Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602-973-4602 or toll-free across the United States. It's 1-877-753-3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White. Hey, good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a rainy Tuesday morning here in the Phoenix area. We are having winter. It doesn't come very often. But we're having winter. For us, winter is highs in the low 50s and rain. And that sounds like Seattle pretty much all year round. But hey, for us, it's our winter. So we are enjoying it. And I imagine the plants are enjoying it. Looking at the monitor screens right now, I see that there's a fair amount of water coming down in front of our one rain detector video feed that just happens to be right where the water comes off the roof. So it sits there and goes motion all day long whenever it's raining. But it's nice, because normally rain around here lasts for about 20 minutes and then goes away. So it's been raining for, I don't know, hours. So that's not bad. Well, they're probably getting a ton of snow up north, too. Oh, yeah. I bet you those could be skiing and everything up there. So yes, believe it or not, in Arizona, We have large areas where you can get snow and go skiing and do stuff like that. Flagstaff, over 7,000 feet elevation. So yeah, I imagine they are getting smacked. But anyways, today on the program, I very seriously attempted to have folks on the program today. And last Tuesday evening, as I was preparing to meet with my Arabic tutor, I was informed that there was a radio program on that I could hear online that was going to be criticizing my book on the King James Only controversy. So I tuned in. Can you call it tuning in when you actually just look up a URL? I'm not sure if that's tuning in, but anyway, we use old terminology, I guess. And I started listening, and they mentioned a chat room, so I went into the chat room. And you can hear, you'll hear as I play the program today. that one of the two individuals who's doing most of the talking, a fellow by the name of Brian, becomes extremely... You can tell he's watching the chat channel and just is very, very disrupted by the fact that I came in and started responding to things. Anyway, I didn't get to listen to the whole thing because, as I said, I was preparing for something else. And so as soon as it was, actually while I was listening, I wrote and because I gave an email address, so I wrote and said, hey, be glad to have you guys on next week. You know, we'll, you know, you can be on the program. We can address these things. You know, this would be great for folks because, you know, give and take and you get to hear both sides. That's obviously the best way to do this. It's not Well, one side does a monologue, and the other side does a monologue, and blah, blah, blah, back and forth. It's always best to see if these arguments stand up to critical scrutiny. Well, one fella did respond to me and said that he couldn't be on. So I keep writing back and saying, well, when could you be on? And I don't get the answer to the when could you part, just why I can't be on. But would another week work for you? Well, I just can't be on. And so I forwarded your email to Brian, the guy who did most of the talking. I've never heard from Brian. And I keep hearing him saying, well, how can I get hold of Brian? But I can't get an answer to that either. So unfortunately, there's nobody here today but me, myself, and I, as is so often the case when it comes to King James-only-ism and Arminianism in particular. Folks love to have monologues. They love to present their side, but they don't want to have to deal with me. Because for some reason I ask questions that they don't want to have to answer. And so we will do what we always do. I will let them speak and then I'll respond. And if they would like to call, The toll-free number is 877-753-3341. 877-753-3341 is the toll-free phone number. We'll leave the lines open for you. And if you'd like to respond to any of the rebuttals that I offer, that'd be great. If you'd like to call me up and ask me to be on your program at some point, I'll try to find the time to do it. I'd be happy to do so because, well, The fact of the matter is these are important things, and the fact of the matter is that the gentlemen are simply factually, logically, and historically wrong. and what they have said, and I think they need to be made aware of that, and their listeners made aware of that as well. So we're going to listen to the program today, and I don't think we'll get through all of it, because obviously not only have we done an introduction, but after taking out the various chit-chat things and commercials, some really weird commercials on that station, A lot of survivalists out there hiding in the mountains, getting ready for the end of the world. But there really is, I mean, there was some weird stuff, you know. Seeds you can buy that are supposed to survive nuclear war or something. I don't know. It's really weird. But once I cut all of that out, the hour-long program got down to about 43, just over 43 minutes in length, 43 minutes and 12 seconds to be exact. and uh... so that is what i have a cute up here so we're still is the whole thing i'll stop and start responded to things and uh... listen to the criticism of the king james only controversy uh... here we go welcome to the covenant is called radio broadcast this is pastor jason burton from douglas arizona and i've got on the uh... on the line with me virtually right next to me up in pace in arizona Brian Miller, he was on here a couple of weeks ago for you regular listeners, I'm sure you'll remember him, but we're going to finish up today recapping the James White book, The King James Only Controversy, and then the second half... By the way, I looked for where there had been a previous program, and at least the week before this wasn't posted, so this is all I have. I looked for other things, couldn't find anything else. I played last week for you, The announcement of this program where they talked about... In fact, I need to cue that up. I apologize for that. Where is that one? I think it's this one right here. Yeah, here's where the announcement of the program came up. Of course, next week, I do want to encourage you to tune in next week, Tuesday night, 5 o'clock Pacific Coast time, right here on the Covenanters called the American Voice Radio. tune in because uh... i've got somebody that's going to be on the air i will not be on the air for tuesday night but i've on and do uh... rebuttal to james white book by the way i've had someone asked and i figured by somebody would uh... you'll hear