- Hey everybody, thanks for joining us on The Baptist Bias.
I'm your host, Pastor Shelley.
We're excited to have a special guest this evening.
Dr. Riddle's gonna be joining us.
And I'm here with my co-host, Ben,
but before we get to him,
we're gonna start with our Benalog.
- Christians will often state
that the Bible is the Word of God.
Inspired, infallible, the timeless truth of all ages.
But I guess the real debate is, which version?
Obviously, it's all of them.
Whether or not they contradict or missing verses,
constantly changing, say different things,
they are all the same.
It's not like Jesus told us that we need every word, all right?
For something to be true, it doesn't have to be accurate.
Just as long as the experts agree it's close enough.
You have to realize that no translation can ever be perfect.
And with each and every new edition,
we're getting one step closer to uncovering the original.
It's not like God said he would preserve his word
from this generation forever.
So if you see missing verses like 1 John, chapter 5,
and verse 7, just think, you know what?
Who needs another Trinity verse anyway?
If you're looking at the long ending of Mark,
you might just ask, yay, hath God said.
But if you encounter those irritating zealots who
claim we should have a Bible without missing verses that
doesn't change every year, that doesn't have a copyright,
that doesn't contradict itself, that
wasn't found in a trash can, that doesn't confuse doctrine,
that was used by the Church in all ages,
and that's based on the received text specifically that
is the King James Version, I just
say you probably have Baptist bias.
And I guess we're spoiling our audience this evening
with a second night in a row.
The Baptist bias, we're doing a mini little series here,
and we're going to have a couple more episodes next Tuesday
and the following Tuesday with some special guests.
And so we want you to keep tuning in.
Here with my co-host, Ben the Baptist,
wants to say hi to everybody.
How's it going, everyone?
The doctrine of scripture is so important.
And tonight, we're talking about it
with someone who knows a lot about this subject.
So we're bringing him on, Dr. Jeff Riddle,
who will be here connecting on to the show in moments.
The second night in a row, Pastor Shelley,
I appreciate you bringing that up.
And my question for you is right off the bat,
we're on night two, will there be a night three?
- Well, if there is a night three,
I'm not gonna be present.
So I gotta stay married.
So that's important too, right?
- Definitely.
- Obviously, a completely different show this evening.
We're gonna talk about the Bible
and specifically the preservation of scripture.
Now, of course, our church ended up being able
to make a documentary about this particular topic,
the Preserved Bible.
Brother Ben helped edit this film
and it really turned out great.
I'm very pleased with the project.
You can even still find it if you go to PreservedBible.com.
Our original upload on YouTube
had out of like over 50,000 views,
but then YouTube deleted our channel
and we lost that original upload.
I think a lot of other people
have kind of uploaded and shared it.
So it's definitely been viewed tens of thousands of times,
but to me it's kind of a timeless truth
that needs to be brought up on a regular basis
because the Bible is the cornerstone of our faith.
Bible tells us that it is Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the word.
And it's kind of, it's frustrating to me
how many people are apathetic on this situation,
especially that catalog, it really fired me up.
How many people just kind of claim like,
"Oh, everything's the Bible."
Yeah, whatever, it doesn't matter
if it says different things, misses verses.
Is this something that you just get really irritated
with Ben, people bringing up this idea
of it doesn't really matter?
- Yeah, and I think it demonstrates apathy,
but I also think the people who make this claim
on the other side, a lot of those who would consider
themselves to be critical text advocates,
they're banking on the audience being ignorant
on the subject matter.
I think they know better.
Some of these people who would make that claim,
they know better, and they're banking on you
being ignorant enough to believe them at face value,
and they're also assuming that you haven't done
the research for yourself to figure out that, in fact,
this is a big deal, that there are major differences
between the King James version of the Bible
and the modern versions of the Bible.
Not just that, there are differences in philosophy
between those who would adhere to a, quote,
King James only position, and those who accept
the critical text and the Bibles,
I would call them false Bibles, that are predicated on them.
