off camera or outside the range of a microphone.

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And before I'm, while I'm waiting to get picked up at the hotel, because I want to be there a little bit before five, that's two hours before the debate,

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I like to be at debates very, very early, the last thing I'd ever want to do is go rushing into a debate,

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I don't know how Gerrymatics does it, but that's not my kind of thing. So I start hearing from Rich, and he says, he sends me his pictures of the venue.

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And you know, pictures on a cell phone are really small, you know, they're just tiny, but it gives you an idea, it's like, okay, all right, so there's the venue, it looks like chairs set up in a large university -sized gymnasium, okay, he says, yeah, but did you see what's in the background?

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I said, well, no, I can't see what's in the background, a picture of that size. And so he takes a picture of the platform.

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And the only way I could describe this is there's four chairs set up, there's flowers, and two of the four chairs are the big

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Monty Python comfy chairs, the comfy chair!

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And you know, you look like you should have like a little footstool, and you should you should have, yeah, that's right, it's a masterpiece theatre.

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And they should have had a had a had a little fireplace going in the back, and I would have had a pipe, and my and my robe, and my shoes, and we would have,

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Shabir and I would have had a nice little chat, you know, for a few moments before we retired for the evening.

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And it looked like it, I'm just like, as soon as I walk in,

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I see that you go, nope, nope, nope, not happening tonight, no, no, no, I, you know, it takes you back to the old, there are just people that don't want to have debates, they want to have discussions.

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And this is California, this is Southern California, and you know, this is this is the home of Rodney King, can't we all just get along?

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And I'm looking at this going, I did see one debate, one televised debate that Shabir did with Jay Smith, and they had to sit in these big comfy chairs, and I hate chairs where the the the arms come up to like your shoulders,

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I mean, if you actually put your arms out, you look like you're surrendering or something, you know, because they make it look like a little kid, you know, you're just sort of, you just want to wrap yourself in a blanket and go to sleep for a nice little winter's nap.

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And, and that's what these things look like. And I'm just, I'm going, all right, look, I'm going to have a tablet

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PC, and I'm going to be scribbling notes as he's speaking, and he's going to be wanting to write notes as I'm speaking, and he's got a computer, and I've got a computer.

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Now, this is not happening. I need a table. I've never, ever, ever done a debate where I did not have some place where I could sit down and write something.

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It's just never happened. And so very quickly, I got hold of somebody that said, not working for me, need a table.

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And very, very quickly, without any argument or anything else, the big comfy chairs went to wherever big comfy chairs go to.

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And we had tables set up, you can see the setup on the main page of the website right now.

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We're doing cross -examination. The first picture there on the website is Shabir and I doing cross -examination, if I recall correctly.

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That's right at the beginning, and he's, he's asking me questions, and I'm, I'm responding.

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And you can see that they, first they set up the tables with white tablecloths on them only.

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And then they thought that was just going to totally mess up the camera stuff. And so we had to put the little black thingamabobbies on top of it.

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And that's, that's how that works. So anyway, we got that all set up. And then the crowds started coming in.

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And down on the bottom of the, the, the prime seats,

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I counted them, there were 600 prime seats, and they were on the, on the floor.

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And then those were $15, and then it was $5 to just sit in the bleachers. And aside from the bleachers, then on the far side, there was what

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I call the nosebleed section, which was up above where the basket would be. And I would say that by the, by quarter after 7, we got, we got started, the debate started about 7 .20.

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It was supposed to start up at 7 .15, got a little late start. But by the time the debate started, that last section was about 80 % full.

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So I, I'm not sure how many more folks we could have gotten in there, but not that many. It was pretty well packed out.

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They said 3 ,000, I'd say 2 ,500 around there, somewhere in, in that, in that, you know, range,

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I'd say would be where we, where we were as far as the number of people. It was a really, really good audience, primarily

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Christians. There were some Muslims there. I had some conversations, I'll tell you about a little bit later on, with, with some of the

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Muslims a little bit later on. But anyhow, I, of course, was watching for Shabir and he got there,

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I would say maybe 25 minutes before, half an hour, 25 minutes before the debate, 7 o 'clock.

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So around 6 .30, 6 .35 -ish or so. And so I saw him coming in and I, I shot down there and, and before the debate, we, we talked about a number of things.

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We, we talked first about, it had been mentioned to him that when

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I debated Hamza Abdul -Malik that all the Muslims had gotten up and left halfway through my presentation because it was prayer time.

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And so he, he mentioned that one of the ways to avoid that was to basically make sure that everybody knew that within an hour, hour and a half of the sunset, that we would be taking a break so that if any

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Muslims who were there needed to go do their prayers, they could do it at that time. So if they knew there was a break coming, then they wouldn't get up and walk out in the middle of things.