some words cut out here the sound file that was sent to me of this had about seven huge screeches in it uh... audacity i don't know what it did there are these things were just you would be pulling the earplugs out of your ears, I'd be having to take my headphones off, you all would be complaining because it just goes, it's like dragging your fingernails down chalkboard just super loud, it's terrible. And I had to cut them out, because if I had played them, you all would have complained. So that's why it gets choppy a couple times, is I had to take out these weird type sounds that ended up in the sound file. I don't know where it came from, but that's just the way it was. I'm not trying to hide anything and blah, blah, blah. The King James only controversy. Now, James White is a Calvinist. He is a Bible corrector and he resides within Phoenix, Arizona. He has done a work and destroying the Word of God. He makes it his life work to debate those that believe in a final authority. Now catch the standard King James only-ist diatribe stuff here which is never overly true, but it's meant to, you know, create a lot of emotion and stuff like that. I destroy the Word of God. And that's really funny because one of the first things that Brian Miller is going to accuse me of is a straw man argument, because I point out in the book that for most King James only advocates, there is a mathematical formula that you need to keep in mind, that is the King James Bible alone equals the Word of God alone. He says, I've never met anybody who's believed that. Yet, listen to what he just said. I destroy the Word of God. How do I destroy the Word of God? Well, by disagreeing with the King James Version of the Bible being the only perfect Word of God there is. So, it's funny, you're going to catch Brian Miller over and over again functioning on the very basis of what he says I have misrepresented him on, misrepresented King James only folks on. And there you just heard it in this fellow. Very clearly for him, if you disagree with King James only-ism, then you're destroying faith in the Word of God. And that's why most of the time when we've had King James only folks coming to the channel. stuff like that uh... and i ask them questions i i'd nail them down a particular point provide them facts and clearly demonstrate that the king james version of the bible uh... is not a perfect translation just as its translators said it was not uh... are you you god hater you're destroying people's faith in the word of god blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and the only way for that to work is if you equate the king james version of the bible with the only expression of the word of god now obviously They recognize that up until 1611, you know, the question then gets asked, where was the Word of God? Interesting enough, Brian Miller's going to say it's the Old Latin. Well, funny thing is, the Old Latin is not the TR. The Old Latin and TR have numerous differences from one another. So if you adopt his perspective, then the Word of God changed over time. And we'll point out these inconsistencies because, folks, the reason that we would even take time to again deal with King James Onlyism is it's fascinating. These guys try to compare me with Bart Ehrman. And in reality, they're the ones who agree with Bart Ehrman on the subject we're going to be debating in Florida. That's what's amazing to me. That's why we need to be addressing this. You're going to hear Brian Miller saying, Bart Ehrman is exactly right. That if God inspired the text, then there's just going to be one text. And that's where both Bart Ehrman and the King James Only-us are wrong. And we need to know why they're wrong. And we need to be able to demonstrate why they're wrong. uh... and it is truly ironic to hear these two people they both these two sides they both accept the same argument and come to exactly opposite conclusions airman accepts the argument and rejects all belief in the bible's word of god they accept it decide that one translation You know, why not the Geneva Bible? Why not the Bishop's Bible? Why not any number of other things? Well, because God blessed it. That's why, brother. Because it was used in a revival. So God blessed it, so that must be the right one. throw that out there and make one translation the standard to fulfill the need to have this one perfect version of the Bible in a language that did not exist and was not spoken by anyone of the apostles or any of the writers of scripture and so they're both buying the exact same argument and yet coming to completely different conclusions and the problem is it's the argument that's wrong uh... the argument is is bogus uh... let's begin with and so we have asked a young man in our church he is a teacher uh... you didn't a scholar and so we've asked notice uh... this man says brian miller's a scholar so we're gonna hold into a scholar standard And a scholar shouldn't reason in circles, and a scholar shouldn't make assertions that are not scholarly, in the sense of being able to be substantiated. So, you know, we're not making that up. I'm going to come on the air and do a rebuttal. I offered a challenge to those that lift up James White in such a way, almost to the point of godhood. He's offered a challenge to me. You know, again, rhetoric without meaning, it is of course absurd and ridiculous to say anyone elevates me to the status of godhood and this type of thing. I think most rational folks can recognize when somebody, you know, when you have to utilize that kind of rhetoric and that kind of exaggeration, then you probably don't have a whole lot of arguments are actually going to be uh... you know overly compelling and the fact that i'm sitting here alone does sort of indicates that that's that while these folks really like to bluster and they really like to throw stuff out there when it comes to facing me directly and all of a sudden uh... not not quite and uh... just uh... just to hear the other side of the opinion and uh... uh... and and then he's going to stay on the next week he's gonna come back on for the next tuesday Tuesday evening and so that you can call in with your challenges so folks put this down in your books Now, I don't know if that means that he's going to be on this week. I had been told it was going to be the week after. I don't know. Maybe he'll be on this evening. I suppose I should listen in. You know, I'd be happy to call in if I had the time to do it. And maybe I could reschedule things and make it that way. I don't know. But I think there's, as we're going to see as we get in the program here, there's just a lot of things to be