Skype Show from Tucson: A Bit on Race, A Bit on Thanksgiving, Then A Lot on ETism

Greetings, and welcome to The Divine Line. My name is James White. I'm coming to you via Skype, so who knows how long this will actually last. I don't know. I just, I need to repent right now of the, a couple of the traffic laws.

I may have bent a little bit to get here. Tucson traffic. Let me tell you something. I understand why the folks in Tucson view themselves as sort of the stepchildren in Arizona because Maricopa County, Phoenix, gets more of the money because that's the capital and stuff, you know?

They could use a little help down here. The traffic can be tough. And I thought I left from the mountaintop fast enough to get here. Barely made it, ran into the room, I think 12 minutes ago, eight minutes ago, something like that.

I forget when it was. Anyway, and so here I am. And so I'm sort of scattered and rushing around really quick. But it's good to be with you. A couple follow-ups from the last program. It was pretty disturbing, honestly.

There was one individual on Facebook that, you know, just to me anyways, exemplified what I'm really concerned about in this area. I don't know who he is. Evidently, Kofi does know who this guy is. His profile picture is a book called The Satisfaction of Christ.

I haven't read the book. Sounds like a good title. The way he spoke to a brother in Christ, well, my only response was to quote from 1 John. He who hates his brother is in darkness until now and is deceived.

And it was just so startling to see such a clear example of someone for whom race has become the most important thing and everything else is subserviented under that. And I think my real concern is that there seems to be more and more people that are willing to accept that and are willing to say, yeah, that's the way it needs to be.

That's the way it has to be. As I listen to more and more people, and again, this is making great inroads into seminaries, denominations. It is a Christianized critical race theory. It is, in many of its manifestations, Marxist in its origination.

And in its final analysis, it repudiates the idea that the central lens of interpretation for any Christian, I don't care if you're Chinese, I don't care if you're from Africa or the Orient or wherever, it does not matter.

The central mechanism of interpretation of your relationship with others, the entirety of your worldview has to be, must be, cannot be anything other than the Christian worldview with at its center, the reconciliation that has been worked out by Jesus Christ.

Now, I was asked a question on Twitter. I didn't get a chance to respond to it. And someone says, but okay, yeah, Christ worked it out, but don't we have to work toward it ourselves? Well, the reality is in the church that the central barrier, that wall has been broken down.

There is a renewal in which there is no race. We are all equal before the cross. And what really concerned me, and I'll just mention it again, was when I heard the gentleman I played on the last program saying, hey, taking somebody out to cup of coffee, getting to know somebody, the personal level thing, that's great, but that's not enough.

What you need to do is work toward the destruction of barriers and institutions. And so this is where the Marxism comes in. This is where the political stuff comes in. It's not biblical. Some people try to paint a little bit of some type of a biblical thing.

That's just not what the apostles were teaching. What really concerned me was, hey, if you personally have absolutely no animus, your worldview does not function on the basis of race, great, but that's not enough.

That's not enough. And that really concerns me because there's huge differences, but the mechanism of argumentation here reminds me a lot of other groups that are saying tolerance is enough. You need to celebrate.

You need to get on our side. You need to embrace our paradigm, or you're on the wrong side of things. And so seeing some of the reactions, just again, very troubling. We pray that, well, when we pray for revival, this is another area where obviously revival would have a tremendous impact in that area.

And I have been contacted, again, by people. There are a lot of people of black color who sort of fight this lonely battle on their own. And they fight it every day and they pay dearly for it. And they're the ones that have contacted me and said, please, don't let anybody make you silent about this.

This is a destructive movement and you're right and you'll pay for it, but you need to understand we are seeing it firsthand. So it was an interesting bit of response, not nearly like back in March and what happened at that time.

One group just simply reposted what they did back then, like, ah, here, we did this last time. It's same old thing. And, but especially that one exchange with Kofi just left me going, really? This is really happening in what's called the Christian church?

And sadly, unfortunately it is. So, okay, now I'm looking at the channel and I'm being distracted by it. Well, if I lose him, I will call him back. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Okay, I'm hoping it's, the connection's okay.