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And so that was announced beforehand. We also discussed the nature of the cross -examination because I don't,

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I have not listened to every single debate Shabir Ali has ever done because I don't think you can actually obtain every single debate

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Shabir Ali has ever done. But in the ones that I have heard, the cross -examination, if there was cross -examination, was not the kind of cross -examination that we did in this debate or that we like to do.

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And that is the free -flowing cross -examination, the, the question and answer form of, of cross -examination that we, we find to be the most useful.

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And so there had to be some discussion of that. There had to be some explanation of that. We did that with the moderator. And it ended up working out pretty well.

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At one, toward the end of his questioning period, he started just talking. And the moderator didn't stop him.

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I remember sort of looking over at the moderator and, and he was looking at me. But the problem was, if you look like, if you look at the picture right now that's on the main page on the blog, if you're looking at it from that angle, the moderator is way off to the left.

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And so since Shabir is facing me, he's facing away from the moderator. So the moderator would actually have to speak up, say something loud enough for him to hear.

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That was another one of the issues that we had, was there were no fold -back monitors. There were no monitors aimed back toward us.

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So all we had was house sound. And so when someone's speaking out toward the audience and you've just got house sound, it can be very difficult.

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I had to concentrate very hard, and I'm sure Shabir did as well, to understand what the other person was saying when they were at the podium.

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It was a little easier during cross -examination because we were close enough to, to hear each other just using natural sound. But it was very difficult.

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There were, Shabir, for example, told a joke in his opening statement. I didn't get the joke because I didn't hear it.

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Shabir has an accent. He was born in Ghana, or is it Guyana? I forget which one it was.

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But anyways, I didn't get the joke because I didn't hear the punchline. The punchline didn't work. I couldn't hear it, couldn't understand it.

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And so there were a couple things like that that were a little bit difficult as far as being able to hear and things like that.

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It didn't really impact the entirety of the debate. So before the debate started,

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I'm starting to watch all these people coming in. And we had a number of neat folks who showed up. We had folks from Grace Community that were there.

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And there were other individuals who came up and folks from the channel that were there.

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One fellow, well -known channel, showed up in his camo kilt. And he's sitting down front and it was hard to miss him.

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And so we had a number of folks who were coming up and all sorts of interesting conversations.

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I like getting the chance to meet people beforehand. Of course, I don't mind talking to folks and answering questions and stuff, but there's a balance, you know.

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And later on in the evening, long after the debate was over, you know, when I start saying, man, I really need to get going.

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It's getting really late. My brain's turning to mush, you know, after I've been engaged in dialogue now for hour upon hour upon hour.

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Still, there are folks that just, you know, they want to come up to you at 11 .30 at night after you've been speaking now and addressing every subject in the sun for hours and hours and hours on end and hit you with their biggest philosophical questions that they could ever come up with.

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And even after you said, okay, I'm leaving now. Well, actually, could I talk to you about the transcendental art?

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And you just you just want to go, hello. Hello. Did you did you catch that little subtle hint there?

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And there are some folks that just do not get it. It was it was odd.

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So anyway, we got the debate started. And I had always, by the way, had always assumed

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I was going to be going first. It just seemed logical to me, even though it'd be very difficult because I'm defending the

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New Testament. But if you're going to be defending something, you need to know what the denials of it are going to be.

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And so it was only, what, about two weeks ago that for some reason, even though we thought we had sort of established everything beforehand, once the staff got involved, they sort of took everything over.

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And and there was new questions as to how this was going to be organized and things like that.

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And the order ended up changing and it was a little bit odd because Shabir went first.

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And he would also get to go last, so he got the first word and last word. And some people would say that was that was not fair, but that's just sort of how it worked out.

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I didn't care if many years ago that would have bothered me when

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I first started doing debates. I was really focused on that. Don't care anymore. You know why?

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And anybody who is going to be so shallow as to be influenced by who had the last word and it's all just a matter of what people are wearing or or, you know, how loud somebody's microphone is.

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You know what? I don't I don't debate for those folks anymore. I can't. There's there's nothing

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I can do about that. I debate for people who are going to seriously listen to both sides.

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They're going to seriously weigh the evidence. They're going to seriously look at the arguments. Those are the people that I can debate for.

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They're the only people I can be concerned about. People who, well, you know, I I didn't like your tartan tie.

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Well, OK, fine. Not debating for you. I didn't like the tone of your voice.

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Well, not debating for you either. I will very, very quickly admit that there's only a certain group of people that that I hello that I know.