looking at. So let's go back to the program. Did I miss? Welcome to the covenant. All right. Well, let's just skip forward a little bit here. Thanks for having me, Jason. And like Jason said, I was on here a couple of weeks ago. And if somebody could just affirm, okay, Redneck says he can hear Brian. That's good. So at least somebody is hearing me and somebody is telling me I sound a little low. So let me hold this mic a little closer. We were talking, we were discussing the book, The King James Only Controversy by James R. White. And we talked about that a couple weeks ago. And you know, I really don't have anything personal against James R. White at all. And I've never met him. And so I really don't have anything bad to say about James White, even though I disagree with the outcome of this book. And I appreciate that. I don't have any personal issues on this for myself either. But again, it does strike me that if Brian Miller had written a book, and I did a program about it, and basically said that he was destroying people's faith, he says in here that I use strawman argumentation, wild and crazy ad hominem argumentation, I'm going to demonstrate that he's wrong about those things. If the role is reversed, I would feel a moral obligation to... and if they say, well, you know, the timing of the dividing line is bad, we can always change the timing of the dividing line. That's not difficult for us to do. That's the one nice thing about a webcast. We can make it fit your schedule. So once again, the invitation is there. To Brian Miller, to all the folks involved in this program, let's dialogue. I'm going to throw some challenges out here to you. I'd like to hear how you respond to them. If you can't respond to them, then admit you can't respond to them. I think that's perfectly fair, and I think that's the way it should be handled. We are talking about the Word of God here. But we looked at some things in this book, and we also briefly looked at some things in a book called Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, and we made some comparisons there. But I think it's an important issue still. Now this book's been around for a while that you were talking about, and it's written by James White. And James White, I believe, he's an assistant pastor or something like that in Phoenix, is that correct? I'm not sure what position he holds. I know he is a co-pastor, assistant pastor. He does have a position in a church down there. I can't even remember exactly what it is. He has a show, The Dividing Line, that comes out of Phoenix, Arizona. I think it's Daily or something like that. Right about this point, I got into the chat channel. And because one of the first things I typed, as I recall, was, I'm an elder in the Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church. So obviously I just heard them saying something along these lines. So right now I'm starting to respond to some of the things that are being said in the chat channel. I don't really listen to it much. And, you know, I'm just telling you I don't know anything about, I don't hold anything against James White, but I do disagree with some of the conclusions drawn in this book. Well, there were several things that you went over in the previous show, and unfortunately I wasn't able to listen to that. So if we repeat some of the stuff in the first half of the show, I guess that's okay because there may have been some people who weren't listening before. So what were some of the major problems that you had with this book? And obviously you disagreed with the premise, otherwise you wouldn't be getting on and contradicting what James White had to say. Yeah, I think first before you Before you jump into... I think honestly what's happening right now is Brian has realized I'm in the chat channel and I'm responding to stuff and that's you know I've been doing this for years our chat channels open right here and I see what people are saying and so it doesn't necessarily throw me off sometimes it does you know sometimes somebody will come in and I'm like oh man and it'll throw me off but I think that's what's possibly going on at this point. discussing a book like this, you know, first of all, we have to be realistic and fair and honest. There's a church up the road from my house and I don't go there and I disagree with a plethora of the doctrines taught in that church. And I have good friends that go there and I looked at their doctrinal statements and what they believe and I just shake my head for crying out loud. Good grief. That doesn't necessarily mean that God doesn't use people in that church. As a matter of fact, people get saved in that church. People grow in that church. And some of the doctrines, I don't think they're doctrines that send you to hell, but their views on eternal security are a little bit warped, you know, for me. Basically, you go down their doctrinal list and you think, oh, that's so wrong, that's so wrong, but people still get saved there. You don't understand what I'm saying? And when we look at a topic like this, and I hesitate to... I don't want to be vindictive. I don't want to say that if you don't use the King James Bible, that you're going to hell. You're not as spiritual as me. God will never use you. I don't want to say anything like that, because that's just not my position to say. You understand, Jason? I'm not the judge. I'm not the one you stand before and give account to. And that's just how it is. However, I think we need to take a look at the book. We need to take a look at the Bible and see what the Bible has to say. And we need to make decisions from there. Now, the first thing that I found in this book that bothered me was the obvious straw man. There is an equation stated throughout the book that says the King James alone equals the Word of God alone. And we get lumped, people who use the King James Bible get lumped into this category of certain people who may or may not believe this, but I personally have never met anybody who believed this, that starts out with the statement, the King James alone equals the Word of God alone. Now one of my criticisms will be that they only mention my interaction with Ruckman and Ripplinger, they don't mention my interaction with anybody else, including D.A. Waite, and it seems to me that their position is almost identical to D.A. Waite's. And as we're going to hear, I think over and over again, you're going to hear Brian say things that only make sense if you start with exactly this, that he is identifying the Word of God as the King James Bible. And so I've met many people, and I think almost anyone who has read the book and has