Was Mark Confused? Birth Narratives? Original Readings?

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday, and we have some important things to talk about.

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Of course, we try to do that fairly regularly. We certainly did on the last program, where we discussed the issue of Roman Catholicism, and there's been at least one interesting

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Roman Catholic response to that, that I'll try to get to next week.

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I noted that today, Apologia had a program where they're responding to Marcus Rogers with the gripper on.

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And so I'm sure the gripper has taken care of Marcus Rogers' arguments more than sufficiently, so we won't have to do that.

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Yeah, I tore that phone book. It wasn't a phone book, it was a tract. That was about the depth of that.

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So we won't have to worry about that. So that'll give us time next week to specifically look at Mr.

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Rule's comments, and I think they'll just verify exactly what I said on the program in regards to the concept of priesthood and Roman Catholicism, and the fact that you have to deny sola scriptura.

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And it again, once again, raises the fact that Roman Catholic apologists, what they will do is they will try to parallel divine truths of Scripture with their human traditions and say they both developed out of this oral tradition type stuff.

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And we'll get to that and deal with that. But having addressed

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William Lane Craig on the subject of Roman Catholicism, now we need to turn to some very, very important foundational information regarding the subject of the authority of Scripture, the nature of the inspiration of Scripture, and the dreaded doctrine of inerrancy.

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Now, N .T. Wright, it has been said, I don't think he's said it in print, but reliable sources have reported that he calls that the silly

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American doctrine. And certainly in our day, if you wish to be accepted within the academy, and of course, we need to talk about how you define what the academy is, but if you want to be accepted within the academy, it is extremely detrimental to your future advancement within the academy to confess any belief in such things as inerrancy.

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If you happen to believe that God could have created the entire universe functionally rather than solely by naturalistic processes over huge amounts of time, these kinds of things, and certainly if you believe

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God's law remains relevant today, all those things would be enough to pretty much end your aspirations for any type of advancement within the academy.

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And again, I speak of the Society of Biblical Literature, broad academy type thing.

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I suppose we could redefine that phrase to believing

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Christian scholarship and things would change. But there's unfortunately a tremendous amount of what

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I would simply have to call in an oxymoronic fashion unbelieving Christian scholarship. It calls itself

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Christian, but it rejects fundamental elements of the

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Christian faith and as a result ends up being extremely useful to the enemies of the faith, primarily.

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Anyway, if you believe in doctrines like inerrancy, now there are certain denominations that, for example, if you want to teach at a

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Southern Baptist seminary, you have to at least back in the early 2000s up through I think the last year that I taught for Golden Gate, you had to sign a statement that you basically believed in the doctrine of inerrancy.

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Well, unless you define it rather specifically, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good.

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A lot of people simply redefine the doctrine of inerrancy. Many Roman Catholic scholars will say they believe in inerrancy and yet it is painfully obvious that the vast majority of Roman Catholic scholarship believes nothing like the doctrine of inerrancy.

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What they'll say is that the Bible does not contain error in regards to the communication of divine principles or divine beliefs, but that it could contain all sorts of historical and scientific error that simply reflects its nature as ancient literature and yet still be used of God to infallibly communicate divine truth.

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Looking at liberal denominations, you see how well that ends up turning out. It doesn't end up turning out really well at all.

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And I think a lot of people are extremely, I don't know,

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I was going to say upset, but they're disappointed, they're frustrated. A lot of people who have a concern for giving an answer in our day are frustrated by the fact that so very often the primary response given by opponents of faith draws from people who call themselves

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Christians. And I believe that this is a function of the day in which we live.

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If apologetics was easy, if there was a consistent clear voice of a healthy

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Bible -centered church, that's a blessing upon a culture and a nation. And right now, we are called to minister in a time of great judgment and difficulty.

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And I think anyone, and it doesn't matter whether you are called to engage in apologetics in the formal sense or just what,

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I think we all need to recognize that all the standards that had become popular in preceding generations in measuring the success of the

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Christian faith probably need to be abandoned. All the pragmatism, all the numbers, all that kind of stuff probably does not communicate anything.

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We as individuals need to recognize that fundamentally in living our

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Christian lives, in pursuing the call of God upon our lives, we need to purposefully adopt the idea that I am going to be concerned about pleasing one person, that I am going to do what

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I do in the sight of one person and one person only. I'm not going to be doing this for men, but I need to do what

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I do for God. And if I am convinced that what

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I have done and how I've done it is how He would have me to do it and that He's pleased with me, then that needs to be it.

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That needs to be all we're concerned about. And that's a sort of radical way of doing things, but I think it's a necessary way because so many people will talk to me, and I feel the same thing.

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You do your best to present the truth of God. You do your best to give a defense for the faith that's once delivered to the saints, and yet there are just so many countering voices from a bewildering number of directions and perspectives that sometimes just feel like it's not even worth doing this.

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And from certain theological perspectives, if you don't believe that God is sovereignly ordaining what takes place and that He has a purpose in these things,

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I don't know why, honestly, a lot of people would continue on doing what they do in light of how difficult it is.

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You know, I remember when we first started going to PRBC, Pastor Frey had a phrase that he would use.

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He would even pray it, break the teeth of the false teachers. That's a good

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Psalms reference. And, you know, shut their mouths.

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This is a prayer. Shut the mouths of the false teachers. Well, that is something to pray for because when there are people looking for reasons to disbelieve, you'll always have false teachers who will come along and give them a reason to disbelieve, and that is extremely frustrating.

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So, one of the first things I would say today, even before we get started looking at this material, it is extremely important,

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I think, to put down a stake, you know, a place where it's going to give you a central focus.

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Why do we do what we do? And when you see someone come along and just start throwing out all sorts of citations from, and you know the citations are from a worldview that is inconsistent and all the rest of this stuff, but you don't always have the opportunity of providing a full refutation or you see them succeeding in blinding people, succeeding in throwing stumbling blocks in the progress of the gospel.

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If you think that's up to you, and if you think that it's all our effort, then yeah, you're going to become so frustrated, you're going to end up doing something else in your life.

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But it's a little bit like something we learned the hard way in doing street ministry out at the temple or up in Salt Lake City or whatever.

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And that is, there are many, many, many of those tracts which we had printed and folded and put in boxes and carried around in our bags and given out to people that simply got thrown away, torn up, spit upon, whatever.

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And we'd find them laying on the ground, trampled under the feet of men. And I don't know who first came up with it,

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I think I did, but it could have been somebody else, I don't know. We call them fallen warriors.

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And we had to recognize that the truth of God goes out for salvation and for condemnation, both.

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And God is glorified in either one. And that when you have false teachers, when you have people who are perverting the truth, when you have people who are twisting the truth, when you have people that will utilize people who've become compromised in their theology to blunt the truth of the gospel, the people misusing those sources will be held accountable for what they did.

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Those who are false teaching within the church will be held accountable for what they do.

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You're simply held accountable to honor God and to do what's right.

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And if His approbation and His approval is all you care about, then you'll be fine.

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You will be able to press on in the midst of an ever more challenging and even crushing situation.

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And so, important to keep that in mind, I think, right at the beginning, as far as what we're saying here.

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Now, to our subject today, a couple of weeks ago,

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Dr. Mike Licona appeared on Jonathan McClatchy's webinar, which he does regularly each weekend.

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And we're going to be looking at three different topics that the

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Muslims also attending the webinar found to be quite fascinating and have attempted, you know, we have some ya -ya snow jobs here and nothing new about that, but have attempted to say, well, there's all sorts of contradictions here.

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On one level, there is, because everyone, well, folks who are actually concerned about understanding what we're saying, not just twisting what we're saying, have known for a very long time.

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I don't remember how long ago it was, but we have played on this program.

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Mike Licona's interaction with Shabir Ali, with Bart Ehrman. And while we've normally been criticizing

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Shabir Ali and Bart Ehrman, there were times we played things that Mike Licona said, and we said, not quite.

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Same thing with William Lane Craig, when he made original sins.

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Oh, well, you know, it's not really central to any Christian belief or anything like that.

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You know, we responded to these things. We have been consistent.

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And of course, there are those that, you just attack other Christians. Well, there's really a fundamental difference in approach, which once again recognizes and flows from a fundamental difference in theology.

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And we believe that your theology should determine your apologetics, not the other way around.

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And so, in general, what you're going to discover is that strong biblical monergists are going to view things quite differently than synergists do.

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And that's going to end up showing itself especially, well, obviously, in discussions of salvation, things like that, but in other areas as well.

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Furthermore, I've said many times that unless you have the highest view of Scripture, there's no reason for you to be a

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Calvinist. Look at any Presbyterian denomination, any at one time

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Reformed denomination that abandoned its foundation in having the highest view of Scripture as the very words of God.

