Inerrancy and Harmonization: What's the Problem?

Is that welcome to the dividing line. I don't have it in the screen, so I don't know what's going on, but that's okay. It's just, it's that silly, that's not Windows 10. There, that, okay, there's that guy.

I'd rather have the Windows 10 thing, or Windows 7, or whatever it is, I don't know. Better move the cell phone out of the way, because it does that little flashy thing, and that'll really bother people.

We have some OCD people that watch, and that's why they couldn't handle the Borg light, which is now over here. I can have it, and it doesn't bother me, but I don't have OCD, so. Anyway, welcome to the dividing line.

You know, every day is an adventure these days. It truly is. The world is an odd place. It truly, truly is. You know, there are so many topics that I could address right now. And I'll be honest with you, how much pushback, detestation, anger can any one person take?

I mean, there are a couple that I'd like to address, but I'll just be honest with you. I'm heading out of town. I've got my major yearly rides to do at high altitude, and getting to go spend some time with some of my best friends in the whole world, and it means a lot to me.

Speaking of three different churches in the Denver area, by the way. But I just, I suppose I could just light these fires and leave them all to Rich, and I just leave town, because he answers the phone anyways.

And sometimes I'm over on this side of the office, and he's on that side of the office. And now that his, he's a little bit closer, is he moved his office. Used to be around a corner. I really couldn't hear anything.

Now I can hear a little bit more. And so, you know, why not? You know, just flip the pins, throw the grenades, and leave town. You know, maybe I'll forget my computer, drop my cell phone, whatever, and just have a couple weeks to relax,.

And to not deal with all the insanity. Do you find my conversations disturbing?

Well, you get some interesting phone calls. You get some interesting phone calls. You should have an automatic little thing that you press. You should have a little bank of recorded things. And you're like under one of Matthew 18, you know, and there's just that recorded response to Matthew 18, and James White's a Jesuit, and you click that one.

It might be a little bit easier. Or we could just have it as a part of the options when you call in. If you think James White's a Jesuit, press one. If you're a King James only-ist, and think that Stephen Anderson and Peter Ruckman are God's gifts to the church, press two.

But the response would be the same in each one. You are the weakest link. Goodbye. No, no, no, no.

No, there'd be all sorts of stuff. There'd be cool recordings. Don't you remember what we used to do with 2662 LDS and stuff like that? We could have some great recordings available for these. If you're a jihadi, press three, and your call will be automatically traced and sent to the FBI.

You know, there's just all sorts of stuff that we can do here. But yeah, I won't do that. I won't do that. But you do have the phone lines open, because not for calls. Hold on, hold on. Don't go crazy.

I announced yesterday, and I'm going to discuss a topic other than the lynch mobs with the pitchforks and torches and effigies of me that are being burned across the internet by the religious and the non-religious alike, basically.

But I did throw out a open invitation. Now, someone's going to have to contact Brother Flynn at Megiddo Films, because I just posted on Twitter that I'm blocked by Brother Flynn. I don't know why. Why would that be?

I mean, he's felt the freedom to go after me on his program and for hours on end, and then blocks me on Twitter. It's really interesting. I've noticed, I've said a couple times with only a small amount of exaggeration that both Facebook and Twitter have had to bring entire new server farms online to hold Brannon House's block list.

Because if you show any, if you express anything other than his perspective, he will block you. I mean, you're just gone, boom. It's amazing. And so, yeah, somebody else in channel was blocked by Paul Flynn too.

So, you know, that's his right. I mean, I've blocked people in the past, normally because they were acting like complete jerks, but this is all being blocked, sometimes preemptorily. You know, just, I don't want to hear what you have to say.

Well, anyways, someone might let Paul know. I included him and Osama Daqdaq and Brannon House. You can call the studio here. I gave the number on Twitter. And here's the thesis of our discussion. The gospel was magnified and proclaimed in the dialogues in Memphis.