interacted with King James Only Advocates realize, yes, that is the exact equation that they're making. They link to Sam Gipp, Later on he's going to basically repeat Sam Gipps' own perspective that God only promises us one inspired and inerrant translation in one language at a time. Right now it's the King James Version of the Bible. So I stand by what I said and I think his own words will demonstrate the truthfulness of what I've said as we listen to more of his criticism. Nobody starts there. That's where we end. As a matter of fact, we don't even exactly end there. We end that the King James is what the Lord preserved for us to use. And in the English language, not even necessarily worldwide, but just what the Lord has preserved. And that is an obvious strawman, because nobody starts out with a statement, the King James alone is the Word of God alone, and that's a very easy statement to shoot down. We have to understand how we come to the position of the King James Bible, and it's quite simple. The King James alone is the Word of God alone. It's not the starting point, and it's not even the correct conclusion, Jason. The starting point is our belief in God. We believe that God We start with the belief in God, and that is something that I cannot prove to you, Jason. I cannot prove that God exists. I can't take a picture of God. I can't call him down and introduce you to God. And so the starting point for the position is a position of faith. We believe that God exists. Second of all, we accept the person of Jesus Christ and we accept the fact that he has paid the penalty for our sin and that is something also that I believe by faith. I know I'm a sinner and I accept by faith the person of Jesus Christ and all he has done for me and I wasn't there to watch him die on the cross and I wasn't there to watch him pay the penalty for my sin with his blood. I wasn't there to see that, but I accept that by faith. Now, that all sounds wonderful, but there's an obvious category error here. We really should be a little bit concerned when you start putting a 17th century Anglican translation of the Bible in English, which has gone through a number of revisions, on the same level as the existence of God and the reality of the atonement. I think we have a little bit of a category error here, and once again, the only way to understand this is if the category error is based upon identifying that 17th century Anglican translation as the Word of God. in a way that other things are not the Word of God. That the Latin Vulgate wasn't the Word of God, or that the New American Standard Bible isn't the Word of God, or something along those lines. That's the only way to make heads or tails of this kind of exaltation of a 17th century Anglican translation of the Bible in English. I believe also by faith that God has communicated to us and that God has communicated to us through his word, the Bible. I believe also by faith the Bible to be true. I can't walk you through history and show you video clips of Noah and the ark and the flood, and I can't show you video clips or have any sort of hard evidence of creation, though I believe evidence exists, but I can't walk you through and show you all the prophets of the Old Testament, the miracles of Elijah and Elisha. I just can't do that, Jason. And so we believe, but I believe the Bible to be true, and I believe that based on faith. Now, since I believe the Bible to be true, and I believe that based on faith, I open the Bible, and I look into it, and when I read it, we read where God says that He would preserve His Word. And so, Based upon that belief, based upon what we've read in the Bible in Psalms 12, 6, and 7, and there's a myriad of passages, Isaiah 48, 1 Peter 1, 24, and 25. Okay, so here we get a sort of a scattergun blast of texts that Brian understands to refer to the preservation of the Scriptures. And I too would believe that, especially Isaiah chapter 40 verse 8, would refer us to the fact that God has preserved the scriptures. That is not the issue. I explained this very, very clearly. in the King James Only controversy, that God has preserved his scriptures. I don't almost ever hear King James Only critics interact with this material, but I did explain these things rather clearly, that God has preserved his scriptures. The question is, how has he done so? How has he preserved the scriptures? Does he do so by, in essence, re-inspiring them over and over again, so that once he's done using the Greek, then he uses the old Latin, and then once he gets done using the old Latin, then now he's using English? That is exactly what some people believe, that God gives one inspired translation in one language at one time. That's what Sam Gipps says, and my understanding is they link to Sam Gipp. So there are those people who have that viewpoint. And that right now, you know, it's English, and everybody in the world speaks English, allegedly. In fact, Brian's going to say he's been to the deepest, darkest parts of Africa, and he found people there who could speak English. That means that this has something to do with the King James Translation. I'm sure they were not speaking King James English, but that's another issue. And so there's, you know, their assertion is this is how it's preserved. Obviously, that's not, I don't believe that's even semi-defensible. I do not believe you can take this type of argumentation into debate. That's why, for example, they're not here right now. I think they know they can't take this into debate. He's talking about, well, I believe this by faith. Well, it really concerns me when someone takes a belief like, well, I'm going to accept one particular English translation. I'm not going to accept the Geneva Bible. I'm going to accept the King James. And then you parallel that to the faith by which we have justification by faith in Christ. That should concern, I think, anybody. Because not only is it clearly a category error, but if it were to be parallel to the faith we have in the promises of God, that would make belief in the King James, the same kind of promise from God that the very redemptive work of Christ is. And if you really think that, then I think you see why we really need to say something about the King James only controversy. It's an issue. Wow, we're already to the break point? Goodness, we're not going to get done with this this week, are we? So we will continue with our examination of the program right after our break. Public crimes. The criminal mishandling of God's Word may be James White's most provocative book yet. White sets out to examine numerous crimes being committed in pulpits throughout our