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Look in the channel. Thank you. There's only a certain group of people that I am

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I'm going to be addressing. That's all I can do. So anyway, we got started.

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Shabir went first and I all along had been wondering how was

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Shabir going to start? How was I going to what what was his approach going to be?

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I've heard him make presentations primarily focused upon the synoptic gospels, the

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Mark Matthew doing stuff with Mark, making Jesus bigger type thing. I've heard how many times he's done that.

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That was his primary presentation, for example, in England when wasn't

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Manchester, but there was a guy was going to debate him. He bagged out. And so that was his presentation there.

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He's used that in against Jay Smith and things like that. So he's got his synoptic presentation. Then he's also got a sort of a

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Paul presentation. You know, he used some of that against Robert Morey. He's also got a textual critical presentation where you have, you know, alleged textual corruptions and, you know, let's go after Bruce Metzger and stuff.

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And of course, if he's got like a 40 minute opening statement or something, then in that type of a situation, you've you've got, you know, you can put more of that together.

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We only had 20 minutes, 20 minutes. And so what do you do in 20 minutes?

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What's he going to do? Is he going to draw from each one of those? Is this going to be a scattergun approach?

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Is it going to be just, you know, broad assertions? And I'm going to have to deal with all this stuff.

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Well, what I had prepared to do was, in essence, to address all of those aspects.

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And so I had a had a pre -written presentation. I had timed it out very, very closely.

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When I read it, thinking that there is a, you know, trying to do it the same way that I would do it as I was presenting it to an audience.

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It had come out to 19, 19 minutes and 55 seconds.

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So I, no, no, no. 18 minutes and I had a minute and five left. Let's put that way.

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Had a minute and five buffer. And I knew that meant it was going to be very, very close because I've never figured this out.

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But I've mentioned this on the dividing line before. No matter how realistic I try to be in private reading it.

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Once you get up there and once you're in front of an audience, I don't know if it's you just feel you have to enunciate more clearly because you're using a public address system.

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I have no way of knowing what it is. But I need to have at least a minute, in essence, to try to fit it in.

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It just goes longer. I don't know why. I guess time changes during that period of time. I don't know.

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But when I got up there, I made my presentation. And I finished,

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I think, if I recall correctly, there was a two on my timer. I think

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I had two seconds when I finished my 20 -minute presentation. Shabir, in his opening presentation, took no notes whatsoever to the podium.

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No notes at all. Which was fairly impressive given the number of references that he gives, the number of citations that he uses.

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He obviously has all of that memorized. And as I listened,

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I very quickly discerned that this was going to be the synoptic presentation. And it was going to be the synoptic presentation with some

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Bart Ehrman flavoring. He had Ehrman's misquoting Jesus on his desk.

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And so I knew that was going to be coming from that direction. And so he primarily focused not on the illustrations that he had used before.

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He focused on illustration that I had not heard him use before.

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That I had not heard him use in a debate before. But, and this is where the providence of God comes in.

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Thankfully, over the past almost, well, three and three -quarter years now,

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I have been teaching through a synoptic gospel study at the

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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. I even mentioned this during the debate. And we use the parallel gospel text published by the

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United Bible Society. It's a big, the big blue one. And we had already covered the one that he focused most upon.

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And that is, he specifically focused upon the story of the raising of Jairus's daughter.

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And I was so thankful. I mean, I actually had a smile on my face, to be perfectly honest with you, when he started on this.

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Because I had already lectured through this. That means I had already worked with the issue.

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And it just took a moment to make sure I had the right references in front of me.

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And I knew that I was going to, in my rebuttal period, I didn't, like I said, I already had a pre -written opening statement.

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In my rebuttal period, I was going to be able to very clearly, concisely, he only had,

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I think we had nine -minute rebuttal periods. But clearly and concisely respond to his primary example of the alleged corruption of the

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New Testament text. Because remember, his thesis basically is New Testament is and is not inspired. It has some inspired parts to it.

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And the rest of it comes from mankind. And that particular assertion leaves you wondering, well, how do you know which is which?

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And I'll tell you how he answered that when we got into the cross -examination. So he makes his presentation. I get up, I make my presentation.

31:23

As I'm walking back to my table, he gives me a very interesting look. He's smiling, very gracious, but a very interesting look.

31:30

I sort of got the feeling he, because as we talked beforehand, as we talked before the debate,

31:38

I had asked him if he had had a chance to, for example, see my debate with Hamzah Abdul -Malik. No, no,

31:43

I didn't get a chance to see it. Have you had an opportunity to see any of my other debates? No. And he did have the

31:49

King James only controversy on his desk. We had no other books of mine on his desk at all. And so it was pretty clear to me he really was not aware of what kind of a debate he was going to be engaging in, in debating me.