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The degradation, declension, and eventual destruction of those denominations, it's a matter of history and it's an ugly thing to watch.

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It's a slow, painful car wreck with explosions and lots of dead bodies.

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It's bad stuff. And it's happened over and over and over again.

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If you do not believe that God has spoken, if you do not have the same high view of Scripture that Jesus and his apostles embody in everything they write and in all of their attitudes and all of their words, you can't even be a

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Trinitarian and you're certainly not going to be Reformed. Because how often have we listened to the

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Zons and the Olsons of the world on different levels abandon, get around the tough biblical texts by just simply compromising on the concept of inspiration, what it means, and what the authority of the text is, and how you interpret the text and come up with the

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Gumby means of exegesis where you just, well, that Midianite thing, that's just what the ancient

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Israelites thought about God. It's not really God speaking and so on and so forth. So, this is an absolutely key area as to whether you believe that Scripture is what, you know,

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Jesus said the Scriptures cannot be broken. For him saying it is written was the final argument.

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And if you adopt a perspective that says, what? That's not enough. And please, don't get me wrong.

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I mean, there are some people that get so loopy here they think that has something to do with the King James Bible or something like that, as if Jesus was quoting from the

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King James. That's not what we're talking about here. But if you don't have that view of the

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Scriptures as theanoustos, God -breathed, if you cannot hear

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Jesus say, have you not read what was spoken to you by God saying and understand how read and spoken go together with one another there, you're really not going to be in a position to give much of a defense the faith in this day and age.

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Just not going to be able to. And as we move into a more and more post and anti -Christian world, you're not going to have a foundation and you're going to find ways of major compromise.

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And of course, if you're absolutely convicted of these things, then it could cost you everything.

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Could cost all of us everything. We will find out and pray that God would cause us to be faithful.

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So, with that, let's take a look at the first of these videos.

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Hopefully, I've got the right one here for you. The first was a question that came up in regards to difficulties in the

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Synoptic Gospels. Evidently, Dr. Lycona is writing a book on this subject. I'm, to be perfectly honest with you, concerned about that, but that's how it goes.

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I haven't written a book on this subject, but I did teach the Synoptic Gospels for 11 years. So, ran into most of this stuff before.

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And you've heard me deal with Jairus' daughter and all sorts of things like that numerous times before.

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But this one caught me by surprise. It caught me by surprise for a couple reasons. First of all, he's asked, you know, what do you think the most difficult thing is that isn't explained by the concepts you've enunciated before about the nature of the

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Gospels and things like that? And much to my surprise, he actually identifies the location of the feeding of the 5 ,000 as one of the toughest examples he can come up with.

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And as soon as I heard that, as soon as his conclusion was, well, it just seems like Mark was confused, two things came to my mind.

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The first is something a lot of you thought of when you saw this as well. Sound like a familiar story?

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It is a familiar story. It's not this particular incident, but what was the door?

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What was the unlocking of the door that led to the apostasy of Dr.

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Bart Ehrman by his own testimony, which he's repeated many, many, many, many, many, many, many times in almost the exact same words and frequently the same

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PowerPoint slides with the same misspelled words in it. Anyway, what's the story?

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Remember, it was about Mark and the eating of the showbread and the high priest and stuff.

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And he had written this paper that he thought was pretty ingenious and coming up with a way of rescuing

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Mark and explaining what it meant. And he gets the paper back from his professor.

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I think this was at Princeton, as I recall. Might've been Wheaton, but I think it was at Princeton. And the comment from the professor was, maybe

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Mark was just wrong. And that was the key that opened the door that freed

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Bart Ehrman from the Christian faith. Now, he wouldn't put it that way, but it's, if you follow the decline from there, that was where it started.

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The final thing that pushed him out the liberal door was the problem of evil, according to him.

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But that was a turning point in his thinking. Well, maybe

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Mark was just wrong. Oh, wow. There's all these, I could explain this by all these, wow, how does that work?

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And so to hear Dr. Lycona, who himself, obviously, some of you aren't aware of this, but a few years ago, maybe somebody in channel could give me the year that this started, because I've forgotten.

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And when you're over 50, you're perfectly excused for remembering which, for forgetting which year it was, unless it was before you were 20, and then you remember everything.

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It's really weird. But what year was it when

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Dr. Lycona published his book on the resurrection? It wasn't long ago. I'm thinking three years, maybe 2013 -ish, 2014.

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And he commented on the resurrection of some saints, wasn't all saints, some saints in Matthew, I think it's what, 2754, something like that, just off the top of my head.

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And his explanation of it is still difficult to follow to this day, but he identified it as sort of a poetic device, and it really didn't happen.

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There really wasn't any resurrection of saints. This is just Matthew's poetic way of emphasizing the stupendous nature of the resurrection.

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Well, this led to a real brouhaha with people lining up on both sides, and the primary battle was between Lycona and Norman Geisler.

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I love it. I was just given two different dates in the chat channel, which sort of gives you some idea of why there's differences in dates in ancient literature, too.

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2011 and 2010. So, Norman Geisler went after Lycona and basically said, this man does not believe in inerrancy.

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And when I waded into that,

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I tried to, once again, do so without unnecessary vituperation, which frequently gets me shot at by both sides as well.

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And I guess the book came out toward the end of November. So, it was 2010, early 2011 when all this is going on.

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And Lycona, I guess, sort of lost his job or at least resigned from his position.

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And look, I know what it's like to have Norman Geisler come after you. Norman Geisler does not like me anymore at all.

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That's a sad truth. But the fact of the matter is, Norman Geisler isn't always wrong.

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And I certainly took that exception with Lycona's view on the

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Matthew 27 issue. Gave my own understanding of the text. But I likewise, having listened to his debates with Ehrman, I likewise was like, yeah,

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I really, at best, super soft on inerrancy.

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In all likelihood, having taught for a number of different seminaries, yeah,

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I've heard this before. It's, I don't want to deny it. But if you're not passionate about it, you probably don't really believe it.

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If you think it's true, then you're going to be passionate about it. If you, I suppose you could think it's true, but you really don't like it.

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But on this subject, that wouldn't make any sense. So at that time, I was like, well, it seems without question to me that what we're going to watch here pretty much ends that whole saga and basically says that, yeah,

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Geisler was right. And this is the result of it. And it's a process over time, but yeah, no two ways about it.

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Since I, with a clear conscience, can say that I accurately represented

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Norman Geisler when I wrote in response to him, then

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I can say, hey, I don't have skin in this game, as they say. I don't do what

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I do for personal reasons. If something's true, it's true.

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If something's false, it's false. And accuse me of things, if you will.

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There's a situation right now, I'm trying to reason with a brother not to go after another brother on a subject that he should not attack him on.

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And I think I'm failing. But once that comes out, you're going to discover that I'm trying to convince a brother not to attack a brother who attacked me.

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Because it's not a matter of all the politics and the personal stuff. It's what matters.

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And see, when we look at this, what you need to understand is this impacts our evangelism of Muslims. This impacts how we reach out to folks.

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And so I have to be consistent. I have to respond to this stuff. It's there.

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It's right in the middle of what we are addressing and what we're saying. Would it be easier just to keep my mouth shut and stay out of the way?

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Would we not lose as many supporters over things? Yeah, yeah.

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But what can I do? This is out there. It's got to be dealt with. It's got to be dealt with. Someone's got to talk about it while we still have the freedom to talk about it.

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The day's coming. I'm not sure we're even going to be able to talk about these things. Okay, so here's, let's see,

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I'm plugged in for audio. Let's go. Any differences in the

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Gospels that you don't think are adequately explained by appealing to compositional devices such as literary spotlighting?

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Yes, I do. I think one of the, some of the most difficult ones, perhaps the most difficult one,

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I think would be, in my opinion, is the location of the feeding of the 5 ,000.

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And I get into detail with this, a lot of detail in the forthcoming book.

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I don't know what the forthcoming book is. Sorry. I'm certainly going to be looking for it.

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But I realized I gave you two reasons. I gave you the first. Sorry. I did a lot.

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The first reason had to do with the Laicona background, stuff like that. But the second reason

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I'll give you right now, before he continues on, this is an issue of geographical location.

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And I've told the story many times of how, when

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I was in seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, which was the only seminary I could go to in the

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Phoenix area. Poor as a church mouse, I don't remember how many years it took us to pay off the student loans even for then.

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And back then it was nothing in comparison to this now. Long time. But that's why I went there and got a good education there.