land every week as he seeks to leave no stone unturned. Based firmly upon the bedrock of scripture, one crime after another is laid bare for all to see. The pulpit is to be a place where God speaks from his word. What has happened to this sacred duty in our day? The charges are as follows. Prostitution using the gospel for financial gain, pandering to pluralism, cowardice under fire, felonious eisegesis, entertainment without a license, and cross-dressing, ignoring God's ordinance regarding the roles of men and women. Is a pulpit crime occurring in your town? Get Pulpit Crimes in the bookstore at AOMEN.org. Alpha and Omega Ministries is pleased to introduce the Christmas Morning CD by Todd Lindstrom. Passion and peace are what sets Todd's music apart from others. These 12 instrumental favorites will bless and inspire you as you entertain guests and spend Christmas morning with your family. You can find this beautiful music that celebrates the birth of our Lord in the bookstore at aomin.org. Hello everyone, this is Rich Pierce. In a day and age where the gospel is being twisted into a man-centered self-help program, the need for a no-nonsense presentation of the gospel has never been greater. I am convinced that a great many go to church every Sunday, yet they have never been confronted with their sin. Alpha Omega Ministries is dedicated to presenting the gospel in a clear and concise manner, making no excuses. Man is sinful and God is holy. That sinful man is in need of a perfect Savior and Jesus Christ is that perfect Savior. We are to come before the Holy God with an empty hand of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Alpha and Omega takes that message to every group that we deal with while equipping the body of Christ as well. Support Alpha and Omega Ministries and help us to reach even more with the pure message of God's glorious grace. Thank you. And welcome back to The Dividing Line. Before we get back to the program, very, very quickly, just a reminder, if you're not a King James Only advocate, and you would like the finest Bible I've ever held in my hand, a couple of times. I don't normally do this. Normally I leave my Bible on a pulpit. If I'm preaching from an English Bible, I'll normally leave it on the pulpit. I'm not one of those Bible-carrying guys. But once in a while, I do want to pick it up. Normally when I'm talking about the Bible as a whole. And what I like about a Bible, when you pick it up, you can't do this with these uber-thick Bibles. Like, you know, I know a lot of people like the ESV Study Bible, that's fine. The thing is so stinking thick, it probably stops small arms fire. I mean, it probably does. I mean, I don't know how many pages it is. But that thing is not going to hang in your hand. We have what we call the uber-Bible around here. Steve Camp introduced me to it. It really bummed me out. I was at Steve Camp's church and he had this this bible and i picked it up and and the thing was so soft and it just hangs in your hand and i was like where did you get this i got it from lockman i'm like wait a minute how'd i come i didn't know about this so first thing i did when i got back is i got hold of an uber bible and uh... this is available in the bookstore and i'll make a mysteries that ain't cheap but they certainly are awful nice to have and if you're gonna you know there's so many things we have to buy these days like you know well my dvd player diets and i got a blue rain blah blah blah blah blah uh... if you want to give somebody something that's gonna last and uh... especially if they love to have a bible hangs in the hand uh... look up the uber by what we call that the ultra Ultra-thin. It ain't ultra-thin. It's ultra-thin for being large print. It actually has a decent print size. Man, I saw one of those study Bibles recently, and I figured, well, if it's this thick, it's got a good print size. No way I would have to carry a pair of glasses with that thing to even read the thing. That's the other thing I like about it is you can actually read it. So check it out in the bookstore. It has my stamp of approval because I really like it. And I don't get to carry it when I travel as much just because when I travel, you know, stuff gets beat up. I don't care what you've got, it gets beat up. But once in a while I do get to take the Uber. Bible with me. We've got one caller on the line. We'll get to him in a little while. I need to get a little bit farther into this program, at least past the introductory stuff and into some of the meat. So let's get back to it right now. And the list goes on and on and on of different places where we understand that God has kept his word together. We believe that there's a Bible out there somewhere. And to this point, we've still not gotten to the King James only position. We just believe that the Bible is out there somewhere, that God has preserved for us a book. And so we prayerfully seek what God has preserved for us, and we see what God has used down through the ages, and we see what God has used and is using in our modern times, and we discover, you know, and we believe that God has provided for us the King James Bible to use. And then we feel that things that are different are not the same. In other words, the first John 5-7 is missing, in one Bible and it's included in another Bible, then those Bibles are not the same. Now this is something I'm going to hold Brian to. Things that are different are not the same. does give me some indication of where Brian's coming from, that he would go to the Kama Yohanim, because there have been so many who would, for example, argue for a Byzantine platform over against a textual, the modern eclectic platform, things like that, that all recognize that if the Kama Yohanim, 1 John 5, 7, is an original part of the text, and Brian's going to go this far later on in the discussion, He's basically saying, well, God preserved it in the Old Latin. Now he's going to tell us we don't actually have the Old Latin. But what he's going to tell us is actually in manuscripts of the Old Latin around 600. So somehow we don't know what the Old Latin says, but we do know that it had that somehow. Again, this is where consistency is sort of important. But the point being, he takes a position that in essence you can have a text that simply disappears from the Greek manuscript tradition and it doesn't matter. Now, historically and on a logical basis, that would mean that the entirety of the New Testament is completely thrown up in the air. We have no idea what it originally said. He's going to say, hey, you know, we don't have to worry about this having manuscripts thing, because