I will defend that, you deny it. How's that? I've got it queued up, ready to go. Paul Flynn knows that in the program he did with Mark Carpenter, they specifically stated that the gospel was not presented.

What? No, it's not. No, I don't believe you're correct. All right, whatever. It was stated that the gospel was not presented. And I have, I have it, you know, I've got these little programs here and these little programs play videos.

It's amazing. You can actually play videos from stuff that happened in the past. These are recordings of events. And so you don't have to just, it's really neat. You don't have to just go on the basis of, you know, what people think.

You can actually rewatch what was said over and over again. It's really cool how it works. It's great how that happens. And so I can just, you know, click on a few little things here on the screen and we can all watch as, well, as Yasir Qadhi asks me in the mosque to explain why Jesus had to die and justification.

And I have all this time. And I even took the time to contrast the Christian perspective with the Hadith of the man who killed 99 people, which I've done a number of my debates, but I did right there.

And I did so in such a way as to be motioning toward Dr. Qadhi. And I was saying, well, for example, like the Hadith of the man who killed 99 people. And I was wanting, if I, in any way, misrepresented that Hadith, please feel free.

And no, he was just nodding his head. Yep, yep, that's what it says. That's what it says. And for a lot of folks, that's an amazing thing to watch. They've never seen that before. They've never seen a Muslim scholar, an imam in a mosque sitting with a Christian who is narrating the Muslim Hadith.

And he agrees with his narration. It's an accurate narration. He's accurately representing what it says, what it means, and presenting in such a way that it communicates to Muslim people. Now, one of the problems a lot of people have is, and again, this goes back a ways, but for years and years now, this ministry has been involved in witnessing to Mormons.

And people who are now parents with teenage kids were once kids themselves who went out with us to the Mormon temple, and they can testify very, very clearly that for decades, I have taught people that you have to overcome language barriers in witnessing to people from other faith perspectives.

Some people don't even like the idea of faith perspectives, but from another religious viewpoint, whatever. And you have to overcome language barriers because the danger is they may hear you using certain language and interpret it in such a way that they will put a meaning into your words that you don't want there, and that will end up sort of short-circuiting what you're attempting to do.

You may think they're following, and then half an hour into the conversation, everything goes off the rails. You wonder what happened, and what it was is you hadn't been communicating all along, and that's the problem.

And so I sit in a mosque, and when I explain the necessity of Christ's death, I do so in such a way that I quote a Hadith so as to present a contrast so that people can understand what the real difference is.

And that's not the first time I've been in a mosque and explained that. There is a video out there. Mark Fitzpatrick, okay, you're right. There is a video out there of me in the mosque in Erasmus, South Africa, and the debate was on salvation.

And so one of the issues that had to be dealt with was, to me, and I think to serious Muslims as well, one of the key issues is, can God forgive sin without his law being propitiated? And Islam says yes.

That's what the whole story of the man that killed 99 people, actually it's 100 by the time I got, that's the whole point, is that Allah can arbitrarily forgive egregious mass murderers with his law remaining broken, no justice done.

God's law does not require justice in Islam. And when you think about it, there are a lot of Christians that struggle with this issue when you ask them, well, you've accepted the idea that atonement is necessary.

You may have accepted it when it was presented to you as a child. You may have accepted it when it was presented to you as a young adult. Whenever it is, you accepted the message. But a lot of Christians are really befuddled when you press the issue and say, why?

Why can't God just forgive? Why does his law have to be fulfilled? Why is it necessary for there to be atonement? You've got to deal with this when you're dealing with Muslims, if you're dealing with Muslims.

Majority of my critics aren't dealing with Muslims. They may encounter Muslims. They may pass out of track. They may say, repent and believe the gospel, but that's not dealing with Muslims. Actually engaging them, their worldview, their beliefs, so that the gospel is understandable to them, that's a different issue.