Another lie that you'll often hear from these people
is that, well, you see, when it comes to the received text
of scripture and the critical text,
there's only really just a few places where they differ.
Or they'll say something like, when it comes to the received
text, there are only just a couple of spots
where there is some controversy.
They'll point to the real ending of Mark 16,
the woman taken in adultery, or 1 John 5-7.
But in reality, there are many places
where critical text advocates would posit that the King James
Bible has spurious readings.
Acts 8-37, for example, which is a very important verse.
There are a lot of different scriptures
that you will find in your King James Bible
that someone like James White would look at and say,
that is not authentic.
That has been added in.
That is a corruption of the text.
And this isn't just a small issue.
We're talking about the scriptures.
We're talking about the word of God.
And if the Bible does teach preservation,
like you and I know it does,
well, the question is, how exactly has that happened?
And I think the only doctrine that is most consistent
with providential preservation would be the one
that you and I subscribe to.
- Well, and again, this is not just a fringe view
that us or our church or a handful of people have.
In fact, it crosses a lot of doctrinal boundaries as well
because a lot of people take the Bible seriously
and they want to have the right Bible.
And that's why it's great to even get a broad perspective
and talk to different people.
In our film, we interviewed several different people.
What was one of your favorite interviews
that we did for the Preserved Bible?
- I would point to Dr. Phil Stringer.
I think that he has a robust background in this subject.
He's very passionate about the subject.
He wrote a book about it, The Unbroken Bible.
I read it, and that was what prompted me
to ask about interviewing him for our film.
And I thought he gave us a really good interview
on a number of different subjects
that we were able to utilize for the Preserved Bible.
But that film is so important
because it demonstrates, I think,
beyond any shadow of a doubt, Pastor Shelley,
that the new philosophy of textual criticism
is inconsistent with the doctrine of preservation.
And I think that if you're a Christian
and especially if you're one who takes the Bible seriously,
it should be troubling to you that there are teachers,
popular teachers out there,
who would look at the real ending of Mark,
who would look at 1 John 5-7,
who would look at Ephesians 3-9,
the rendering that we find in the King James
and the received text that underlies it,
who would look at all these different places,
the woman taking adultery, et cetera,
and say, "Well, that shouldn't be in the Bible."
And I think what is so aggravating about this issue for me
is how many people are listening to false teachers
who are actually undermining their faith in the word of God.
Because I would say that someone who doesn't know any better
can have their faith undermined in the Bible,
in the doctrine of scripture,
because they heard someone on YouTube tell them,
"Well, that verse really shouldn't be there.
That verse doesn't have sufficient backing
from a manuscript perspective.
That is based on a minority tradition.
It shouldn't be in the scripture.
It's invalidated.
It isn't authentic."
And so that's why I get passionate about this subject,
because I don't want people to be led astray.
But most of all, Pastor Shelley,
I believe that as Christians,
we should be defending the Word of God
against all opposition.
- Well, yeah, that was an interesting response
to the question of which interview you liked,
but, you know, obviously you can tell
that Ben's really passionate,
and if you just let him go,
I mean, he'll just, he'll take a full hour.
So, but obviously this is a big topic,
a lot of passion, it's really important,
and I like that we can talk to people
that aren't necessarily exactly like us.
You know, that's kind of the point
I was trying to thresh out a little bit here,
but, you know, even in our documentary,
we had individuals like Donald Break,
we had other historians that were Joel Lamp,
and some other people that, honestly,
some of them I wouldn't agree on doctrine at all.
Yet, we can all at least agree that King James Bible
is the superior product in the English language,
and in many cases, most of us all agree,
look, it is the Bible.
It's not just a Bible or a translation,
it is the word of God.
And so, you know, we're bringing on other guests,
and you know, our show, while we have the Baptist bias,
we still like to bring other people on
that maybe don't have the exact same bias
or the exact same viewpoint, just to challenge ourselves
and to also kind of push our ideology out
and test it against other people.