God's preserved his word. So, in essence, God somehow is re-inspiring it bring it back in, and it takes different forms and in different languages, and I think most people can see that this kind of perspective is completely indefensible. Nowhere in Psalm 12, it's not Psalms 12, in Psalm 12 do you have anything about the King James Version of the Bible. In fact, there's a lot of question about exactly what the 12th Psalm is talking about. Let me mention it to you here. so that you have some knowledge of what we're talking about here. In Psalm 12, beginning of verse 5, because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan, I will now arise, says Yahweh, the Lord. I will place him in the safety for which he longs. The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times. You, our Lord, will keep them. You will guard us from this generation forever. Now there's all sorts of questions as to what this is actually referring to. It seems fairly clear that Psalm 12 is about the promises of God to defend the poor, that he will place him in the safety for which he longs. and that the words of the Lord in verse six are in reference to his promise to deliver his people. Now others say, no, no, no, this is about all of scripture. Isaiah 40 is, but Psalm 12, we're not so certain about that. You can't just assume these things. And even if Psalm 12, 6 is about the words of God in the sense of all of scripture, you'd have to provide some kind of foundation for that. Do some type of exegesis. to demonstrate this, which is almost never offered. But even if it was about that, what does that have to do with an English translation produced under the direction of King James, because he hated the Geneva Bible, and which he told the translators certain things they could and could not do. They had to translate church in a certain way to support a state church. They couldn't translate baptize in any particular way. They had to do it in a way that would support the state church's view. How in the world do you jump from the 12th Psalm to the King James Version of the Bible? When you listen to the attempts that they make, go back and listen to the Ankerberg program, because this came up then. Listen to just the huge leaps of logic that are left completely undefended by the King James Only Advocate. It basically boils down to, well, it's by faith. Well, don't call that Christian faith, because Christian faith is in the promises of God. And this is not a promise of God. You can say that God promised to preserve His Word, fine, I believe that, but you can't just leap from that into a language that did not even exist at the time that the 12th Psalm was inspired, and just grab hold of one of a number of English translations that existed at that time, and say, oh here it is, this is it. That is irrational, it's indefensible, it's circular argumentation, That's just the way it is. So don't say, well, Psalm 12 says this. Psalm 12 has nothing to do with the King James Version of the Bible. If you say that it does, then you need to do more than just simply assert it. You need to prove it. And they are different. Are you with me, Jason? Yeah, oh yeah, I'm still here. I'm listening, absolutely. You're being quiet. Well, the chat room's buzzing right now, and apparently we do have James White in the chat room, so if there's anything you want to say to him personally, he's in there. But he just sent me an email, and we're going to get together, and I've got a few things to talk to you about after the radio broadcast. But again, let me just remind you, this fellow who's talking right now responded to a couple of my emails. He stopped responding now because I keep saying, is there a time when you could come on? And how do I get hold of Brian? And I haven't gotten any responses for a while now. And he said that he forwarded my email to Brian. So Brian has my email address, but he has not responded to anything either. And so that's why I'm just here doing this alone right now. No, just continue on. I'm in the chat room. I'm sitting here waiting for a good place to jump in, but you're doing fine so far. OK, so I'm not in the chat room right now. I don't have that screen up. But anyways. It basically this book is a refutation maybe of Gail Ripplinger and Peter Ruckman and I don't necessarily have a big problem with that. I'm not big fans of Gail Ripplinger or Peter Ruckman. It is also a refutation of his own position and his refutation of DA Waite. Anyone who's read my book knows that it's got a much wider application than is now being represented and of course if Brian were to call in I'd ask him Why do you make it look like it's just about Ripplinger and Raccoon? Yes, I do refute them. They're the easiest ones to refute because their arguments are just so zany at times. But I also went after D.A. Waite many times, and it seems like your position is almost identical to D.A. Waite's. Why? It seemed like a little bit of misrepresentation there that doesn't really need to be here. I think God preserved his word long before they ever came along the scene, and God will preserve his word long after they're gone. But, you know, that's basically how we come to the conclusion that the King James Bible is the Word of God. It starts with a belief that God exists, and we trickle down to the fact that we believe the Bible is true, and we trickle down further to when we read the Bible, we read that God has preserved His Word. And none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the King James Version of the Bible. I believe God exists. I believe his word is true. I believe he's preserved his word. It has nothing to do with the King James Version of the Bible. That doesn't force me to accept the errors in the King James Version of the Bible. At Revelation 16.5, in the King James Version of the Bible, there is an error. The text is not correct. It follows a conjectural inundation made by Theodore Baez, the successor to John Calvin, interestingly enough, in Geneva. At the end of the 16th century, in the new edition of the King James Only Controversy, I provide graphics that demonstrate beyond all question that Erasmus had the text right, that Stephanos had the text right, the Geneva Bible had it right, Coverdale had it right, Tyndale had it right, Everybody up until Beza had it right and the King James translators followed Beza and they got it wrong. They changed the text. Now this is a fact, it's an irrefutable fact, and so how does anything, this trickle-down theory that we just, how does that have anything to do with the King James Version of the Bible? It doesn't. You might make that connection in your