32:02

So once the opening statements were out of the way, then I think he started to get an idea. Then we got up and did the rebuttal section.

32:10

And in the rebuttal section, I went through that text and I explained what telescoping is. And I explained, if you're wondering what the text is all about, in Mark's account of the raising of Jairus' daughter, remember he comes to Jesus and in Mark he says, my daughter is at the point of death.

32:30

And so they begin to go to the house. And as they're going, that's when the woman touches the hem of his garment. She's healed of the issue of blood.

32:37

But then in Mark, men come from the house and they tell

32:42

Jairus and Jesus, don't bother the teacher anymore. She's already dead. And remember, that's when

32:49

Jesus says, do not doubt, only believe. And they continue on.

32:54

You got the mourners. Jesus kicks the mourners out, raises the girl to life. And that's how

33:00

Don Francisco got his song. If you remember his song, Gotta Tell Somebody, it was a good song.

33:06

I really liked that song. Now, when Matthew tells the same story, he tells it in a briefer form, shorter form.

33:17

Now, that might surprise some of you because you're thinking, well, Mark's much shorter than Matthew. And for some reason, at one point when

33:25

I had been studying for this debate, I had asked BibleWorks to give me percentages because he likes to say, well, you know,

33:32

John uses Son of God this number of times. And that's more than Matthew uses and Mark and da, da, da, da, da.

33:38

But he never took into account the fact that Mark is much shorter than Matthew. And that, in fact,

33:45

Luke, even though it has fewer chapters, is longer than Matthew. And so I had had

33:50

BibleWorks give me the number of words in each one. And I would work out Son of God, Son of Man as percentages of the particular book that we're examining.

34:03

And so I had mentioned that. And for some reason, he found that just fascinating that I knew how many words there were.

34:10

And I only approximated, I rounded them off, actually, in each one of these books so we could work out the percentages.

34:15

And I remember mentioning to him that I had also memorized the number, the numbers that he had given.

34:21

He actually has a presentation he only gives to Muslims. He doesn't. I've never heard him use this in a debate against a

34:26

Christian. But when speaking just to Muslims, he has almost a Koran code type thing.

34:32

If you remember the Bible codes stuff, the Koran code stuff, if you take the number of surahs and add them up and the number of verses in each of the surahs, the number of ayahs, and you add them up, and then you have an odd column and an even column, and you add the two columns together and the numbers, 6 ,555 and all the rest of the stuff.

34:53

He has this presentation. So I mentioned to him, yeah, I even, for example, know the numbers from your Koran code presentation, like 6 ,555.

35:01

And he was looking at me and it took him a second to even realize what I was saying. And then when he realized it, he was like, oh my goodness.

35:09

It was the same kind of viewpoint, the same kind of look that I got from John Dominic Crossan when he and I were talking before the debate.

35:16

And he'd start telling me a story and I'd finish his story for him out of his own autobiography. And I said, well, you know,

35:23

I read your autobiography and I listened to this tape and this tape and this lecture and this presentation.

35:28

And they're sort of like, you did? And at first, you can tell they're happy that you did.

35:37

In fact, they can sense you must respect them if you did that. But then there's also mixed with, oh, because I didn't do that for you.

35:48

I have no idea where you're coming from. And so if you know all that about me, this might not be good.

35:55

So I sort of got the same sense that I mentioned that to him as well.

36:01

So anyway, we got into the rebuttal section.

36:07

And so I got into, I'm sorry, I keep wandering away here. I got into looking at the difference between Matthew and Mark.

36:13

And Matthew gives a shorter version. That might surprise you because you figure, well, Matthew's always going to be longer. No, there are times when

36:20

Matthew takes the same story and he, what I call, telescopes it. Remember, if you've seen the movie

36:28

Master and Commander, that was a pretty cool film, all right, especially if you like seafaring stuff.

36:34

And if you remember that opening scene where that first battle they have, where they're peering through the fog and they've got their looking glasses, those telescopes.

36:45

Well, why is it called telescopes? Well, it's a sea far, but the idea is you could fold it up.

36:51

You could push it inside of itself and then pull it out from itself. And that's the telescoping effect that we're talking about.

36:59

And when I talk about a writer telescoping a particular story,

37:05

Matthew telescopes what happens in regards to Jairus' words to Jesus. When Jesus gets to the house, he knows the woman's dead.

37:14

He's already had to tell Jairus, do not be unbelieving, only believe. When they walk into the house,

37:20

Jairus believes that his daughter is dead. That's true in both stories.