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But I was Fuller's token fundamentalist. And I wasn't at the

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Pasadena campus. It was here in Phoenix. And fully ATS accredited, by the way,

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Mr. Prash. Anyway, when somewhere along those lines, somewhere,

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I don't know where it was, I was already involved with apologetics. And so, I found most interesting, many of the classes that most of my fellow students just found boring.

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All the Old and New Testament background stuff and the geography and archaeology. And you could hear people snoring, literally, during those classes.

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But I already knew how important that stuff was. And so, I was focused in. So, somewhere along the lines,

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I don't remember what class it was. I don't remember what professor it was and anything like that. But when

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I first started seeing people using, and some of this may have come from Bible college too because I was involved then at Grand Canyon.

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When, for example, I would see people arguing that the Book of Mormon cannot be the

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Word of God because it says that Jesus was born at Bethlehem. You never heard me using that argument.

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You never heard me using that argument. Why? Because I knew that in comparing, for example, various parallel accounts of Old Testament battles or movements of the people of Israel or whatever else it might be.

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If you had more than one account of it. The only way to accurately see what both of them were saying was to allow for differences.

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For example, one writer might identify an entire region by the name of the primary city, whereas someone else might be much more specific.

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And I realized, somewhere along the lines, we do this all the time. When people ask, where do you live?

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Well, I live in Phoenix. And right now, technically, I do. And I'll say, we came here in 1974, which is true.

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But we did not technically live in Phoenix in 1974. Where we lived was technically

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Glendale. But we told everybody we were moving to Phoenix. And when you leave

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Phoenix, you pretty much tell people you live in Phoenix. And even in the years that I've lived here, the borders between those cities have changed, expanded.

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There's another city up north called Peoria, which has gone way farther north than it used to be.

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Out in the places, we used to go rabbit hunting and shoot model rockets off and shoot 300

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Winchester Magnums off without worrying about where the bullet was going to land, because there wasn't anything out there but rattlesnakes and lizards.

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It's now just nothing but housing developments. So, things have changed. So, here's the point. These are notoriously the weakest kinds of arguments that can be used against an ancient text.

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Because if even today, I've lived in Glendale, then

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Phoenix, then Glendale, then Phoenix, and all that time, I've never differentiated that. Am I lying? Of course

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I'm not lying. Anybody who would say that's just foolish. You can't have a meaningful conversation with someone like that.

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Phoenix is the general descriptor, but you've got Glendale, you've got Peoria, now you've got Surprise and El Mirage, and these are all getting to be big places.

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That's just on the west side of the valley. And then over on the other side, you've got Tempe and Scottsdale and Mesa and Chandler and Gilbert and all these places.

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And eventually, it's just all going to sort of creep together until Casa Grande is just a suburb, and then

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Tucson, and it's just the way it works. So, we have

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GPS maps today. You know, I mean, my Garmin heart rate monitor here,

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GPS, man. I did a five and a quarter K run this morning, and I just used this.

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Heart rate, the whole nine yards, and I've got a nice little map, shows exactly where I went, and can tell a difference between which side of the street

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I was on, and whole nine yards. It's great. It's wonderful, but you've got to realize this is really, really new technology.

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Especially millennials think we've always had cell phones with Google Maps on it.

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Trust me, we have not. We have not. Paper maps,

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I remember them well, trying to get them folded. You could never get a map folded back up the way that, no, it's impossible.

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Once it's unfolded, it's just sort of like something magical happens to it. You can't fold it back up again. Anyway, I've been reading a lot on my rides about, and again, this shows you where you're from,

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Civil War, War of Northern Aggression, War Between the States. I can sort of tell you almost, you can almost identify someone's hometown by how they identify it.

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I was just reading about, and this is interesting, if you have a northern rider, it's the first battle of Bull Run, southern rider,

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Manassas, different names, and I have seen movie depictions of that first battle.

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That's where Thomas Jackson got his name Stonewall. I have read a number of histories, and as I've tried to picture things, wow, there's a lot of variation.

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That was only 150, 160 years ago. A lot of variation.

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And people argue to this day, where this particular brigade was, or where this battery was, and we can still go to the places.

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It's not like it was 2 ,000 years ago. And so, arguments based upon figuring out directions of boat travel on water in an ancient text,

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I'm sorry, that's just the weakest, the most likely to trip us up.

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And that's the other thing we've got to understand. When you're looking at ancient documents, the most likely people to be confused are not the writers of the ancient documents.

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They're us. We are so arrogant with our technology to think that, well, these writers are guilty until proven innocent.

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And so, when I heard this, I was like, really? I can think of much tougher, much tougher issues to deal with, much tougher issues to deal with that do not involve whether ice put on, ice top it on, in Greek, is to be understood one way or, you know, pros, and all this kind of stuff.

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I was a little taken aback. I really was. This is not the kind of argument that I expected to be, you know, more than I can cover right now.

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But in that case, you've got Mark. He doesn't identify where it is, or the feeding of the 5 ,000.

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He doesn't say where it is. Luke says it was in Bethsaida, okay, or very close to it.

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Now, if you imagine the Sea of Galilee, this will be helpful. If you imagine the Sea of Galilee, it kind of looks like the continent of Africa, kind of.

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But if you imagine it as a clock, all right, because it's just the top half o 'clock that's really important here.

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Bethsaida is around 1230. Capernaum is between 10 and 11 o 'clock, all right.

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And so, and the Gerasenes, that land over there, or what is it, the region of Gerasa, I think it is.

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I might be wrong with that, okay. But the region over there is a little bit lower than Capernaum.

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That's around 9 to 10 o 'clock, all right. Now, with that in mind, Mark doesn't tell us where it occurred.

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Luke says it happened in Bethsaida, or very close. So, imagine around 1230. John and Matthew, they don't really give a location.

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But for what they say afterward, they're pretty compatible with Luke here. Now, what's interesting is what happens afterward.

40:01

After he feeds the 5 ,000, he sends his disciples to cross the lake. That doesn't necessarily, when the word that's used there doesn't necessarily mean, you know, directly across.

40:11

It could be just a little bit or whatever. But they're supposed to cross the lake. That's when a storm comes up.

40:20

Jesus had been praying after he dismissed the crowd, goes up the mountain and prays. So, afterward, he comes walking across the water.

40:28

And so, they cross the lake, and they end up in Capernaum, all right.

40:35

And pretty much, so you got Matthew, John, you know, is compatible with Luke here, okay.

40:44

They're supposed to cross the lake from Bethsaida. And you cross the lake, you go over to Capernaum.

40:50

So, you're going from 1230 to 10, 11 o 'clock. That makes sense. That works. What's really interesting is in Mark, Jesus says, cross the lake to the other side.

41:03

Now, remember, he doesn't say where they were. But he says, he told him to get into a boat and to cross over to Bethsaida.

41:11

Well, how can you cross over to Bethsaida when according to Luke, that's where you started out? Well, you know, you might try to explain that by, and that's really difficult,

41:23

I think. It's really difficult, unless you want to engage in that hermeneutical gymnastics of some sort.

41:29

Now, I just, and okay, so someone, and then they land in Capernaum. Just one thing to note, hermeneutical gymnastics.

41:42

I've heard this used many, many times before in my own seminary education.

41:50

You know, at Fuller, like I said, I was a token fundamentalist, and there were many times when

41:55

I, when the language would be used, well, there's tension in the text.

42:02

There's tension in this text, which was the nice way of saying back in the 1980s contradiction.

42:10

And when I would say, well, but couldn't it be understood this way, to where you're not causing a contradiction between the two authors?

42:21

It's sort of this, you know, patch on the back and, ah, fundamentalist, eh?

42:29

And, you know, there are some proposed harmonizations that do make you go, eh?

42:35

Um, but there, there is very plainly amongst many in New Testament studies today, a complete rejection of even the propriety of considering harmonization.

42:52

And very often it's identified in this way, hermeneutical gymnastics. Um, let me point out what the hermeneutical gymnastics here is, and I think it's on Dr.

43:07

Lycona's part. Because, yes, we, well, let me, let me do something here.

43:14

I'm going to let him finish, but let me see if I can, um, did that bring

43:23

Logos up for you? No? How about now?

43:34

Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha. Any way to zoom in on the, just the map there?

43:41

Okay. Let's see if we can do that. New program, man, give me a second.

43:48

I'm repeating exactly what I'm hearing through the not quite soundproof wall, which evidently sounds to many people like the, um,

43:56

Peanut's, uh, adult voice. So, uh,

44:05

I mean, I can, I can use my thing here, but it would be cool if we could, uh, zoom into that a little bit.

44:12

Uh, so you can see it a little bit better, but you can see what he was talking about when he says that it looks a little bit like the

44:19

Africa, sort of, if you had written it in pen and then it got really wet and sort of got all messed up.