mind, but logically it has to be argued and that's the one thing that doesn't happen you don't get a large logical arguments that makes that uh... connection and so i mean i think that's important to understand that it's easy to shoot down circular reasoning but uh... we don't really feel that we hold circular uh... reasoning now you know we don't use uh... the king james bible because grandma and grandpa used it uh... we don't You know, we believe that the King James Bible is the Word of God, and it's been preserved for us, and we can see that. Okay, why? I know that you believe it's been preserved. Why? I presented all sorts of issues. in the book for anyone who would think these issues through to go well why do I believe that why do I go against the translators the King James Version who clearly were not King James only us why do I disagree with what they themselves said How do I get there? How do I make this something that would be defensible in my presentation to others? That is a question that so far has not been answered. Well, we will continue with all of that in just a moment, but we're going to take a phone call and then get back to the program itself. Let's talk with Jason. Hi, Jason. Hi, how are you? Good. I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not Brian. Our stock's King James Version only, so we won't have too much to argue about. Actually, given what you just said in the chat channel, we will, because you're an error. So I'll hopefully be able to correct your error. Go ahead. Well, I'll just repeat what I said in the chat room. I feel that the Alexandrian texts are fallible, whereas the... You didn't say fallible, you said corrupted. There's a difference. Corrupted. Okay. Corrupted is what I believe. All right, why? Why do you believe that? There will be a... Do you know what an Alexandrian text is? Can you name one? Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, P66, P75, all the earliest papyri manuscripts we have likewise. Wasn't that found in like a heap of garbage? That is a common lie. It is a fable. It has been told many, many times. And I understand when people hear fables, they often believe them. But I've corrected it many, many times as well, and I'll correct it again. Anyone who wants to, I mentioned this, for example, in the presentation on The reliability of the text of the New Testament that is available on YouTube, I posted it just last week. I spent about 10 minutes going over the fact that there are many who repeat this error. This goes back to Count von Tischendorf. Calvin Dichendorf found Codex Sinaiticus at the monastery at St. Catharines in the middle of the 1800s. He had gone there first, I believe, off the top of my head around 1844. He was a believer. He was looking for evidence to substantiate the text of the New Testament. And one day, as he was visiting the monastery, he saw a monk going by. They had a very large library there, and he had a trash can, a waste basket in essence. And he happened to look in it, and he saw scraps of what he recognized to be ancient manuscript copies of something. It didn't necessarily have to be the New Testament. And so he stopped the monk and he said, what are you doing with these? And the monk said, I'm taking them to the kitchen to stoke the fires. And von Tischendorf made a big mistake. He became angry, not angry in the sense of you idiot, but what are you doing? This is extremely valuable. Now monks aren't used to people coming from Europe and pawing through their garbage and saying your garbage is extremely valuable. When you have a large library of ancient works, especially those that contain parchment paper and papyri and things like that, Pieces fall off. That's what happens with ancient works. And if you don't clean up the floor, you're going to end up with a huge fire hazard. And so they would, and they had been doing that for a long, long time, never gave a second thought. The fact that he became so upset and said, don't do this anymore, they stopped talking to him in essence, showed him nothing more. And it was many years later, he had visited, even in between time, but it was many years later that he visited again. And at that time, the last night that he was there, he gave to his steward, who had been taking care of him, a copy of the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Tischendorf himself had published. And so when the monk who was taking care of him looked through that, he said, I have one of these too. Oh, and so he takes him to his room. And out of what we would call a closet, he takes a book that is wrapped in red cloth. My friend, you do not wrap trash in red cloth. And he takes the red cloth off and Count von Tischendorf finds himself staring at Codex Sinaiticus, which at that time was about 1525 years of age. Obviously a treasured possession of the monk because you wrap things in red cloth and put them in a closet because you like them, not because you're about to throw them away. And Konstantin von Tischendorf now learned his lesson. He had learned his lesson. And instead of getting all excited, he puts on a deadpan look and says, oh, that's interesting. Would you mind if I looked at that? And so he is given Codex Sinaiticus, he takes it to his room that evening. He is looking at that time at the oldest manuscript of the Bible known to man, both the Old and New Testaments written in Greek. And the story of how it ended up in the British Library is a very interesting story. He tries to buy it the next day, they wouldn't allow it, but the Tsar of Russia got involved, etc. etc. So, no, it was found at St. Catherine's and it was wrapped in red cloth and was kept as a special possession of the monk. Codex Vaticanus is probably done at the exact same time around the time of the Council of Nicaea, probably with imperial monies that Constantine gave the church that time up until 313. The Roman Empire had been destroying the Christian scriptures. Constantine gave money to the church to have them recopied. And that is probably where both Sinaiticus and Vaticanus came from. Both have been, their readings, their special readings, their peculiar readings, in many instances have now been verified by the earlier papyri manuscripts that have been discovered starting in the... Can I interrupt for a moment? Yeah, sure, go ahead. Why do they disagree with each other so many times if they've come from the same source? Well, because the fact that when you say so many times, the relative number is very small in comparison to their actual text. But the fact of the matter is, scholars have identified a number of kinds of manuscript families. And the Alexandrian