37:27

The only difference being that Mark gives us the added information that there is an initial encounter and then the woman's healing, and then the men come from the home and say she's died and Jesus still keeps coming.

37:40

In Mark, he just simply says he's come to Jesus. And I'm sorry, in Matthew, he's come to Jesus. Would you please heal my daughter?

37:46

She has died. And his whole point was, see, in Mark, it's she's at the point of death.

37:52

In Matthew, she's died. Contradiction can't fit these together. I said, no, this is telescoping. Now, interestingly enough, even in giving you my report today,

38:01

I purposefully telescoped one particular aspect of it so you can see an illustration of this in, quote unquote, real life.

38:09

What do I mean? Well, I mentioned to you when Shabir came in that he and I talked.

38:14

And I mentioned to you the things we talked about before the debate. I mentioned we talked about how to keep the Muslims from all getting up and walking out.

38:21

I mentioned we talked about the cross examination. But in reality, and all of that's true, and I think if Shabir had been listening to me, he would have gone, yes, yes, that's, yeah, well, those are the things we talked about.

38:31

But the fact of the matter is those were two separate conversations. The first conversation, I walked to the back of the room.

38:37

As soon as I saw him come in, I met him at the back of the room, shook his hand. And that's when we talked about how to keep the

38:42

Muslims from all getting up and leaving. Then he had to go do his prayers. I didn't mention that he did at least some of his prayers before the debate started.

38:51

And he even mentioned at the time that he has more freedom because he's traveling. And so when Muslims are traveling, they have more freedom as to the timing of their prayers and things like that.

38:58

So he went to do his prayers. I went back down front, talked with folks. He came back down. And then we had the conversation, still before the debate.

39:05

But then we had the conversation about the cross examination. And then the moderator was involved and so on and so forth.

39:11

So I telescoped those two things together. There was no lie involved. And we all do that every single day. And if I was only giving you a five minute report on the debate or a 15 minute report on the debate, that may have been all

39:22

I ever said about it. And it would not have been inaccurate. And that's what I explained about the difference between Matthew and Mark at that point.

39:30

Now, obviously to me, he had never heard that response. He had never, I guess he has, maybe he's presented this more than once to people.

39:38

I don't know. But he had never heard that response and wasn't really sure how to, all he could say in response was, well, you know, people speak entire, they preach entire sermons about what

39:49

Jesus allegedly said. But you're saying Jesus didn't really say what he said, what Matthew says. And I'm saying, no, that's not what

39:56

I'm saying. But I am saying that to say there's a contradiction between these two is untrue for these reasons.

40:04

And I then use that to point out, and this happened a lot in the conversations we had with Muslims as well, that they are trying to force a completely different view of inspiration on the text of the

40:16

New Testament. The Muslim view of inspiration, that the Qur 'an comes down without the touch of human hands, that it is a divine revelation.

40:23

It's absolutely dictated. You know, the angel gives it to Muhammad and he repeats it. And that's all there is to it.

40:28

This isn't Muhammad's language. This isn't, that's not how Christians view the inspiration in the

40:34

New Testament. Okay, I'll take that back. There are some Christians who in error view that as the nature of a dictation theory of inspiration.

40:42

That's wrong. It's very easy to prove it's wrong. Muslims all the time prove it's wrong. Paul says, pray for me.

40:49

Was that God saying, pray for me? Did God tell us to pray for God? They will appeal to the imprecatory

40:56

Psalms. They will appeal to where the Psalmist said things like, you know, how long will you abandon me?

41:02

And that's clearly just the words of a man. And when Luke says, it seemed good to me to record these things. Well, that's just Luke saying things.

41:09

That can't be the word of God because God doesn't talk like that, etc, etc. So he's using the wrong standard.

41:15

He's using the wrong understanding of inspiration. And so it gave me the opportunity then of explaining that as well.

41:21

At the same time, giving the answer to the alleged contradiction, and so on, so forth. So he said a number of amazing things during the debate, to be honest with you.

41:30

He said the Gospel of Thomas was earlier than Mark. And I'm like, what? Where did that come from?

41:37

And so I brought that up during cross -examination. And he said, well, okay, actually, it's sources of Thomas are earlier than Mark.

41:44

And even at that, there's just no way. That was one of the illustrations, in my opinion, where he really gave an example of where he will accept what one scholar says, even if what that one scholar says is way, way, way outside of the realm of accepted scholarship.

42:07

Well, let's put it this way. Way, way outside of being any type of mainstream opinion.

42:15

Let's put it that way. That's the better way to put it. And so I focused on that.

42:23

And then a lot of people caught two things. I've gotten a lot of really, really positive responses from the debate.