It is hotel Wi-Fi and hotel Wi-Fi is just hotel Wi-Fi. Pay no attention. It's all fine here now. How are you? Yeah, let's go back to Star Wars. So, no, I'm not at La Quinta right now actually. I'm in a pretty nice place, but that's neither here nor there.

I am in Tucson and I'll just mention once again, the fact I'll be speaking Saturday evening and Sunday morning at Faith Community Church. And I'll be speaking on perseverance in the Christian life, if you're interested in a subject like that.

So, if you're in the Tucson area, you would be more than welcome to join us. There are plenty of room for you and you will be warmly received. All right, so just a little bit on that. Listening to media coverage of this transitionary period.

Now, I've got to admit, I posted it and said, well played. Did you see the White House video they put out? A couch commander? And especially the memes that have been being produced with Obama and Biden, especially focused upon Biden.

I guess now the election's over. We can all make fun of Joe and it's okay because he's Joe. And those memes have been pretty hilarious. They really have been. But if you saw the couch commander one, did you notice when he was trying to get his driver's license, Obama was, and she asks for his name and goes, did you notice it was in the background?

I didn't see it the first couple of times I saw it. But it's like in most DMVs, you got Obama standing here and then the sort of quirky DMV lady. Actually, she is sort of the quintessential DMV lady, wasn't she?

Anyway, right on the wall in the background, right behind him is Obama's picture. So she's going, who are you? What's your name? Oh yeah, birth certificate? Yeah, really? And his picture's right there on the wall in the background.

And I think that was obviously purposeful and I hadn't seen it for the first few times. But anyway, I'm trying, honestly, I mean, I would like to basically say, let's just wait a year and see what happens.

We'll have some perspective, something to go on a year from now. But obviously everybody wants to jump on stuff right now. I was not surprised at all by President-elect Trump's comments about gay marriage and looking at some of the people that are being chosen.

But I'd like to step back and go, let's see what happens because this was the great toss of the dice. So we knew what Clinton would do. I have no idea what he's gonna do. Let's see, let's see what happens.

We've actually got, what is it? About 68 days or something like that between now and when things happen. And I personally would like to just forget about all of it for a while. I know we can't do that, but it would be nice just to put off to the side and focus on next week, that wonderfully unique American Christian thing called Thanksgiving.

It's undoubtedly one of the best holidays ever. That would be great. And maybe we can do some of that, but I'm gonna be watching. We all need to be watching. Speaking of Thanksgiving next week, I really hope that you're able to focus some time upon that.

There are a few topics in scripture, more spiritually important and satisfying. And I would say one of the greatest marks of a mature and maturing Christian is thankfulness. And I can't think of anything that's more important to cultivating contentedness, contentment than Thanksgiving.

Not the holiday, the attitude. I've said many times, I wish the Greek term had not been stolen from us. Eucharist, beautiful, beautiful word. It's been stolen because of what has been, it's been turned into within Roman Catholicism.

But I don't know how you could overdo a real study of Thanksgiving and the application of it in one's life. I don't know how you could overdo that, especially in a society, Western society, that teaches us each and every day to be discontent about everything, about, and I mean everything, discontent with your spouse, your kids, your parents, your house, your body, your looks, how much money you've got, how much food you've got, where you live, what car you drive.

I mean, the very essence of Western society is discontentment. And discontentment and Thanksgiving cannot exist together. It's like putting Dawn dishwashing liquid into water that has oil in it. The oil just goes.

And when you drop a little bit of Thanksgiving into Christian life, that discontentment, just it's repelled, it's driven away. And so given that every single day, almost every advertisement is specifically designed to, I'm gonna use it again today, inculcate has become my favorite word all of a sudden.

Let's not start any drinking games with the term inculcate, but is designed to create within you this real strong discontentment with what you have, then looking at Thanksgiving, recognizing that it is central to the Christian character to be constantly thankful for what God has done for us in Christ.