That's a different issue. It's real easy to talk to people on the street, have a five-minute conversation, go, yeah, I'm really engaging the Muslim people. No, you're not. That may start something, but if you can't go beyond that, if you can't get to this level of discussing, of even answering the question, why is atonement necessary?

Then you're not really engaging the subject. So anyway, what's really neat is I have right here on this wonderful computing device, this videotape where I can replay what I actually said over and over again, and we can listen, and we can go, look, the gospel is presented.

Look, I talked about things like repentance and faith and atonement and justification, the nature of justification and the relationship of faith and works. Wow, I got to say more about the gospel in that mosque than most people say in sermons in their churches on Sunday mornings.

How did that happen? Hmm, that's amazing. Yeah, so it's 877 -753 -3341 for those gentlemen, but they're not going to call because it's a slam dunk and they know it. So they have their purposes for what they're doing.

They have their, you know, and it doesn't, it wouldn't promote their purposes to actually have to deal with what was said because not a single one of them has ever been in that situation and ever will be in that situation and has given anywhere near as complete or clear a presentation as was done in what they are calling a huge act of compromise and sin on my part.

So there you go, there you go. But the phone lines are open. You could keep an eye on those, for those little blinking lights. Okay, good, good. So we'll, we tested them, made sure they worked and everything, yeah.

Couple other things. There's, look, when this level of attack begins, there are certain people in the internet. There's one individual, for example, the vilest internet troll ever known to man. He is the world record holder and always will be.

If you even start talking about him in the chat channel, I will ban you. This man is, this man defines vile. There is, there is no one that I know of in my entire life of any religion that I despise more than this individual.

Okay? What this individual has said in public forums concerning me and my family and people like that, I'm not even gonna, obvious I'm not even gonna mention it. I wouldn't repeat such things. But there is no one, nobody on the planet as vile as this man that I've ever met in my life.

He's crawled out of whatever hole he lives in to start spitting and throwing dirt and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And people are picking up on that. It is an amazing thing that you can spend all these years doing the things that we've been doing and what's happening in that process is there are people out there that just, they just become embroiled in their anger and their hatred, just waiting for the opportunity.

And evidently the Lord wanted to teach me something because when you see this kind of vitriol and hatred every single day, what it does is it has tremendously focused my mind on the people who have stood with me and the friends that I have and the value of having friends who stand with you the last thing that it's popular to do is to actually stand up and say, hey, what are you people doing?

This is crazy. Because we're seeing a lot of stuff. We're seeing the destructive interface of politics and different kinds of politics with the Christian faith. You start mixing the state with the church.

I don't care if it was in Rome. I don't care if it was Constantine or Constantius or Constance or Theodosius or anybody else. Once you start that mixture, bad things happen. Bad things happen. But man, if you even mentioned that, I mean, look, I'll just mention a very, very large church last week or the week before last had some big honking patriotic celebration.

Fireworks in the sanctuary. Fireworks, serious. I mean, serious. Somehow they managed to do that without torching the place. I really wonder if the fire marshal's a member of the church. That probably is.

Probably is this church. Because I don't know how that would really be even safe, to be honest with you. I really, really don't. Anyway, but I'm being distracted by something in channel right now. I don't know what it's about.

Mubin, what's Mubin? I've used Mubinun, which means clear. I'm not sure what. Anyway, don't have time to try to catch up with stuff in the channel. But there were flags everywhere and everybody's wearing red, white, and blue.

And they're American flags just being waved all over the place and fireworks going off. And this is a service of worship to the one triune God who is the God of all people, all people. Now, I didn't listen to the sermon, so I can't be completely critical.

But I'll just tell you right now, if I'm considered to be an elder in any church, that ain't ever happening in any church that I'm an elder at. No way. No, that's no. I, no. But even if it did, in someone's church, it would be absolutely necessary that in anything like that, you would have a complete call, a complete call to repentance on the part of this nation.

I have seen pictures of our flag flying over our embassies in foreign countries with the gay pride flag right beneath it. This nation is using its treasure and its money to promote sexual perversion around the world.