44:28

Um, well, that looks, um, hey, hey, there we go.

44:40

It just took a little while. There we go. Okay. And, oh, we can even see my little thing here.

44:47

So here's, uh, here's Capernaum. Uh, this is the, uh, area, uh, of Gennesaret.

44:58

So it's just about just past Capernaum here. Now here you have Bethsaida back off.

45:07

Now there, there's questions as to what the biblical Bethsaida was. There are a number of different archeological tales and people argue about which one it is.

45:15

They're fairly close together, but they're in this general area. But notice what this says right here, plain of Bethesda.

45:22

So you have a whole area here. You have a city and a plain, and then you got

45:28

Capernaum over here and you've got the plain of Gennesaret over here. All right.

45:34

So that's what he's talking about here. So Luke says it's over here. And here's the problem, folks.

45:41

Mark says it was over there too. And I don't know how Dr. Lycona missed this.

45:47

I really don't. You say, how do you, how do you, how do you know that? Because it, it specifically says, uh, on in Mark 6, 45, immediately,

45:58

Jesus made his disciples get in the boat and go ahead of him. And so the, under the other side, and of course the issue is what does pros me?

46:17

Pros can mean to Bethsaida, but anyone who spends much time reading, uh,

46:27

Greek and dealing with Greek prepositions, especially when it comes to travel and things like that knows that that's not the only way that it can be translated, especially in talking about directional travel.

46:42

Well, here's the problem. If you understand 645 to be just commanding them to go to Bethsaida using pros in that way, here's, here's the problem.

47:00

What you have happening is Jesus walking on the water after this, remember? And where did they then land?

47:08

Mark 6, 53, when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored to the shore.

47:17

Well, here's Gennesaret. If this is where Bethsaida is, then you cross over and you pass by a perfectly valid use of pros.

47:29

You pass by Bethsaida on your way past Capernaum and landing here in the plain of Gennesaret.

47:37

So if you take it the way that Dr. Lycona is taking it, you are creating an internal contradiction to Mark, let alone a contradiction between John and Luke.

47:54

One of the reasons, for example, you know, John has been brought up because remember when Jesus talked about defeating the 5 ,000, who did he ask about where to find food?

48:01

Philip. Well, what does Gospel of John tell us? Philip was from Bethsaida. So he knew that that was the area.

48:07

There really isn't any question about where it was in the sense of the general region. It's on the east side, northeast side, and they end up on the northwest side.

48:18

But Mark himself says that they end up over there at Gennesaret.

48:24

And so a simple reading of pros as alongside is hermeneutical gymnastics.

48:34

So the default is to assume that Mark doesn't know what he's talking about, even when a few verses later, he does know what he's talking about.

48:46

Because it says, when they had crossed over, Mark 653, when they had crossed over, where were they?

48:58

Were they at Bethsaida? No. Do most of us remember what we wrote just a few sentences ago?

49:06

You'd think so. You'd think so. And you would think that a

49:11

Christian scholar might default to trusting Mark, but that's not what you end up getting here.

49:22

So let's go back to, uh -oh, you're going to have to fix things?

49:33

Yeah. It's a new program, is what he said earlier.

49:41

It's different than it used to be. And so it takes longer to get it back into the right size or something,

49:53

I guess. So how are you today? So what's that? You're ready.

49:59

All right. I was gonna say, everything's fine down here. How are you? Okay, here we go.

50:06

So they're supposed to cross over to Bethsaida and they land in Capernaum. So is Jesus wrong then, or what?

50:12

And someone might say, well, they got in the boat. They were supposed to cross to Bethsaida. Maybe they walked far away from Bethsaida and he told them to get in the boat and go on back.

50:22

Well, how come the boat's over there when they landed in Bethsaida? That's a problem. But then it could be, okay, they get in the boat.

50:28

They're supposed to go to Bethsaida. They get blown off course. They end up at Capernaum. Well, the problem is, according to John's gospel, when they landed there, it says they landed where they had intended.

50:38

So I think that's one of the most difficult ones. That looks more like just probably

50:43

Mark is confused. Okay, there's the statement. I don't know how you can meaningfully define the doctrine of inerrancy and at the same time say,

51:02

Mark was confused. He's just, he's got it wrong. It's no big deal.

51:09

And I know this is how a lot of people deal with it. They get tired of dealing with, you know, you've got all this information from these different sources, just tired of the whole thing.

51:18

It just doesn't matter. It's, you know, all that matters is the message. And so Mark just got confused.

51:29

But what's more likely? In light of the fact that I can guarantee you,

51:37

I know that Dr. Lycona travels a lot, and I can guarantee you that if we had somehow magically kept track of everything he's ever said about his travels, we would catch him in numerous, numerous statements that were not technically how we would understand them.

51:58

But he would say, well, wait, wait, come on, come on, come on. I took all these different flights.

52:04

I was just summarizing. You know, if you just understood what I meant was we passed by. Oh, so it's okay for us today to do that.

52:14

But looking at Mark, we have to default to Mark was confused. Wouldn't it be better to say, we should give

52:23

Mark the room to have said both of these things and to remember what he said and to not assert contradiction in Mark himself, let alone between Mark and Luke.

52:34

And if these are the guys that are so big on Mark and priority, and Luke is just slavishly editing

52:44

Mark. So Mark got it wrong and Luke corrected him.

52:50

I mean, that's what our Muslim friends say. So is that where we're standing now?

52:58

You know, like I said, I was pretty surprised about this and most everybody else was too.

53:05

That's a difficult one. I think the infancy narrative. Okay. So that was the end of that. Is it really hermeneutical gymnastics to start with innocent until proven guilty?

53:23

Is it really hermeneutical gymnastics to not assert an internal contradiction to Mark himself, especially in something as ambiguous as directions in the ancient world when they didn't even have maps the way we have them today?

53:43

I was taken aback. So then he moves on from that to the birth narratives.

53:50

Now, again, we've spent a lot of time in years past, especially around Christmas time, talking about birth narratives and Matthew and Luke.

54:04

You aren't going to talk about Mark there because Mark doesn't have any and John sort of abandons all that by going all the way back eternity, which makes sense.

54:13

But when we look at Mark and Luke, very, very, very, very clear,

54:21

I mean, just think for a second, folks. I get really frustrated with scholarly types because when you think about it, if you just step back for a moment and just look at it, neither

54:43

Matthew nor Luke are even pretending to give us the whole story of Jesus's infancy or his young life.

54:55

It's obvious, isn't it? Each author has to be given the freedom to include in his narrative that which is going to make it a coherent narrative in light of the audience to which he's writing.

55:08

And Matthew and Luke are not writing to the same audience. Is that really a debatable thing?

55:17

I don't think it is. It's very, very clear that they are writing to different audiences, which is why they express themselves in different ways.

55:23

And it's why they choose different elements to include in their story and especially at the beginning of their narratives, even in a different order.

55:40

Now, of course, if you think that they're all looking at each other or how you figure out the alleged literary dependence of one upon it, it raises all sorts of wild, crazy questions.

55:56

But when we come to the birth narratives themselves, this is really where you start finding out, does someone believe that there is a purpose?

56:08

And this is, again, I confess, I I am outside the academy.

56:20

Of course, I believe the academy, I'm using it in the general term, has been deeply, deeply infected by unbelief, secularism, a humanistic worldview.

56:37

Okay. I mean, I would feel so much like a fish out of water. SBL wouldn't even,

56:44

I mean, it's creepy, the stuff that goes on there. And yet this is the academy.

56:49

I don't want to be a part of that. That's not, I'm not interested in that. I have a different audience.

56:57

They have audience very different than mine. So, okay. Who's going to be consistent?

57:04

And by the way, for you Muslims that are going to be cherry picking stuff here, shame on you. Shame on you.

57:10

If you're believing Muslim, you should be sitting there going, you know what, that James White guy and us, we both believe

57:18

God has spoken. And we both believe that rejecting fundamental, definitional, foundational elements of our faith is not a wise thing.

57:28

We, we actually believe that there's divine revelation. Together, we reject the world's rejection of divine revelation.

57:39

We disagree as to what is divine revelation, obviously, but we all agree together that there is such thing as divine revelation.

57:47

And we reject the world's mockery of divine revelation. You should be recognizing that.

57:56

And you should be the ones who recognize that you would never take seriously someone who would reject the prophethood of Muhammad and yet continue to call themselves a

58:08

Muslim, reject the Quran as the word of God, and yet continue to call themselves a Muslim.

58:14

You would honestly say, look, if you're not going to believe the things that define our faith, find a different name for whatever it is you do.