42:32

But a lot of folks heard two particular aspects. They heard during the cross -examination where I caught

42:40

Shabir with one of his errors. It's an error he's made over and over and over and over and over again.

42:48

I've heard him make this error in debates. I've heard him make this error in lectures. He's going through this alleged

42:54

Mark is changed by Matthew stuff. And he said that, see, in Matthew, Jesus is called

43:00

Lord more often. And that's a term of deity instead of trying to make Jesus look like a god.

43:05

And Mark doesn't have it that way. One of the ones he uses is when you compare Mark 13 with Matthew 24. And the phrase, you know, be sober, be vigilant.

43:15

You do not know when your blank is returning. In Mark, it is in the

43:21

RSV. And remember, Shabir Ali does not read Greek. And he admitted that in the debate. In the RSV, it is the master of the house.

43:31

And in Matthew, it is when your

43:37

Lord is returning. And he says, see, Mark has the lower term, master of the house.

43:42

Matthew has a higher term, Lord. Here is evidence of that, you know, Matthew is not truly the word of God. And this perversion is going on, blah, blah, blah.

43:50

Well, a long time ago, I had looked these texts up.

43:57

And I just chuckled every time I heard it. Because in reality,

44:02

Mark's giving the longer phrase. And it is the Lord of the house.

44:10

It's the term, which is what Matthew uses. The exact same Greek word. It was just translated differently in the

44:16

RSV for stylistic reasons, for nothing other than that. And so I asked him about that during the cross -examination.

44:25

And it's almost like he could see what was coming. He didn't know what was coming. He didn't know that there was this, that he was wrong about that.

44:33

But it's almost like he could sort of see it coming. Because I had my Greek text open. And so when

44:39

I explained to him what the reality was, he said, well, if it's the same term in the

44:45

Greek, then I must concede the point. And he was gracious about it. But a lot of people caught it.

44:50

A lot of people heard it. And I've had a number of students write to me and say, look, if he can't, if all of his criticisms are on that level where he's only been using an

44:59

English text, and he's one of their leading apologists, what does that tell you?

45:04

And they did catch that. And the other thing was, and then we'll take a phone call here. The other thing that they heard was,

45:12

I repeated this. My thesis kept over and over again. Look, we need to be consistent. If you're going to apply a different set of standards to the

45:21

New Testament, then Shabir Ali applies in his defense of the Koran. Inconsistency is the mark of a failed argument.

45:30

And then I gave illustration after illustration after illustration where that's exactly what Shabir Ali does. He uses one set of scholarship, one worldview for dealing with the issues of the

45:42

Koran and a completely different set for dealing with the New Testament. I demonstrated that repeatedly over and over and over again.

45:52

So one of the applications that I made of this was, why should

46:00

I as a Christian look at the writings of a man who did not have access to the

46:06

Christian scriptures? He was illiterate. The Bible had not yet been translated into a language that he would have access to, even if he could have read anyway.

46:13

So it's a double whammy at that point. And so he doesn't have direct access to my scriptures, unlike the

46:21

New Testament, which is just soaked in the Old Testament. You cannot separate that. If you made all the

46:26

Old Testament citations disappear out of the New Testament and you could no longer have access to the Old Testament, the New Testament wouldn't make sense.

46:33

There is a direct connection, a lifeblood connection there. No such connection to the

46:38

Koran. You could never read the Bible and the

46:44

Koran would stand on its own because it comes from a completely different culture, comes from a completely different time. 600 years later, different language, different culture, no connection to my scriptures.

46:54

Why should I believe that an illiterate man without connection to my scriptures at all, what he said should supersede the testimony of the martyrs themselves in those early centuries, those apostles themselves who wrote.

47:07

Why should I believe that? And then I turned it around. This is what people heard. I said, and would any

47:13

Muslim here this evening abandon their belief in the Koran on the basis of the words of a man 600 years after Muhammad, say in the middle of the 11th, 12th century.

47:27

And this person comes along. He has no access to the Koran in Arabic. He's never read the

47:32

Koran in Arabic. And yet he comes along and says that if you're a true follower of God, you're a true follower of Allah, you should follow him and what he has to say as he overthrows the teachings of Muhammad and the

47:45

Koran. Would you follow such a man as that? And a lot of people heard that because Shabir Ali never even attempted to give a meaningful response to that at all.

47:57

And yet it's the direct parallel, the direct parallel. And so they caught that. And so it was a wonderful opportunity in my closing statement.