This nation has spit in God's face and redefined marriage. This nation spits in God's face every day and murders unborn children. This nation has not yet quite gotten to the point, but man, they're trying to get there, of criminalizing, well, New York has, but it just hasn't gotten outside of the crazy spots yet, but it will, to follow Canada's line in criminalizing you if you use the wrong pronouns of someone.

By the way, that is so insane. That is so utterly insane and completely unworkable. It would end human communication. I mean, you just couldn't talk to people. You could no longer talk to people. You couldn't communicate with people.

You just have to ignore people. And of course, they'd probably make that illegal too. But if they're gonna go there, I'm gonna come up with my own set of pronouns. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use Greek.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the most difficult, let's say third, nah, first declension pronouns. I'm gonna use, I'm gonna pull something from Greek that will be so esoteric that anyone who tries to talk to me will automatically go to jail, just gone.

Why not? Why not? I mean, if that's how insane this world has become, why not? Look, if there is not a call in that service for a recognition that what this nation needs is not for us to be sitting there waving our flags and going, yay, USA.

It's for Christians, we should be mourning. Mourning at what has happened in our land. Mourning at the love of sin and rebellion and the depth of degradation that has taken place in this land. Anyway, lots of unpopular things we could be talking about.

Looks like Paul Flynn is trying to get his own block server as well. People that are on Twitter are telling me, hey, look, I got blocked too, wow. I guess there are actually some apps you can buy that will block all the followers of someone you don't like.

I haven't seen it, but someone's told me about it. And maybe that's what these people are doing is I'm just gonna block. The problem is I have over 30 ,000 followers on Twitter. So like I said, you end up with your own server to hold your block list.

But as I was saying, I've learned from this who my friends are and certainly learned who my enemies are and that I have a lot of them. But that there are people who will stand up and do what's right and see through all the craziness.

Most of you know that a article was published on American Thinker over the weekend. I asked for the opportunity of responding and was turned down, of course. And Michael Brown was aware of this and so he's attempting to get an article because he's got a lot more contacts as far as the publishing industry is concerned.

And we're still hoping to get something. They'll only give him less than half the space even if anything happens. And I'll be honest with you, we've sort of got a little joke going. He's the optimist.

I said my middle name is Eeyore. So if he does get something published on American Thinker, then he wins on that one. But I don't think it's gonna happen. But he sent me the article he originally wrote and gave to them, which was a little bit shorter than the original thing.

And they're like, ah, it's way too long, blah, blah, blah. But I read it and it was great. And just extremely touching that he would take the time to write something like this and weigh in on this and do research.

And it's gonna get published one way or the other. Obviously, he has other avenues of publishing that he can utilize. But it's gonna be out there hopefully within the next couple of days. Obviously, I'll be linking to it in regards to our social media accounts and things like that.

I'll be letting people know how they can get hold of it as well. But it should be out probably by tomorrow at the latest anyways. And so I'm extremely appreciative of that. There have been a few in my own tribe who have stood up and said things.

Most, I think, are probably, in my tribe anyways, not even aware of it. But yeah, there's a number of folks. You would have assumed, would have thought the best of you that didn't. It is interesting. I saw someone make note that they had said a few months ago that I'm concerned that James White seems to be nicer to Muslims than he is to Christians.

And this has been said a couple of times and I've commented on air more than once. Folks, I hold Christians to a much higher standard than I do anyone else. Don't you? I mean, seriously. I want to believe the best of someone, but when it comes to truthfulness or consistency or whatever else, I expect Christians to act like Christians.

But even then, the idea seems to be if you disagree with someone's perspective, and a lot of this goes back to the text issue, amongst Reformed folks, at least some Reformed folks, it goes back to this issue of TR, ecclesiastical text, King James Stripe, whatever it might be.