And because of that, because of how transcendent the work of Christ is in our lives, everything else needs to be seen within light of that. All the actions that we experience, the difficulties, the joys, the trials, everything, it all needs to be seen through that lens.

And that changes, that really does change everything. Yes, I'm talking about Taco's favorite holiday. And then we've got other people in channel that are pushing their webcast during our webcast. And I'm not going to mention what webcast that is because that would be unwise, I would think.

But there you go. There you go. Oh, is someone not due Thanksgiving? Probably be book, huh? Anyway, I did mention on Facebook, Facebook, I joined a Reformed Baptist Fellowship group and I had to turn the notifications off from that particular group, unfortunately.

I'm not sure that there's any group I ever could join on Facebook that... Anyway, I mentioned on Facebook that I was going to respond yet once again, because I do believe it's important to the promotion of this vague concept.

And again, I do apologetics, I'm involved in trying to help people understand how to defend the faith in a modern context where we're dealing with so many attacks upon the very foundations of the faith.

We've talked about Bart Ehrman and we've looked at, if you look at the topics that he's done in his popular books over the past number of years, there is a very clear progression and purpose in what Ehrman has done.

And what he's doing is laying a foundation for unbelief at every level of the transmission of the text of the Bible, at every possible identifiable stage, even to the memories of the writers. He's laying a foundation to say, we can't trust it, we can't trust it, we can't trust it.

And as a result, while our great-grandparents didn't have to deal with many of the issues, memory, textual transmission, manuscripts, all the rest of that type of stuff, the fact is we do. If we're gonna be engaged, if we are going to open our mouths and say the word of God says, then we need to be prepared to give a defense of the accuracy of that text which we possess today.

And in my opinion, the people that can give the most compelling and consistent defense of scripture are Reformed individuals, believers who recognize God's sovereignty. Because what are we saying when we talk about scripture?

We're saying that we don't believe in a dictation theory, we don't believe, you might, but I hope you don't, we don't believe in automatic writing. We don't believe that the Apostle Paul was gonna write a letter one day and then he gets the pen out and he's thinking about ways to write to the church at Rome and all of a sudden, and his hand starts moving and he's just staring off into space.

Well, actually, he was, like it really wouldn't have worked because he was using the manuensis, but okay, so all of a sudden, he was about to start telling his scribe what to say and then I saw some, Paul, an apostle of Jesus, this type of thing.

He uses his own language. He uses the context in which he is living. We can tell the difference between something Paul writes and something that Luke writes. There's very different syntax, grammar. Of course, the word usage and choice is very different.

And so we don't believe in automatic writing. To give us, for Peter's description, well, for anybody's description, whether it's Jesus' description, have you not read what God spoke to you, saying, or Paul's, all scriptures, Theodosius, God breathed, or Peter's description, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, or any of the many descriptions you can get out of looking at the 119th Psalm or Isaiah chapter 40 or whatever else it might be.

All of those put together require a very, very high view of God and God's sovereignty. And his providential interaction in time and how his decree works out in time flawlessly. It's not like he tries and then, oops, we'll learn from that one and some type of process theology idea.

And so the people that I think can give a consistent argument for the highest view of scripture, are not those who emphasize the autonomous will of man. The synergists, on one hand, it seems many of them want to affirm a high view of scripture, but their emphasis upon the capacities and abilities of man cause a problem.

It's something that they have to struggle with. And there we go. I wasn't gonna, by the way, I wasn't gonna buy another Mount Lemmon shirt, but it was cold up there. I started going down a hill and it's like 48 degrees with a 20 mile an hour headwind and I'm going 25.

So it was a 45 mile an hour headwind, wind chill at 45 degrees and I did not dress for it. I went straight to the little store down there in Summer Haven and I even said it late, I wonder how many long sleeve shirts you all sell just because a cyclist or morons and she just tried to keep from laughing.

Anyway, so a little aside there as I tried to adjust the camera a little bit. So I'm not just down here someplace in the picture. Anyway, with that in mind, and of course reformed theology as a whole, historically has had an extremely high view of Scripture.