48:06

And I'm going to go to Tony here because Tony has debated Shabir Ali as well. And so Tony's debates were some of the debates

48:12

I listened to, to be prepared. So he got there before I did. In my closing statement,

48:17

I had seven minutes and I gave to Shabir a copy of The God Who Justifies, The Forgotten Trinity, and Scripture Alone.

48:28

Three of my books. I had a copy of King James I Controversy with me, but I already had one, so I didn't need to give them to him.

48:34

And then I had talked to the folks at Lachman and they had delivered an

48:40

Uber Bible, which is what we have on our website there. The New American Standard, large print, ultra thin with the super rich cover on it.

48:51

And I mentioned that I had heard him quote from the New American Bible, which is a horrific

48:56

Roman Catholic translation. And I wanted to get him away from that. And so I wanted to present to him from the

49:04

Lachman Foundation for which I work as a critical consultant, a copy of the New American Standard Bible.

49:09

And so I had this stack. That's a fairly decent stack of stuff that I then left the podium and went over and gave it to him at his desk as a part of my closing statement.

49:18

And there was applause. He smiled. He stood. He shook my hand, accepted the gifts graciously. And when he got up for his final closing statement, he said that I was a gentleman and a scholar from whom he had learned much this evening.

49:34

And then very interestingly, the majority of his closing statement was a cut down version of his why the

49:46

Quran is inspired speech. Now, if he really felt that there was much he could do at this point in this debate, he would have still been addressing those issues, but he didn't even try.

49:57

And a lot of folks noticed that as well, as basically as an admission. OK, I wasn't prepared for this.

50:05

And by the way, this is mentioned on Fred Butler's blog article, which is linked on the thing.

50:13

In my closing, I also said, I really hope that we will be able to work out a debate at the University of Glasgow next

50:18

May. And I offered, I threw in there and to make it an offer you cannot possibly resist.

50:25

If you will say yes, then I will promise to wear a formal kilt in the debate at the

50:30

University of Glasgow. He would have no reason to say no.

50:38

I mean, honestly, he was treated fairly. It was a fair debate. He'd have to admit that. And so I'm really hoping that in the not too distant future,

50:46

I'll be able to come to you and say, hey, we've got confirmation. Here's going to be the date,

50:51

University of Glasgow, wherever it is in Scotland and so on and so forth. And so I really hope that that does end up taking place.

50:58

So with that, I wasn't expecting this and we only got a few minutes left, but Tony Costa from up in Canada is called.

51:05

Hi, Tony. Hi, Dr. White. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm well. I'd first like to commend you on a great debate.

51:11

The reviews have been excellent. They have been. Bravo to you. Well, thank you. And now you, how many times have you debated

51:18

Shabir? I've debated him four times up here in Canada, the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo at Ryerson University as well.

51:27

So I've had four matches with him. And what topics did you cover? Well, we covered, is

51:32

Jesus the divine son of God? Is the Quran the word of God? We dealt also with Jesus in Islam, Jesus in Christianity, which is the true version.

51:41

And it's interesting, Dr. White, that your description is exactly the same. It's the same thing that happened with my debates.

51:48

The problem with Shabir is basically he is corrected, but he never takes the correction. He simply repeats what he's always been saying.

51:56

And that I think is a serious problem. Do you think, for example, he will repeat the

52:03

Matthew 13, I'm sorry, Mark 13, Matthew 24 anymore in the future? Well, I think he will.

52:08

Really? In my debate with him. Well, but I mean, from now on, I mean, he's been shown that it's the exact same

52:15

Greek term. Do you really think he would? I hope he takes it to heart. But from my own experience, I have found that when he is corrected, he simply goes on repeating the same mistake.

52:24

But I hope that he's taken this to heart and that he does correct himself the next time.

52:31

That would, I'm certainly going to be listening, because that would disappoint me a lot.

52:36

I mean, you know, I would like to think that at least at that point he would go, all right, here's a clear fact.

52:45

And he doesn't have to read Greek to verify what I said. No, no, he doesn't.

52:50

He did something similar when I debated him. He brought up the passages in Acts 2 and 3. Where the references to the servant,

52:57

Jesus is called the servant there. Right. And I reminded him that the background to those servant passages is the

53:03

Servant Song of Isaiah, which identifies the Messiah as the suffering servant of the Lord.

53:09

And he basically said, well, no, it means that Jesus was a Muslim, that he was a slave. So unfortunately, what you have here is he's reading back

53:17

Islamic theology into the New Testament. Oh, yeah. Well, I haven't heard a single Islamic speaker yet.

53:24

Who was not suffering from having the glasses of the

53:29

Quran as the filter of his worldview firmly in place. And anachronistically, then reading

53:36

Quranic categories and Islamic beliefs back into both the Old and New Testament, even when it creates an absolute upside down contradiction.