And since I've said, look, folks, this is dangerous. This is highly corrosive and destructive to the apologetic defense of the New Testament, et cetera. Well, that makes me a terrible, horrible, mean, nasty person.

And that means I'm meaner to Christians than I am to Muslims. Well, that's funny. I mean, my fundamental conclusions and my arguments about Islam is that it's not true, period. The Quran does not come from God and Muhammad was not a prophet.

And there are reasons for that, that you don't have to light yourself on fire and act like a complete jerk to be able to explain to people. But how is it that saying this position, let's say ecclesiastical textism, how is it that saying, I think this is destructive to the apologetic work of the church?

I'm going to warn people. Where have I said any of these people aren't Christians? I don't get it. Where have I come to within one 10th of the level of the vitriol that is aimed at me constantly over the past few weeks by so many people?

I just don't. So I haven't quite followed that, but as it may, fascinating as it is. Would you be interested in doing Mormon evangelism here in St. George, Utah? Well, I've driven through St. George, around the temple.

Yeah, I used to do that type of thing all the time. I wish I still had that opportunity, maybe someday, but thanks, Zachary. That'd be fun to get back out there again. The only problem, Zachary, is I tend to attract an interesting crowd.

I mean, literally, I have to do sort of hit and run witnessing. And what I mean by that is, I went out to the temple for the first time in years, one night in Mesa, but I couldn't tell people I'm going to be out there because I attract interesting people.

That's what stopped our outreach in Salt Lake City, in Mesa. The King James only street screechers would show up, and it just destroyed everything. And unfortunately, that would probably happen again, but it's possible to do a one-time thing once in a while.

But yeah, I haven't been through there for a while. I remember driving up from down there to Salt Lake once in the 1972 Camaro. I found this used Camaro, and it was one that had one of those rag tops on it, and the top had decayed out, and the whole roof was just full of holes.

And a friend at church had to come in and use that stuff, use stuff in the walls and fill it all. And then buff it down. Oh, it looked horrible. But it was still a Camaro, man. And it had a V8 350, I think.

And I remember driving up there through Utah. I'd have to plan my stops so there would be like a, not no malleys, but a checker or something like that, because I had one cylinder that would foul all the time, and so I'd have to keep replacing the spark plug at regular intervals.

And oh man, it was so much fun back then. So like when Mike Beliveau and I drove my 1960, when was that, 64? Was that a 64 Dodge Dart? Was my Dart a 64? I think it was a 64 Dodge Dart up to Salt Lake City.

And we had to stop at Lake Powell at the dam to dig socks out from the back of the car because there were so many holes in the floorboard, that the cold air is coming through and freezing our feet. Yeah, we've got lots of funny stories we can tell about stuff like that.

But anyway, what can I say? Now everybody is posting their block pictures. We're gonna bring Twitter down. That's just all there is to it. We're gonna destroy Twitter because the block list will become so long that the whole system is just gonna bog down and it's just gonna die.

And that'll pretty much end everything. Wow, von Tischendorf just joined the chat channel. I'm not sure if that's legal because that's like a necromancy or something. Because I happen to know that Konstantin von Tischendorf is in, well, I believe he's in heaven.

I believe he's obviously a believer. He's a very strong believer, a conservative believer actually. And so he couldn't be joining channel. So that's strange. Yes, sir? Nothing? Oh, okay, all right. All right, so there's all that stuff.

So we're just gonna keep an eye on the thing here and go on to other subjects. I announced earlier that I was going to, that I had the opportunity of hearing not the last issue of Unbelievable. Justin's got a new book out.

Congratulations, Justin. I don't know that Justin would want to come on the program right now to talk about anything. I'm not sure he'd want to have me on the program right now to talk about anything.

But anyway, we may have Justin on. I don't know, Justin might be a little bit nervous to come on with me because I happen to know that Justin, I don't necessarily see eye to eye on everything and he might have to, you know.