58:25

Go in peace, but don't, you know, historically, that's not how it's been handled, but go in peace, but don't call yourself a

58:31

Muslim. So why is it that, and you know who you are, and you know that you do it, why is it that your favorite people to quote are the people you know in your heart do not believe about Christianity, what you believe about Islam?

58:46

They are not consistent. You are inconsistent in your reliance upon them.

58:53

You know that. Shame on you. Stop it. May God convict you. Anyway, little sermon was just for,

59:01

I figured, you know, if they're looking for stuff to, you know, snip into videos, they're going to have to run into that eventually.

59:07

So maybe that'll be a good thing. So birth narratives. Let's listen to what's said here. Really difficult.

59:13

As Jonathan Pennington, my friend at the quite conservative Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says,

59:19

I don't think Jonathan is as conservative as a lot of those. Jonathan, I think, is a great scholar.

59:25

Studied under Richard Bauckham. Now, did you catch that? There seems to be a thinking there, conservative and great scholar on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

59:37

Whether he meant to communicate that, that's what it sounded like to me. A PhD from Bauckham.

59:46

And Pennington, in his book, Reading the Gospels Wisely, says that, hey, if we didn't know better, it appears that the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke are describing two different individuals because there's so little overlap between the two stories.

01:00:03

There are a couple of details. Okay, so please don't take this the wrong way, but so?

01:00:13

What's supposed to be the great meaning of that? Once again, if you allow

01:00:22

Matthew and Luke to be addressing significantly different audiences, they get to choose what they're going to include in their narrative.

01:00:37

So the only way that the birth narratives could be an issue is if the two could not together describe the same person.

01:00:52

So in other words, the argument normally is, well, but this one's emphasizing something different and we're not exactly sure how to put the two together as to when this event was and that event was, and we're not given specific ages and things like that.

01:01:07

Okay, that's true. All that's true. So what? So what?

01:01:14

I mean, if you look at any one of the Gospels, is that really long enough to tell you all the details about Jesus's life?

01:01:23

I mean, isn't it just a given from the start that the author is is selecting based upon how long he wants this to be?

01:01:34

And, you know, there were some limitations given your audience and given the production facilities of the day, there were some limitations as to how long the book could actually be.

01:01:49

So they don't have the freedom to include different things that would have different meanings to different audiences.

01:01:58

You see, in much of New Testament teaching today, something has been lost that was central in New Testament teaching before and you'll be taught in most seminaries that it's good that we've lost this.

01:02:17

But in olden days, there was a coherence to what was being presented because you had the fundamental belief that it was

01:02:31

God's intention to give us the Bible in the first place. So there's an overarching purpose.

01:02:39

And so God can have a purpose in Matthew and a purpose in Luke and a purpose in Mark and a purpose in John.

01:02:45

And when we bring these together, we actually get a fuller and greater view. But see, once you lose that organizing principle, that ordering principle, then the only thing left to do is to start putting these sources in contradiction with one another rather than seeing them as part of a larger whole.

01:03:10

And I was certainly taught in this, well, I was taught in some classes that it's a good thing that we have dethroned systematic theology.

01:03:26

And now we have biblical theology, which is another way of saying we can make Mark contradictory to Luke and we can make

01:03:33

Luke contradictory to Matthew and Paul contradictory to James and now we're allowing the text to truly speak.

01:03:41

So in other words, there's a presupposition that there is no harmonious overarching purpose in the giving of Scripture.

01:03:51

It's just, it's not necessarily stated that way that bluntly, but it's there.

01:03:59

And you're basically not allowed, you're not allowed to bring in the historical presupposition except in the history classes where you sort of look at, oh, these people actually believed that you could put all this together and there was a harmonious whole.

01:04:18

And it's sort of said with again, the wonderful condescension of the modern scholar.

01:04:27

And so if you don't go there, if you go, no, wait a minute,

01:04:35

I think Matthew and Luke, they do need to be heard within their own context. I think that is an appropriate thing to emphasize.

01:04:43

But I don't think it's an appropriate thing to then say, and having heard Matthew and Luke in their own context, we need to set them odds with one another.

01:04:52

The richness comes when you actually do the hard work of seeing their place in the overarching perspective of all of Scripture, which by the way, was

01:05:04

Jesus' view and the apostles' view of the Old Testament. And I think paradigmatically can then be said to be of the

01:05:12

New Testament as well. So birth narratives, fascinating, need to be studied, but the presupposition being, well, they're supposed to give us the same story in the same way when the author is writing completely different audiences.

01:05:31

Why? Why? It really seems like in a lot of seminary education, a lot of the academy today, you're not allowed to ask why.

01:05:41

Why do we date the gospels as late as we do? Well, that scholar over there said, you know what?

01:05:51

The vast majority of guys who teach in New Testament accepted what they were taught on those things and have never really seriously worked through why they believe what they believe about that.

01:06:03

It's just, well, it's, you know, I don't know if you saw, if you have

01:06:13

Twitter up. I've come to a point where I'm willing to pay Dr. White money to remove the electricity bowl from the background.

01:06:21

Some folks, some folks have trouble focusing like a laser beam.

01:06:29

Evidently, the lava lamp, however, does not cause that kind of a problem. So, but I'm having trouble focusing because obviously

01:06:35

Twitter just distracted me. Anyway, I think there's much to be learned by allowing the text to speak for themselves and then to speak in harmony.

01:06:45

Because once you isolate them from an inspired text, an inspired whole, which by the way, you

01:06:50

Muslims demand not be done with Quran, but then you just forget about that when you're quoting other people.

01:06:56

Oh, well, a little inconsistency there. Anyway, when you allow them to speak for themselves and then speak together as a chorus, as a choir, you know,

01:07:08

I love the Hallelujah Chorus by Handel, but just the soprano part isn't nearly as impressive as the soprano and the alto and the tenor and the bass together.

01:07:26

Right? And I think that's what you have with the New Testament, especially the

01:07:32

Gospels as well. I think that's why we have more than one. If we want it to be simple, then we would have been given one.

01:07:39

We were given more than one. All right. Now, I need to switch over to this one.

01:07:50

And that shouldn't have messed you up. Should look pretty much the same. Should look pretty much the same.

01:07:59

Yes, but it's a different video. Okay, good. Um, then we have the attempt on Yahya Snow's part on another

01:08:11

Yahya Snow job here to place me and Laikona and Wallace in conflict.

01:08:21

But the mistake that he made, and it might be a common mistake, but hey, when you're, if you're putting out the videos and demonstrate you don't really know what you're talking about,

01:08:30

I'm going to point out you really don't know what you're talking about. He gives a clip from my presentation on New Testament reliability and contrasts it with Laikona statements about Old Testament texts.

01:08:44

Oops, we weren't talking about the same thing. Then he seems to misunderstand what Dan Wallace is saying.

01:08:50

We'll talk about that in a minute. But this has come up in other, in other contexts.

01:08:57

When we talk about the free transmission of the text of the New Testament documents, the, uh, people still trying to, uh, now, now they're throwing out more surface level little, uh, alleged contradictions.

01:09:18

Uh, let's do it on the fly. The difference between the Old and the

01:09:23

New Testament in textual transmission must be understood. Well, okay.

01:09:30

Let me introduce you to it because let's be honest. When was the last time you even heard this discussed?

01:09:36

Almost anywhere but here. Uh, it's, it's, it's the kind of thing that gives most, uh, seminary trained pastors hives to even think about trying to explain this in the form of a sermon, let alone a

01:09:51

Bible study. The Tanakh, the

01:09:57

Torah, the Nevi 'im and the Ketuvim by its very nature is fundamentally different than the

01:10:04

New Testament. Why? 1 ,500 years versus 100 years.

01:10:15

The, just, just think about that for a moment. Think of, of what changes over the course of a millennium and a half.

01:10:24

Even the language and the forms of the written words differ over that 1 ,500 years.

01:10:36

The Tanakh is significantly more of a work of, of early antiquity.

01:10:44

I mean, it is very, very old in its oldest, the oldest part of its tradition.

01:10:50

Very, very old. Some of the oldest literature known.

01:10:58

And by nature, it is the, uh, covenant documents of a particular people.

01:11:11

So there is no free transmission, nor could there have been historically and in light of the purpose of the documents themselves.

01:11:24

So when we start having sufficient, or at least when we start having, uh, most sufficient manuscripts and citations, uh, to start identifying streams of transmission, you know, cause we can find, you know, you hear about stuff on, on pots and, and, and things like that that have been found here, there, and everywhere and minimizing

01:11:52

Twitter, uh, you know, where you'll have a, a, you know, a little section from a verse here, a little section of verse there.