53:44

There's no question. I like the example you used about, let's say someone came 600 years down the road and attempted to replace

53:51

Islam. Well, something similar happened with the coming of Bahá 'u'lláh, the founder of the Baha 'i faith. Right. Who could read, who actually was

53:57

Persian, but he did have a knowledge of Arabic. And he claimed that he was the fulfillment of all the world's religions, including

54:04

Islam. And to this day, the Baha 'is are considered a cult by Islam. And so is the

54:10

Ahmadiyya movement, which claims that its founder is actually the true prophet who has succeeded

54:15

Muhammad. Right. Right. Oh, yeah. Well, there's no question that there's the whole issue of inconsistency is where I had to start.

54:24

And I would like to see, like I said, I would like to do the deity of Christ. I would like to do the cross and the nature of the cross, which you've done elements of that with him.

54:34

It was a fairly short debate, as I recall, but you've done elements of that with him. But we had to start someplace.

54:40

And I would like to see those topics addressed, especially the deity of Christ, because you've seen his little book on the deity of Christ.

54:47

And most Jehovah's Witnesses that I know go far more into depth than he did on that particular subject.

54:54

And so that's why I would like to address that one as well. But you have to start with somewhere. And this was at least I can go back to this and remind him of those inconsistencies.

55:04

And when he then engages in them again, I can refer back to that very quickly and say, we've already demonstrated these inconsistencies and you can't keep going back to them.

55:13

But I'll ask you, do you think we're going to have any problem getting further debates arranged in the future?

55:23

You may, depending on the response that he received. I know that when Robert Morey was up here in Toronto, he debated

55:30

Shabir and that was the end of it. I don't think he ever wanted to touch

55:35

Robert Morey again with a 10 foot pole. So it all depends on the reaction that his audience gave, his

55:41

Muslim audience. They're really, even he said, he didn't have a lot of connections in the

55:47

LA area. So there were some young men there, they jumped me during the break and they wanted me to quote by memory the reference to Ibn Masud and what happened with him.

56:03

And I had to look it up and I gave the reference during the cross -examination period, but they were very aggressive.

56:08

But there was probably only about five or six of them. So I really don't know that.

56:15

It's quite possible. I mean, I wouldn't rule it out, but it's quite possible he may take you up on that debate.

56:23

That'd be interesting because I'm looking forward to seeing you in the kilt as well. Well, I happen to be looking forward to getting one.

56:32

So that's two of us. So I'll use that as an argument with my wife who continues to oppose that idea.

56:37

But anyway, no, I'd like to see that happen because I have seen one of the debates at the

56:43

University of Glasgow. Of course, I'd like to see it in Manchester and Birmingham and places like that where I've heard some of the debates or presentations that didn't go all that well for the

56:52

Christian side. I'd like to be able to give a presentation there as well. So we'll see how that happens.

56:58

That'd be wonderful because as you know, there's a great number of Muslims in England. Yes, oh, believe me. Yes, I'm well aware of it.

57:04

That's why I'd like to do that over there since I've now got a little bit of a foundation amongst the folks over there. I'll be over there in July speaking in London.

57:11

So that would be something we really need to do. So well, thanks for listening. And I thank you for your prayers and the

57:17

Lord definitely did bless. All right, well, all the best to you, Dr. White. Thank you, Tony. Continue to prosper your ministry. Thank you very much.

57:22

God bless. Bye -bye. And thank you for listening to VyingLine. I know that we had some technical difficulties about halfway through, but I guess the server came back.

57:32

And of course, those of you who are listening by archive have absolutely no idea that any of that happened. But appreciate your listening today.

57:39

Appreciate especially your prayers. We prayed, we asked that you would pray for this particular event.

57:45

And I know many churches did, many individuals did. And I think that we saw the result of that.

57:53

It was, I know that as soon as we have the tapes, it's going to be a high priority on Rich's video editing schedule to get that one available.

58:02

First, the MP3s will be available. And then the DVDs afterwards. We had a three -camera shoot. So it should be one of the best debate coverages that we've ever been able to produce.

58:11

Largest debate audience we've ever had. Put that all together with one of the best debates we've ever done. And you're going to enjoy it.

58:18

It's going to be something you're going to be able to use in your churches and have discussion groups about and put together with the

58:23

Hamza Abdul -Malik debate. And immediately, we'd have two excellent debates you could look at there.

58:29

It would also have a real contrast in the way that they were shot on video. Thanks for listening to Dividing Line.

58:35

We'll be back Thursday afternoon. Lord willing, God bless. Been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

59:38

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59:43

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59:48

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