I would argue that it's the reformed stream that has come from the Reformation that has given us our best defenses of Scripture, most consistent, the ones that actually, see reformed people when talking about Scripture do so as self-conscious Trinitarians, self-consciously believing in substitutionary atonement, do so in light of their soteriology because reformed theology requires a recognition of how all these things relate to one another.

Unfortunately, non-reformed theology very often just has your doctrine of Scripture out here, your doctrine of God over here, doctrine of salvation out here, church over here, whatever, and there's no connectedness.

And obviously when things are connected together, they're much stronger. And those promoting those things are able to be more consistent in both proclamation and in the recognition of errors on the other side because you see how God's truth is related together.

And so when you see denials of one part of God's truth, you see how that would impact in other areas, you see. And so that's why when people say, oh, I love what you do, I just, Calvinism I can just do without, but I love what you do, I'm just sort of like, really?

Then you don't really understand what I'm doing or you're not recognizing how central the affirmation of God's kingship is to everything else that I do. You're missing something along the line. So with that having been said, I saw a Facebook post in the Reformed Baptist fellowship group.

It said, regarding having a meaningful apologetics to Christian faith and the text of the New Testament, the denial of the inspiration of the pericope adultery, the woman caught in adultery, John 8, John 7, 53 through 8, 11 specifically, and the last 12 verses of Mark is a capitulation to post-enlightenment humanistic rationalism and fundamentally undermines the authority of scripture and the Christian faith.

There is the assertion that is made. Now, notice how it's phrased. My immediate response would say, you're assuming the inspiration of these texts and you need to demonstrate that these texts are original to do this.

But you see, this is a representation of what's called the ecclesiastical text. Well, I don't know. This particular individual put forward ecclesiastical text stuff. When I pushed on it, he responded with Byzantine priority stuff, which is not ecclesiastical text stuff.

And so I don't know where he is. I don't know. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not interested in investing my time to try to track all the developments and things like that because my experience is every ecclesiastical text guy is different than every other ecclesiastical text guy.

When you push, when you try to get specific answers, because ecclesiastical textism is not a methodology for doing textual study of the New Testament. It's not. It can't be. It already has a fixed, an idea of a fixed text.

It doesn't actually have a fixed text. I mean, at least if you actually are TR only, here's the, I have with me here in a hotel room, but I've got the Trinitarian Bible Society TR. This is my final authority.

Okay, now we've got something we can look at. Now we've got specific readings that we can discuss and things like that. But for most folks, it's sort of this much more of a vague thing. And when you point out the errors in TR, well, we're not just talking about the TR.

We're talking about the ecclesiastical text, the text used by the church. Well, which church? Are we talking about Western readings in Latin Christianity? Are we talking about Augustine? Are we talking about Eastern Orthodoxy?

What are we talking, what church? There are differences within Western Christianity, there's differences within Eastern Orthodoxy, but which one? So it's very vague, identified specifically. But here you have the denial of the inspiration.

How do you, obviously from my perspective, that's backwards. And here's a fundamental difference. What I believe is what's inspired is what was written under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit by the apostles and those of the first generation used by God to write the scriptures.

I wanna know what they wrote. I don't care, well, I do care, but not on the inspiration level, what a scribe 400 or 500 years later thought they should have written. That's interesting to me as one who studies textual criticism.

But as far as the actual inspired text that has authority, I wanna know what was originally given. And so, in other words, I think it's very clear that all New Testament books were written before 100 AD, the vast majority well before 100 AD.

It's possible they were all written before 70. I can't prove that. And my gut feeling is that Revelation and John are after the destruction of the temple. But some people theorize otherwise. It wouldn't change much for me if that were the case.

But let's just put it this way. I wanna know what existed at the end of that first century during the lifetimes of the authors and the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses. That's what I wanna know. And if something comes along after that, something comes along at another time, well, that may be interesting, but it can't be inspired.

It can't be theanus to us, unless you subscribe to the idea of an open canon and continuing Revelation. And now you have all sorts of issues relating to the authority of the authors and things like that.