01:12:00

That's not enough to establish a, a, a line of transmission or, uh, uh, a tradition at that point.

01:12:08

When we start having, be able to identify, for example, the, uh, earliest form of the

01:12:17

Masoretic texts, start looking at the Aramaic Targums, looking at the, the, what forms the background, the, the

01:12:29

Hebrew text that was translated in the, to the Greek Septuagint, three different lines of transmission.

01:12:35

We can start comparing them with one another around the time of Christ. Um, at that point we can start doing serious textual critical work, but before that, there just simply isn't enough.

01:12:49

It's up for anything, for any work of antiquity. I mean, outside of, of something that you dig up that was chiseled on a rock, um, which wasn't the most efficient way of communicating something, um, you, you really have at that point a text that has been transmitted within a living community over against what happens in the

01:13:17

New Testament where in fulfillment of prophecies in that very Tanakh, you have the

01:13:23

Gospel going out to the Gentiles. And so you need to have a message that is able to be communicated to them in that way.

01:13:32

And of course, by then you now have the Greek Septuagint, which allows, uh, the whole body of Scripture to transcend the narrow, um, genealogical or cultural, national, uh, means of transmission that had taken place up to that point in time.

01:13:54

So there is a fundamental difference in how the

01:13:59

Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, the Ketuvim, was transmitted up to pretty much the time of the

01:14:07

Septuagint. And, and really, you know, the, the diaspora of the

01:14:15

Jews, the large number of Jews that lived outside of Israel, that began, because that, that got the

01:14:24

Septuagint out there. But it was the Christians' use of that that got it out of the synagogues and into a much wider, um, knowledge of the, of the society and, and things like that, and gave a foundation for evangelism.

01:14:42

Because remember that the, the Bible of the early church was the Greek Septuagint. There was no New Testament to be the

01:14:48

Bible of the New Testament church for a period of time. So, uh, where was

01:14:56

I going with that? With all that in mind, um, oh, so the fundamental part of Snow's, Snow Job here is that he just doesn't understand what we're talking about.

01:15:07

Just obviously doesn't have the background, the field to follow what it is that's being said. And, uh, you know, it, it's, it's a shame that someone just keeps doing this kind of thing, but that's seems to be his calling in life, uh, is to do that kind of thing.

01:15:23

So let's, let's take a look at this is, uh, wow, it's nine minutes long. It's longer than I thought. Uh, I may just give you a little taste of mine, then skip to Dan's, uh, so we can get this done by, by 2 .30.

01:15:36

The process of inspiration, at least for the Christian scriptures, is, is vague.

01:15:42

We don't know what it was. Christians do not believe that the

01:15:47

Bible was inspired using the same kind of method that Muslims believe the Quran was inspired. That is a true statement.

01:15:54

Um, that doesn't make it vague in my opinion. Um, but there, there is no question that the idea of Laylatul Qadr and the heavenly tablet, and there is nothing of Muhammad, all of that,

01:16:12

I, you know, I've explained this before. I consider the Islamic perspective on this to be extremely sub -biblical.

01:16:18

It's, it's the, it's the dictation method. And I think the

01:16:24

Christian concept, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

01:16:30

That is the biblical statement. All scripture is Theanostos, God breathed.

01:16:36

Have you not read what God spoke to you saying, there's Jesus, there's Paul, there's Peter. You, you put them together, and I'm not sure that that's vague unless you're asking for a mechanical description of how it works, but men are speaking.

01:16:51

And there's no question that, that anyone who's read the Psalter knows the entire range of man's experiences, emotions, so on and so forth is found there.

01:17:00

Yeah, no question about it. But men spoke from God as they're carried along by the

01:17:05

Holy Spirit. So they, you have their choice of, you, you, you can tell

01:17:11

Paul is different than Peter, than Mark, than Luke.

01:17:18

They have different vocabulary, different grammar, different sentence structure. And yet what they said was from God.

01:17:26

And they are carried along by the Holy Spirit. So that the result is

01:17:32

Theanostos. Okay? But that's not, that's not the

01:17:38

Muslim perspective. No, no question about that. We do not hold to a dictation method of inspiration.

01:17:45

Say, well, then how did it occur? I don't know. I say, well, wait a minute, 2

01:17:50

Timothy 3, 16, all scripture is inspired or God breathed. Well, what does that look like?

01:17:56

You know, what does it actually look like? I don't know. Well, how about it looks like men spoke from God as they're carried along with the

01:18:03

Holy Spirit? You know, some people call this having epistemological humility.

01:18:11

Okay. How, but, but if the scriptures do address these things, why not bring the full orbed testimony together?

01:18:19

Unless you're just really not convinced that there is a full orbed testimony. That, that might be part of it.

01:18:25

You take 2 Peter 1, that no prophecy is a matter of man's interpretation, but men moved by the

01:18:32

Holy Spirit spoke from God. Okay. Well, what does it look like to be moved, carried along by the Holy Spirit?

01:18:38

Finally gets to it and then says, well, we don't know what that looks like. What do you mean looks like?

01:18:46

I don't, I don't understand this. Why, why put them, why separate them and say it doesn't answer the question rather than putting them together and saying we are being given all portions of the answer by comparing these together.

01:19:02

There's such a huge difference between having a confident association of divine texts versus a lack of confidence in dividing divine texts.

01:19:15

Seems to me anyways. I don't know. So we don't think it's a dictation method because if that were the case, then everything, you know, you wouldn't have these different educational backgrounds, different writing styles, different personalities involved.

01:19:29

So there is a divine element and there's a human element involved. Could it be that God placed the concepts in the mind of the biblical author and they turned around and wrote those things?

01:19:42

Now at this point, if, if you, if you throw that out there, you better have a response to it because let, let's just be honest.

01:19:56

That is always the first step toward a total collapse in your view of inspiration.

01:20:03

I mean, I mean, anybody who's read history knows this is, this is the way you go.

01:20:10

Well, it's inspiration of divine concepts and, you know, but they could be expressed in different ways.

01:20:16

And that leads to this, this turning divine revelation, this vague, vague, vague thing, which, oh,

01:20:25

I guess might result in something like mere Christianity. Huh? Well, no, actually it wouldn't.

01:20:32

It couldn't. Why? Because mere Christianity says that one of the fundamental things you still have to fight for is what?

01:20:38

The Trinity. I've never heard anyone be able to give a meaningful presentation of the

01:20:44

Trinity based upon a vague view of biblical inspiration. It doesn't work.

01:20:51

You can't, you can't do it. Well, unless you're just doing it in a monologue, I suppose. But if you're gonna be challenged, man, it can work.

01:20:57

Now, and they used it using their, whatever educational background they had, their skills, their memory, and God ensured that they got the concepts correctly.

01:21:10

So what's to say that that's not the case? I will, I will gladly say that's not the case.

01:21:19

Because that's, that is not how any of the biblical writers in the

01:21:25

New Testament approach the text of the Old Testament. A, that would not fit in the idea of men speaking from God as they're carried along by the

01:21:36

Holy Spirit, because now you have their ruminations. In fact, that's a direct contradiction to what he just quoted from Peter, because Peter says the prophets of scripture does not have its origination in the will of man.

01:21:49

So if you're saying that the will of man, you know, they're, they're just expressing in their own words. How do you even identify what that prophecy is any longer?

01:22:00

Again, this has been addressed in numerous works in the past. Again, this is not what you would expect from someone who has a passionate belief in the doctrine of inerrancy.

01:22:14

You just, it doesn't sound like it to me. And lest we have some people here who are thinking that I'm a heretic because of this.

01:22:22

Not a, not a heretic, but I think there needs to be a straightforward statement that, you know, I'm just not into,

01:22:28

I can't affirm what the Chicago statement said, or I think goes too far. Just, just, just come out and say it.

01:22:36

You know, I mean, Norm said it and he was right. Just, just come out and say it.

01:22:41

That's, you know, that's all. It's, it's, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? Think about this.

01:22:47

Let's take two models that we have. All right. Model one is a very strict, rigid view of inerrancy that there are no mistakes in the scriptures whatsoever.

01:22:57

Okay. No errors whatsoever. Okay. And then the other one is this one that I just presented as a paradigm.

01:23:06

Which obviously is his paradigm. And I, I have, I have a hard time differentiating that from the

01:23:13

Roman Catholic perspective that I hear most of the differences.

01:23:20

Let me know. Inspiration. I'm not saying it's right. I don't know what's right. I don't know what happened here.

01:23:27

I don't know. I don't know. But I'm only going to present two, and one of them it's obvious I don't agree with because I'm about to attack it.

01:23:38

I'll have to admit, this sort of bothers me. Just, just be straight up on it. Just come straight out and say, this is where I stand on this.