But be careful, Justin. I could buy your book and listen to it on a ride and go, no, okay, all right. Let's have a little talk. But anyway, prior to the release of Justin's new book, which I'm sure would be a very interesting read, Justin Brierley called Unbelievable, some about, it's a 10-year history of the program.

And after talking to atheists for 10 years, why am I still a Christian and things like that. Free little plug there for Justin Brierley. The program before that had Mike Lycona on it with Dr. Burrage.

And this was not a debate at all because they are almost smack on one another. Burrage being British is probably a little bit far to the left from Lycona, but not much. And it was on why do the gospels differ?

In other words, it was about Lycona's new book. And I'm not doing this to start engaging everything that was said either about the book or that topic, but I did want to play a portion and do a little interaction with it.

And I'm not gonna speed it up or anything because sometimes Americans have problems with British accents. Well, not like Lycona has one, but here's, let's just listen in. This is from the unbelievable radio broadcast from a couple of weeks ago.

And Mike, oh, and it would help if I had remembered to replug it. Here we go.

And my concern with the problems that a lot of Christians get into and why I totally support and share Mike's perspective to try to help Christians understand the Bible is that many Christians are bothered, as just said, by these differences.

And if you think that the Bible is a kind of video diary and then there's two blind men in one gospel and only one in the other, well, one's true and one's not. But what we're doing there is confusing truth with facticity.

And I totally, back to my arguments with your dad, totally agree with Mike that the crucial things that Jesus arose from the dead and is alive, that's true. I think it's also a fact. The way in which facts are treated in the ancient world and the way in which facts are treated today are very different.

And what Mike has done is to show the way in which the differences in the gospels are not in any shape or form any more significant differences.

Than the differences written by Plutarch. I mean, this is obviously the essential thing. And perhaps just before I invite people to email in with their thoughts on this, this kind of does revolve around the whole idea of are we obliged in some way to view the gospels and the Bible generally as inerrant?

Or is that a somewhat modern category of thinking about the Bible, which does rather impose,.

I guess, 21st century standards. I'm gonna say that inerrancy is a 19th century heresy.

Right, you've put it out there, Rich. I look forward to the avalanche of emails.

So for instance, when does the ascension happen? If you read Luke's gospel, Luke chapter 24, he takes us through the events of the first Easter day. Jesus rises from his head in the morning. He goes for a walk on the road to Emmaus in the afternoon.

He meets with everybody and after dinner that evening, he ascends into heaven. In part two in the book of Acts, he has a period of 40 days. Well, either you have to say that Luke is stupid and doesn't realize he said something different at the end of his gospel or the start of the book of Acts, or you have to say he's actually not writing what we understand by chronology.

He's more theological than he's chronological. What he wants to do is to talk about the truths, and I think they are truth, and I think they're facts, that Jesus rose from the dead, that Jesus met with his disciples, and that Jesus reigns with God in heaven.

And those facts don't depend upon the timing of when he took off.

Just your perspective on this, because I know, Mike, it's been well-documented that certain other scholars in the States have come after you for the way you've kind of looked at some of the stories around the resurrection and things like that, and not necessarily affirmed a kind of strictly, you know, inerrancy kind of view, necessarily, that others, at least the way others would interpret that.

I mean, what's your take on this? Do you, are there other words you would prefer to use than inerrancy, perhaps? How do you approach this?

That's a great question, and I suppose some of it depends on how one wants to define inerrancy. Some of the definitions of inerrancy, many of them here in America, are difficult to swallow. So for example, most American evangelicals sitting in the pew think of inerrancy as every word in our present Bible being true, but they would be surprised to learn that most evangelical scholars here don't even hold that.

In fact, an ultra-conservative scholar here named Norman Geisler, one of the guys who Came after you. Yeah, was attacking me. He even acknowledges that the Bible we have in our hands today contains mistakes due to scribal errors and that the doctrine of inerrancy, in his mind, only applies to the autographs.