So this statement starts off backwards by even phrasing it the way that it is. But of course, from an ecclesiastical text position, everything's backwards. That's why it's next to impossible to reason with these men because everything's backwards.

It's an anachronistic system because you're starting with a text. It has a history. And whether it's the TR or whether it's a Byzantine priority, whatever, that text can only come into existence by a mechanism of textual critical analysis.

And to say, well, you modernistic folks, you post-enlightenment humanistic rationalists, the alleged ecclesiastical text had to be derived from manuscripts by Desiderius Erasmus or whoever else was involved.

I mean, if you wanna go with the Latin Vulgate, hey, Jerome had to do it. And he had to come up with methodologies of making decisions when there are variations in the manuscripts. You can pretend you're not doing that and you can just shluff it off to, well, the church did it.

That's real nice. When? And that's immediately where the wheels fall off. Which church? Who? What manuscripts did they have? What council did it? There's no answer to any of these things because it never happened.

Well, it's just general usage. Well, that's nice. That's exactly how the Latin Vulgate was defended at the time of the Reformation by the Roman Catholic Church. God had been using it for 1 ,100 years.

Who are you to question it? So this ecclesiastical text stuff, I'm seeing it more and more online. That doesn't mean anything. Facebook is not representational of real life. Sorry, I just really brushed a few of you there.

Let me continue on with this. If the church could be wrong about these texts for over 1 ,000 years, we shall fail to have a consistent defense for the self-authenticating nature of the scriptures. Without self-authentication, the Bible would not be a divine book.

If the Bible's not a divine book, then we who profess Christ believe in vain. Now, there are so many problems here. I don't even know if we have time to unpack all of them, but this frightens me because it's coming from a person who claims to be Reformed and is standing in the line of the Reformation.

Why? Well, did you hear that? If the church could be wrong about these texts for 1 ,000, which church? Rome, Constantinople, which one? When did the church speak on the Percopaea Adultery? Where's the infallible declaration?

Where's the council that met and said, we've examined this and this is where we're gonna go? There never was one. Obviously so. And it likewise shows tremendous disrespect to the most primitive church because there's, you might say, well, there was an early church father here who made a reference similar to this.

But the fact of the matter is, the church of the first few centuries that produced those vitally important papyrus manuscripts didn't have it as part of their scriptures. And so you're gonna have to deal with the fact that hundreds of years passed.

And see, what makes me especially sensitive to this, I deal with Roman Catholicism. Got a debate coming up. Just announced yesterday that we have a debate coming up right before the G3 Conference on the perseverance of the saints.

When you lose salvation, I'll be debating Trent Horn, staff apologist for Catholic Answers. First time we've done anything with Catholic Answers in a long time. I'm looking forward to that. I've never met Trent.

I'm looking forward to meeting him. My first few debates with Catholic Answers were with Jerry Matitix and stuff like that. So I'm older and hopefully a better debater than I was back then. So I'm really looking forward to it.

I hope we have an opportunity to really lay things out. And especially with, this will be in 2017, and there's gonna be a lot of stuff going on in that area. But I'm really sensitive to this because I've been dealing with Roman Catholicism for a long, long time.

That first debate that I did with Catholic Answers was in Long Beach in August of 1990. And it was on Sola Scriptura. And so I have been engaged in defending Sola Scriptura and the authority of scripture against Rome for a long, long time.

And as I mentioned, was it the last dividing line or the one before that? Well, whichever one it was where there was this ecclesiastical text videos. I played the videos for you. As I sat there watching it at first, I was like, well, I wonder why the Roman Catholics are putting this out.

And then all of a sudden, it's not Roman Catholics. It's the ecclesiastical text guys. Ted Liedis mentioned at the end of it. And it's like, hmm, so many problems. So the church has never spoken on the Proclamation of Adultery.

Simple usage over time is not the church speaking. Otherwise we should be using the Latin Vulgate and some extremely Western readings because it has the testimony of extended use for a very long period of time.