01:23:47

The I don't know part, you know, that's perfectly fine.

01:23:53

For non -apologists who are not publishing books in the field. But for people who are being looked up to as leaders in this area, the

01:24:02

I don't know isn't, ain't going to cut it. But that would be that God inspired the biblical authors with the concepts and the things going on.

01:24:11

And he wasn't concerned with peripheral details. He wanted to make sure that the concept, the teaching and everything was preserved without error.

01:24:20

Okay. Very quickly. How do you preserve the truth through the use of errant language?

01:24:30

I mean, I hear this all the time. We've got, we've got, we've got the gist of it. We just, you know, it's just communicated to us errantly.

01:24:40

Okay. Well, which one is more accurate? Which, do we have reason to believe one over the other?

01:24:45

Well, consider this. Evangelicals who say every word, God cannot err, so every word is correct.

01:24:54

You have people, and this would be people like Norman Geisler. They acknowledge, Geisler acknowledges in his book, what, when critics ask, that there are errors in our current text and that inerrancy applies only to the autographs.

01:25:10

So when you take numerical discrepancies that are found in Kings, Chronicles, and Samuel, many of them, and you look at them and you look at how

01:25:18

Geisler explains these, Geisler and Thomas Howe, they say, oh, this is obviously a scribal corruption here, a scribal error.

01:25:28

Okay. Well, that's possible. Maybe it is a scribal error. I don't think it's obvious, but it's possibly a scribal error.

01:25:37

Well, now let me, let me explain what he's talking about here. And this may actually take us past when

01:25:42

I was thinking that. That's fine. It's important. There was no numerical system in the most ancient forms of the

01:25:55

Hebrew language in the sense of, we have what we call the Arabic numerals. We have specific symbols separate from our alphabet that allow us to add up columns of numbers and so on and so forth.

01:26:15

In Hebrew, you used letters and letters were assigned a numerical value.

01:26:27

And unfortunately, some of the most important letters, especially that would identify multiples of 10, you know, there was between a thousand and 10 ,000 or something like that, were some of the most often mistranscribed letters,

01:26:48

Yod, Wau, things like that. Especially if a manuscript would be damaged, or if there was, if you were writing on a surface that would have extraneous marks,

01:27:02

Yods and Waus, you know, after time, after some weathering would be very difficult.

01:27:09

And so when you look at the vast majority of differences between the historical sources, they are about numbers, and they are very frequently about 100 versus 1 ,000 or 1 ,000 versus 10 ,000.

01:27:27

In other words, the exact kind of numerical transcription errors that you would expect given the

01:27:37

Hebrew language's utilization of letters to represent numerical value.

01:27:43

That's what he's referring to here. And I think it is obvious that they are transcriptional, transmissional errors in the

01:27:54

Hebrew. Mita said, well, I don't know if that's all that obvious. Well, okay, it seems pretty obvious to me.

01:28:02

But we don't have the manuscripts of any good pedigree that would preserve the correct text.

01:28:09

So what that means... Well, and again, let me just point something out. It's not like...

01:28:15

But we have that for all sorts of other works of antiquity. No, we don't.

01:28:21

This is one of the most ancient works that we have. And so it would not be expected.

01:28:29

See, a lot of people go, well, doesn't that seem a little suspicious that we don't have those? You know anything about history?

01:28:35

No. What would be shocking is if we did. That's one of the things that made people laugh, quite honestly, at Joseph Smith.

01:28:43

When he said the book of Abraham, he had found on an Egyptian mummy, the actual writings of Abraham. These would be the most ancient writings ever known to man.

01:28:52

And Joseph Smith managed to find these on an Egyptian mummy. And they were the actual writings of Abraham.

01:28:57

Well, of course, Mormons don't believe that anymore, but that is obviously what Joseph Smith claimed. No, it would not.

01:29:04

It's not suspicious because it would be amazing if we did. We're talking about uber antiquity here, going way, way, way, way back.

01:29:16

That's the problem. All right. You say, well, that's no problem then. We've got errors in our current

01:29:21

Bible because inerrancy only applies to the autographs. Well, now, wait a minute.

01:29:27

Then that means if you were to walk up to Norman Geisler or... Now, just hold on a second. This is what blew me away here.

01:29:35

This is the argumentation not only... I mean, I've heard this argumentation against biblical inspiration from atheists all over the place.

01:29:44

And guess who else? King James only. This is a

01:29:50

King James only argument or an atheist argument, either one, because it conflates categories. It does not do justice historically to the transmission, to the issue.

01:30:02

And he's right. Inerrancy applies to the autographs.

01:30:08

And this is where the King James onlyists or even some of other folks go, oh, no, no, that's where Warfield ruined us all and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:30:20

And that's why they eventually run to a newly inspired standardized text in the

01:30:26

King James or whatever else it might be. I suppose the 1525 Blomberg text becomes the standard because it was behind the

01:30:37

King James. I don't know. I haven't heard anybody talking about that. But I've heard these arguments before. And I wonder how many people listening to the webinar were going,

01:30:47

I just responded to that argument recently. An errantist, a rigid inerrantist, and say, look, what

01:30:53

I want to know is, is the Bible I'm holding in my hands right now? Is this the inerrant word of God?

01:31:02

If they're being honest, they'd have to say no. Okay. So he stops there.

01:31:10

Then notice what it says here. Scholars like Dr. Lycone are thinking and are making insightful points. Aren't we glad to have

01:31:17

Yaya Snow to define for us what insightful points are? And now that we've pointed out so many of the problems, well, it was just said, will

01:31:24

Yaya Snow think through what we've said? Guarantee you, no, he won't. Apologists like James White aren't thinking this through.

01:31:34

This guy teaches the original readings are present in the manuscript tradition. Now, he just said that in,

01:31:42

Dr. Lycone said that in his opinion, in the numerical variations in the written text of the

01:31:50

Old Testament, that we don't have enough manuscripts to know what the original reading was.

01:31:56

Now, I think we actually can, but not on the level we can with the

01:32:03

New Testament. So in other words, when we look at two different readings, one says 100 and one says 1000.

01:32:16

It's probably, I would say the safest thing to do would be always to go with the smaller number. But I think you should always make note of these things.

01:32:25

And who knows? It's already happened in the finding of Astraka and things like that.

01:32:30

We could find, there might be another Dead Sea Scroll finding out there someplace. I sort of doubt it, but don't know.

01:32:38

And what if we do find, for example, the proto -Septuagint

01:32:45

Hebrew text in a cave someplace? Might actually answer almost all these questions for us.

01:32:52

Not like whether it was 100 or 1000 at any one point in time makes some huge difference.

01:33:01

But so that was, he's talking about Old Testament. Then, in fact, what

01:33:06

I'm going to do here, anybody can go watch. You've heard me do this before. Anybody can go watch me make the, this whole presentation is on from Trinity Law School.

01:33:16

It's on YouTube. Go watch it. Nice high quality. It was an enjoyable evening.

01:33:22

What I'm talking about there is the tenacity of the

01:33:27

New Testament text. So Yahya has now demonstrated, he doesn't know the difference between the Old Testament and New Testament.

01:33:33

He has made a false comparison between the two. Okay, so we have documented yet once again another

01:33:40

Yahya Snow Job. Let's go past what I say in regards to tenacity.

01:33:47

And here's where he attempts to create a contradiction between myself and Dan Wallace.

01:33:57

Dr. Daniel Wallace does appear to agree with that apologist's hopeful conjecture of all the original readings being present in the manuscript tradition.

01:34:04

I don't know why he puts two dots after that. I, I've. If you look at the resurrection of Christ, you look at his deity, his virgin birth, salvation by, by faith, salvation by grace, the trinity, any essential doctrines, not a single one is impacted by any of these viable variants.

01:34:20

All these cardinal beliefs are secure. Not one is affected by it. Now I wonder if Yahya believes that.

01:34:27

I bet you Yahya doesn't. Do you, Mr. Snow? But do you realize that you're, you're putting up someone who is testifying that everything you believe about the corruption in the

01:34:39

New Testament is false, right? Do you realize this? How, how can you get away with this?

01:34:46

Are you, are you so focused on trying to create contradictions amongst us that you don't realize what he just said?

01:34:56

I, I mean, I mean, how do you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning? I can see why you hide behind the internet because I would have a hard time doing what you've done for so long, coming out and actually debating and looking us in the eye because you know

01:35:13

I go for consistency and I know you do not. You're not a man of truth and you'd have to look me in the eye if we were to ever meet and I would look you in the eye and say

01:35:25

Yahya Snow, why are you not a man of truth? If you think Islam is true, why are you so untruthful?