The problem is we no longer have the autographs. So in a very real sense, a rigid definition of inerrancy is nothing more than having a firm grasp on an empty sack. In contrast, the Lausanne

Now, let's stop there, because there's plenty to deal with right there. There were so many things, and it was fascinating because one of the examples that was given by the participants was the idea

See, what Lykon has done is he's looked at Plutarch, who Plutarch's lives, where he provides a great deal of information about various individuals from the ancient world. And what's useful is sometimes he does that from different perspectives.

And so he might mention somebody in one, and then somebody else's life that intersected with that one, you sort of It's sort of like the Gospels where you get some interaction and you can see how, at times, he will telescope or he will abbreviate or he'll include details in one place and not in the other place.

It's a standard observations. I'm sorry, it's really not anything new, in the sense that this was stuff that I was exposed to in seminary in the 80s. So I'm not sure why it makes it all that new. But anyway, that's what the book is about, is these are mechanisms that Plutarch used to communicate this genre of historical biography.

And that's what we should do with the Gospels as well. Well, in some instances, the conclusions are exactly the same. When you have differences in the number of people present, and that was the example used there.

Burrage talks about, well, if you have one person or two, one's right, one's wrong. No, that kind of simplistic, shallow interpretation, I suppose there are people like that out there. The problem is that it seems that these individuals, especially in Europe, conflate any kind of desire to harmonize and to hold a meaningful doctrine of inerrancy.

And they'll use the worst, most simplistic examples, rather than the best, most thought out, meaningful and scholarly examples that are found throughout commentaries that have been written for decades and centuries.

And that's very troubling. For example, Lycona's comment there at the end, that having a firm grasp on inerrancy is having a firm grasp on an empty bag, where he's clearly confusing categories. And what's fascinating, and I can't go into details right now, but I am doing a debate, a written debate with someone.

And instead of going the Lycona direction in dealing with the issue of inerrancy and textual issues, there are people that go the other direction. And that is they establish a particular set of manuscripts or a particular edition of manuscripts as their inerrant standard and solve the problem that way.

So the liberal just throws it all out like Ehrman does. And then there's others who go, who refusing to recognize the difference between inerrancy of the autographs and copyist issues and conflating those.

And they'll actually very often, the conservatives will blame B .B. Warfield. Let's say Warfield came up with all this stuff about inerrancy, Warfield came up with the distinction between the autographs and what comes afterwards, and it's all Warfield's fault.

Warfield was just recognizing what people have understood from the beginning. You know, when Burrage calls this an eight, was it 19th century, 19th century or 18th century? I forget which one he said.

Heresy. Shows you how many New Testament guys don't do any church history. They just don't do any church history. The terminology is one thing. The understanding of what it means is another thing. And it's very, very obvious that the early church functioned upon a doctrine of inerrancy, the nature of scripture, what it is.

It's too easy to document that. There are a number of places you can even go online. There's stuff on Triablog on that. Jason Engler has written stuff like on that for years, literally. And in fact, now I think about it, I think he actually commented on this thing.

I think. I think I saw something about it. Anyway. You can discuss those things. But so it's striking that one who would be considered one of the leading scholarly apologists in the United States would say that a firm grasp of inerrancy is a firm grasp of an empty sack, all because of the lack of the autographs.

I mean, of everything that I heard, and I know that N .T. Wright refers to inerrancy as that silly American doctrine. Burrage just calls it an 18th, 19th century heresy. He even said something about Americans at some point along the line.

Their understanding of what inerrancy actually means seems to be somewhat prejudiced. And I have said, I have specifically made comment on this program, having played extensive portions of Mike Licona's comments, that I think he just needs to come straight out and say, I don't believe in inerrancy.

I believe that the Bible is primarily reliable, or go ahead and do the European thing, that the Bible accurately communicates to us spiritual truths. That's what Rome does. And just go ahead and divorce the spiritual stuff from the historical reality that gives it meaning, because that's what you got to do.