And it wasn't a matter of the church being right or wrong. There was no examination of these issues. So how can it be right or wrong? But then what's really frightening is this is then connected to the self-authenticating nature of the scriptures.

You do realize that this statement connects the self-authenticating nature of the scriptures to the authority of the church. I mean, the writer just may not have thought this through, just may not realize, oh wow, I didn't see that.

But it does, logically it does. Because you're talking about the church being right or wrong about a text, being absolutely central to the self-authenticating nature of the scriptures. So you're mixing all sorts of stuff up here because the only self-authenticating scriptures are the scriptures as given by God.

And the New World Translation is not self-authenticating scripture, is it? No, it is a far removed perversion of that word. But doesn't that then obviously mean that what we're talking about here when we talk about the scriptures being self-authenticating is the actual scriptures that God gave?

That's why we want to know what was written by Paul and John and Luke and not by a scribe 500 years later? Yeah. But once you bring the church in and say, oh, well, you see the church actually makes textual decisions, even though the church has never done that, well, until Sixtus tried it.

And that was a major failure. We've seen attempts by popes and people like that to do this type of thing. But the reality is that when they've done so, they've always ended up face-planting the process either immediately or with the further study of the issue, discovery of manuscripts and so on and so forth.

The self-authenticating nature of scripture comes from the nature of scripture itself. The church may or may not testify to that depending on what church we're talking about. But to make the self-authenticating nature of scripture dependent upon the church's textual decisions is not reformed.

It's not Protestant. It's at best papism. Now, you just may have stumbled into it, just may not have enough experience dealing with Roman Catholicism to realize that. But once again, this is what I keep saying.

Ecclesiastical text, guys, I don't see them out there taking on the Roman Catholics or the Muslims. They're mainly taking on me. And I'm not trying to get them to go out there and do that because it would be a disaster.

It's a circular system that can't answer the fundamental questions. And here's a good example of it. Without self-authentication, the Bible would not be a divine book. That's because of its nature, not because of some mythical church decision on the two largest textual variants in the New Testament, one of which is not found in a manuscript prior to the fifth century.

Trying to make the self-authenticating nature of scripture dependent upon that text is so destructive to any meaningful defense of New Testament. That's why I cannot honestly think of any Reformed seminary that has taken this position.

Does anybody know of one? I mean, even people who prefer the King James, have they made the statement? Because I know Westminster doesn't do things like that, but have even the most conservative seminaries said, yeah, if you don't have this particular text, this actually, the church and divine self-authentication and inspiration, it all gets tied together and wow, I can tell you one thing, the Reformers didn't do that.

Calvin didn't do that. I can point you to too many places where Calvin questioned what's become the standardized Textus Receptus style text to even begin to be suggested that this was what he was actually going for.

So you have so far, anyone who doesn't believe in the inspiration of the longer ending of Mark and the Prick of Adultery, post-enlightenment humanistic rationalism, undermining the authority of Scripture to Christian faith, no longer have the Bible as a divine book, and so we profess Christ in vain.

And we're only third paragraph here now. It's absurd to think that we can get the titles of the books of the Scripture right, but be universally wrong for many centuries about complete extended narratives in those books.

What titles are you referring to? It's inconsistent to say that we could be wrong about these complete narratives, but not about some of the actual books of the canon. Why? Notice you're looking at the two, the only two extended textual variants in New Testament, the only two that exist.

There's none of those. There's single verses, and they're almost all parallel corruptions. In other words, a direct insertion from a synoptic gospel type situation where another gospel has it here, and so it ends up in certain manuscripts later on.

These are the only two. And so what does this have to do with the title of books? Are titles of books inspired? I don't think they are. What does this have to do? Wrong for many centuries. Who specifically, when, what council?

You won't get any answers to these things. I've tried asking. You don't get any answers to these things. And now, so if you question the Percupaea Adulterae, because it first appears in Codex Bese Cantabrigensis, the living Bible of the ancient church, if you question that, then you don't have a basis for canon.