01:35:34

It's a good thing to be able to look yourself in the mirror in the morning, Yahya. It really is. It really is.

01:35:41

Yeah, I, I was just straightforward with you. Somebody needs to be. Somebody needs to be. From that skeptic, we've already mentioned him,

01:35:49

Bart Ehrman, in the appendix to his book, Misquoting Jesus, he was asked by the editors, why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?

01:36:03

His answer, essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the

01:36:11

New Testament. What? Tens of thousands of people left the Christian faith because they thought that the cardinal doctrines of the

01:36:19

Christian faith were affected by textual variance because of having read this book. And yet now he has to admit that's not the case.

01:36:27

We've debated each other three times and every time I show his quotation on this point and he can't refute it because he knows that's what he said, he knows that's what he believes.

01:36:36

You know, sometimes I think that God just, um, super intends and, and blinds people like Muslim by Choice and Yahya Snow just to get this stuff into other

01:36:52

Muslims' heads. I really do. Because did you just hear that? Who is, who is the favorite apostate amongst

01:36:59

Muslims? Bart Ehrman. What did Dan Wallace just say? His fundamental argument is bogus.

01:37:06

And what is the fundamental argument? The very argument that must be used by Muslims to come up with the idea that the deity of Christ and all the rest of this stuff was somehow smuggled into the text and it's all been changed and blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:37:21

You just, you just put this out and you don't realize what it says? Anyways, his whole point's coming up here in a moment.

01:37:29

But, uh, anyway. So consequently, uh, the kind of debate gets over pretty quickly at that point. Is what we have now what they wrote then in all particulars?

01:37:40

I don't know. Probably not. 666, 616, fasting and prayer.

01:37:47

Okay. Now what's he talking about there? When he says 666 and 616, do you even know

01:37:53

Yahya? I know because I've used Dan's joke about this for years.

01:37:59

It's one of the best jokes and I've always given him credit. Everybody who's ever heard me tell the joke knows that I give him credit for this.

01:38:07

So everybody tell Dan, I, I have been very particular in crediting in this.

01:38:15

And it's also a protective mechanism because if they, if they end up being really strong pre -millennials saying go after him instead of me, but, uh, but do you know what that, what he just said?

01:38:25

Because if you don't know what he just said, then you're not going to understand what he's, what is, what his point is. And very often you don't understand what the point is.

01:38:33

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the problem. 666, 616, the two major variants in Revelation chapter 13.

01:38:41

And in fact, I bring up in my presentation, I, I, well, in the presentation you quoted from, I brought up an image of one of the papyri and zoom in on it and show it says 616 instead of 666.

01:38:57

But you see, if you understood New Testament textual criticism, and if you would listen to Dr. Wallace's lecture, we know about those two because we have sufficient manuscripts to recognize where the variation is.

01:39:16

And his point is we have variants in the text.

01:39:22

We all admit that, but this is the very same man who in an interview with Rob Bowman, Rob Bowman presented to him an illustration that he uses.

01:39:40

And Dan thought it was brilliant because it is. And that is Rob said, what we have with the

01:39:47

New Testament is that we have a 10 ,000 piece jigsaw puzzle and we have 10 ,100 pieces.

01:39:56

Not that we have 9 ,900. The point being we possess all of the original readings.

01:40:05

The original of Revelation 13 is either 666 or 616.

01:40:12

It's one of the two. That's what he's talking about. You don't seem to understand that, but that's what

01:40:19

I was talking about too in my presentation. But you've got this filter on that you're always trying to find.

01:40:26

In this instance, you've created a contradiction that didn't actually exist because of your ignorance of, well, an ignorance that you didn't have to have if you had but just listened to everything he said, everything

01:40:42

I said with some semblance of fairness, a desire to learn. And you, unfortunately, do not have that desire to learn.

01:40:54

Okay. Now, you can go ahead and take that down. In fact, there it goes.

01:41:01

Okay. So, we have covered a lot of ground today. And it hasn't been light, fluffy ground.

01:41:13

Most of it has not been really good preaching ground either. I mean, hopefully some of the information and some of the assertions regards to the nature of divine revelation have been important.

01:41:28

But once again, I'm sure I'm going to hear from a lot of folks why you're always attacking other

01:41:37

Christians. Let's just be honest.

01:41:46

Dr. Lykona didn't need to talk about hermeneutical gymnastics.

01:41:53

He very plainly has in his mind a division between his perspective, which he identifies as being the scholarly perspective and the strict inerrantist perspective of a

01:42:06

Norman Geisler and people like him. And I know that that encounter differently, but you must learn to differentiate between what people are saying, the content of what they're saying, and who they are.

01:42:28

I don't care if you don't like me, don't like the way I look, the way that I ended up having to go to a pretty literal seminary.

01:42:35

I learned to listen to people with whom I have disagreements, filter what they say through a recognition of what their worldview is and what the differences

01:42:46

I have with their worldview is, grab the gems and the nuggets of gold and get rid of the rest.

01:42:55

I think that's maturity. And man, that's not how our world thinks today.

01:43:02

And unfortunately, a lot of it comes right into the church. What Dr.

01:43:07

Lykona said needed to be responded to. And hopefully we've done so meaningfully, accurately, fairly.

01:43:15

We played all of his comments. We let him speak for himself. It's not like we just summarized his position or something.

01:43:25

And that kind of communication needs to continue on.

01:43:33

And I have to be able to say, I consider this very important. I consider this issue to be extremely central to our apologetic methodology and approach without then taking the next step that most people take.

01:43:49

And that means Mike Lykona has gone to hell in a bobsled. You don't need to do that.

01:43:56

Leave Dr. Lykona to the Lord. He claims to follow

01:44:02

Jesus Christ, pray for him, love him as a brother, but disagree with him.

01:44:08

Just do so accurately. As long as you've accurately disagreed, you don't have to send the guy to hell.

01:44:17

I fear for people who fall into that, you know, if you disagree with me on this out and the other thing, well, then you just must be an unbeliever.

01:44:29

Leave it to the Lord. Leave it. Address the teaching. Address the public statements.

01:44:36

But leave the rest to the Lord. If it's not, if he's not teaching that we're justified by our works, then leave it to the

01:44:44

Lord. You know, I mean, I really don't think that what he said was helpful.

01:44:50

It could have been stated so much better than it was, but pray for him anyways. Leave it to the Lord. I mean, don't you realize that if the man really is a

01:44:58

Christian, someday you're going to be closer to him than you are to anybody in this life right now. Ever thought about that?

01:45:06

Yeah. Well, anyway. All right. Wow. That was a lot of stuff we've had to cover the past two days.

01:45:14

What's that? Oh, you posted the banner.

01:45:19

You posted the banner on the website. All right. Let me go see the website.

01:45:25

Hold on a second. AOMin .org. Yes. AOMin .org.

01:45:35

There it is. He went with that. He had sent me a bunch of different backgrounds.

01:45:43

But this one's Robespierre. It has something to do with Robespierre. He told me.

01:45:50

But there's a new banner ad up. Who will rule over us? The coming calamity of secular failure.

01:45:57

It's got this really picture of me. O 'Fallon loves the pictures of me where I'm, you know, the dark eyes and the set chin.

01:46:10

He doesn't like the, you know. He did take the picture I use on Facebook where I'm smiling and laughing and actually look like a human being that has a heart.

01:46:22

Sometimes I wonder if he thinks that was a bad idea to give that picture to me because it just ruins my rap, you know, if you actually see me smiling or something like that.

01:46:30

And knowing I was smiling at a Muslim makes it even worse. But yes, my presentation, free admission with registration,

01:46:39

September 10th, 2016, 8 p .m. I thought it was 7 p .m. Okay. 8 p .m.

01:46:44

I'm going to be up late that night. Hilton Airport Hotel, Vancouver, Canada. Could be talking about some stuff that we talk about here every once in a while, but in a more intimate setting, personal setting, if you can join with us up there in Vancouver.

01:47:01

I just realized I'm going to be in Canada. I wonder if I'm going to get out of Canada if I say half the things

01:47:08

I need to say while I'm in Canada. Oh, yeah.

01:47:14

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I may be rowing in a lifeboat. Just row down to...

01:47:21

Well, then I'd be landing on the West Coast. So they may not want me either. I don't know.

01:47:27

This is dangerous. Very, very dangerous. But we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens.

01:47:34

So yes, September 10th, for those of you in the Vancouver area, who will rule over us?

01:47:39

That's from the 12th Psalm. And we'll be talking about stuff like that.

01:47:45

Well, anyways, thank you for joining us on the program today. Lord willing, we will be back on Tuesday of next week.