manuscripts, when you say that they are corrupted, I keep asking you why you would make such an allegation, what's your basis for saying that? The Byzantine texts that you seem to believe are superior demonstrate that they come not only from one particular area, that is around Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and make up the bulk of the later manuscripts. They do not make up the bulk. They are not the majority text, for example, of the first thousand years. The Alexandrian text is the majority text in the first thousand years. And so if your methodology produces a different text depending on where you are in history, that in and of itself is a bit of a problem from my perspective. But beyond that, the Byzantine manuscripts disagree with one another as well. There's all sorts of differences. Go to the Book of Revelation, you'll find especially there all sorts of differences between the Byzantine manuscripts as to what they read in a particular text. And so the question becomes, how do you handle that? I mean, there is no one single manuscript that reads identically to the King James Version of the Bible, for example. Not a single one that exists prior to 1611. What do you say about that? And when you use the term corruption, are you talking about just simply the existence of textual variation? Well, every single manuscript in the New Testament exhibits quote-unquote corruption at that level. So what? All ancient manuscripts do. Normally, when someone says the Alexandrian texts are corrupted, they mean that some terrible, horrible force decided to change something. Well, what? What did they change? Who was it? When did they do it? What evidence do you have of it? I keep asking people these questions and generally I don't get any responses to it. The reason Sinaiticus and Vaticanus differ from one another is because they're huge manuscripts and they're written by hand. That's the simplest way to answer the question. I understand that the Sinaiticus shows evidence of about a dozen different people making working on it, and corrections within itself? Well actually, well yeah, in one sense, you have first of all, it's probably the best known manuscript in the world, so probably more scholarship has been expended on analysis of it than anything else, but you have the original hands, but then when you have a manuscript that is in use for 1,500 years, and about five or six hundred years after its writing, you have another scribe that comes along and now tries to make it amenable to what has become the ecclesiastical text, then obviously you're going to have all sorts of corrections and everything else. That's the nature of handwritten documents. Long after it was originally written, some later scribe tried to, it would be like taking a New American Standard Bible and trying to hand correct it to make it the New King James Version. you're going to have all sorts of things crossed out and everything else if you try to do something like that. But that'd be a very untrustworthy text when you're done with it. Of course not. No, you're completely wrong. Not even close. Why? Why would that be an untrustworthy text? You mean you can't find... if you couldn't figure out what the original reading was, yeah, I suppose so. But that's not the case. So why would a later, why would a change that we can recognize takes place hundreds of years later from the original, why would that be relevant to the weight and importance of the original reading? I don't believe that you could distinguish what the original is. Yes you can. Yes you can. Yeah, so the assertion, the just overarching assertion that the Alexandrian manuscripts are quote-unquote corrupted. It's simply wrong. It's indefensible. It's very common for people to say, but it's indefensible. And if you want to give me an example, I haven't heard an example. Can you give me an example of what a corruption is and who made it? I'm not prepared to do that. Nobody is. That's the point. I know all the examples. Believe me, I've been doing this for a long, long time. You've got Jay Green out there saying, well, John 118 or something like that. Be glad to look at any single one of them. But when you do, as the Ankerberg program pointed out, when you do examine these things, The people making the allegations fall into circular reasoning. They can't back up what they're saying. The Alexander manuscripts simply represent a very early form of the New Testament text. The Byzantine becomes the vast majority of text for one simple reason and it's called Islam. You have Latin becoming the primary text in Europe in the 3rd-4th century. In the 7th century you have the rise of Islam wiping out everything in North Africa up into Spain and all the way up to the border of Constantinople itself. that really impacts the production of Greek manuscripts. And so you have one area that is producing Greek manuscripts consistently for all that period of time. It's the area around Byzantium. Therefore, the text that existed at that time in that place becomes the majority text of the handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament. That doesn't mean that the Byzantine platform itself is somehow, in any way shape or form, superior to that of the Alexandria. So I would suggest to folks, thanks for your call today sir, I would suggest to folks, go to YouTube and pick up the video that I posted there on the reliability of text in the New Testament. It will help you with a lot of these background issues. Right now, I believe, Dale's working on the much expanded version of this I did in St. Charles just a couple weeks ago that we'll be able to make available. And so that will give you some of the background. We'll be talking more about this next time on The Dividing Lines. We continue listening to the program and answering your questions, responding to those who would say that King James is the only text we should use, and also helping us understand how God has preserved His Word, not through one English translation, but through the whole mass of the New Testament manuscripts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. It's a sign of the times The truth is being trampled in a new age paradigm Won't you lift up your voice Are you tired of plain religion It's time to make some noise The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602-973-4602, or write us at P.O. Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the World Wide Web at aomin.org, that's A-O-M-I-N.O-R-G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks. Join us again this Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. for The Dividing Line. I'm standing