I don't think Mike Kruger would accept that, and he's probably the greatest thinker in canon issues around right now, but maybe he's just post-enlightenment humanistic rationalism himself. Who knows?

It seems to be the case. The connection between canon, I mean, everybody recognizes that there were differences even between the manuscripts that Erasmus used. There were differences between the printed editions of the five editions of Erasmus, Stephanos, Basic, there were differences.

So does that mean because there would be, there might be small differences that we can't know John's canon, Romans' canon? Could you establish that with something more than just mere assertion? That would be really, really helpful, I think, at that point.

Sun's going down. It's gonna probably disappear here. It's just into the darkness. I'm not sure how bright this light is. Anyway, it is precisely here that the doctrine of the text of scripture is being attacked by unbelieving academia.

Well, what is unbelieving academia? You mean, oh, shouldn't have done that. No, I have no idea where that went. What is unbelieving academia? Yeah. There we go. Is that Bart Ehrman? Or is that me? If you can't tell the difference, that's what was so really sad about that video that we played last time.

If you can't tell the difference between Dan Wallace and me and Bart Ehrman, I think you should be trying some other line of work. Because that's just, it's really bad. It's really, really bad. So I don't know what the unbelieving academia, that otherwise sound man would advocate the removal of these narratives.

And again, just like in King James onlyism, how is it always put forward? Deleted verses, removing things in the word of God. Not the standard that needs to be, and that is what was written by the apostles of Jesus Christ.

So you always, you can always identify this kind of rhetoric by its poisoning the well and the type of language that utilizes. That otherwise sound man would advocate the removal of these narratives from the Bible, as if they're there in the first place.

Obviously what we are saying is they weren't there originally. Simply demonstrates how disconnected from the actual issue most evangelicals have become. But I would say what it demonstrates is how a human tradition, ecclesiastical textualism, has become so central to how these men view scripture.

And it's a tradition. Just as the papist view of scripture is a tradition. It's not simply then a matter of these narratives. It is what some are conceding about the text of scripture by their removal.

So conceding about the text of scripture, I can only assume means that we should, as everyone that I know of in history has, up until modern times, been most desirous to know the original text. That's what Erasmus wanted.

That's what Stephanus wanted. That's what Bazin wanted. That's what Tischendorf wanted. To establish and defend the original text in the recognition of the frailty of human beings that were used in the transmission of that text.

And this may be where there's a problem with these individuals. They want to try to get away from the reality. And this is something I present a lot in my discussions when I talk about New Testament reliability.

The mechanism that God used to preserve his word was the sudden explosion of the New Testament manuscripts all across the known world. Multifocality, multiple authors trying to multiple places at multiple times.

It was never under the control of any one particular group. Therefore, there can never be been editing, insertion of doctrines. No one could ever gather everything up and change it and put out new copies.

All that kind of stuff, absolutely impossible. The byproduct of that mechanism is textual variation. A relatively small amount of textual variation, but there still is textual variation as there is in every ancient work as there were in the manuscripts of the Tanakh in the days of Jesus and the apostles.

And it seems to me that for a lot of folks, they're very uncomfortable with that. And so to say that the church decided these things allows you to get away from dealing with the existence of textual variation.

And that's why I will just simply point out to folks, you can't get away from it because the New Testament itself has examples where the New Testament writers are quoting from textual variants in the Old Testament.

So you can't get away from the issue. You can hide your head in the sand. You can come up with all sorts of ways around it. All you want isn't going to accomplish anything. It's not gonna happen. So, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

None of the otherwise Orthodox men who would have these passages removed have ever answered this problem. This was part of why I probably made the mistake of even bothering to try to answer it in the sense of making a comment in Facebook.

That's just so abjectly untrue. I went to Apologia Studios and we addressed all of these things. The unwillingness on the part of ecclesiastical text advocates to listen does not mean that we have not provided responses.

We have. And thankfully, I realize the majority, large majority of folks who have listened to this and listened to these slides recognize, yeah, the answers have been given very clearly. But it is sort of frightening that someone can use this kind of rhetoric.