And you know, Dr. Riddle, I don't think
that he's necessarily similar to us on every single doctrine.
I'm sure that he has definitely some doctrinal differences
and everything like that, and that's fine.
But really, we want to bring him on to kind of talk to him
about the King James Bible, because it seems
like there's a lot of agreement that we have
on this particular issue.
And so I'm excited to bring on different guests.
What do you think about that, Ben?
Yeah, I would say that we would unite with him on the idea
that the scripture is stable, that it isn't constantly
up for grabs or in need of change
or in need of updating based on new discoveries of corrupted--
and that's what I would say.
I think it's fair to say that-- corrupted Egyptian manuscripts
that have been unearthed and unused, really,
for thousands of years.
But I think that's the key, is that he would agree with us
that the transmission of scripture from generation
to generation, being passed down through the ages,
that is what validates it.
And he, like us, recognizes that the word of God is stable.
It is a stable, sacred text.
Well, it should be changing, since he made it very clear
that heaven and Ursa will pass away.
My word should not pass away.
My word, I change not.
You know, hey, there's a lot of scriptures
that we could quote here.
And I think that if you're right on any subject,
you shouldn't be afraid to be challenged on those ideas.
And of course, I love preaching sermons and going to church,
but we're all pretty much rallied around together.
We all kind of are on the same page.
So a lot of times, your ideas and thoughts maybe
aren't being as challenged.
And so I like having this format where
we can bring on different people, people that may not even
agree with us, and really put our ideas to the test,
challenge them.
I really liked our show where we called the hotlines
and were asking them about salvation.
And it really puts to the test, are a lot of these people
unsaved, or are we just off the reservation?
But it seemed like that show pretty much confirmed
the fact that many of these calling hotlines,
they're not even saved.
Yeah, they have a counterfeit gospel
that they're giving people.
But I would agree with you that having your ideas challenged
is a good way to sharpen yourself.
And who knows, maybe over the course of this interview,
he'll be on here in a few minutes.
Over the course of this interview,
there may be something uncovered
that you guys don't agree on 100%.
And I think that's fine.
There should be a dialogue.
Of course, Dr. Riddle is no stranger to this.
He's debated James White.
Most of you know who that is by now.
Probably one of the more popular
critical text advocates out there
who stands, I think, strongly against
the received text of scripture and the King James Bible.
That's my--
- Yeah, is that the James White
that's related to the devil?
Or-- - Is that?
- There you go.
That's just my, you know, you could say worldview there.
But my point is, you know, he's gone on and debated him.
And I think he's done an excellent job, frankly speaking.
I think he's wiped the floor with him.
You know, there have been other people who've tried,
and you could argue they haven't done as well
as Dr. Riddle.
So that's why it's even that.
Another reason why I'm really excited
to get a chance to talk--
- Yeah, when you get someone that's actually intelligent
and well-versed on a particular subject matter
to stand against James White,
I think it kinda shows how,
I think he kinda just fakes it a little bit.
I think that James White isn't as studious
as he presents himself,
and he tries to showboat with vocabulary
or pretending like he is just the most expert scholar
in Greek that's ever walked the planet,
and so I think that intimidates people.
And admittedly, a lot of King James-only proponents
are not well-versed in Greek specifically,
so it's kind of a weak spot where someone like James White
can kind of pull a wool over the eyes of the audience
or take advantage of maybe a proponent,
or I'm sorry, an advocate,
an opponent that doesn't really necessarily
know what he's saying and can't really defend
against some of his tactics, as I would kind of say.
Now, we have a lot of people in the chat,
and if you have any questions that you would like us
to potentially address or talk about on the show,
we'd love for you to drop it in the chat.
We appreciate our live audience,
and we're hoping that probably in the next season,
or I'm sorry, in the next episode,
we might be able to do some call-ins again,
and of course, we're still checking out the chat
in every single show, and thank you so much
for you guys coming back on a Tuesday night.
We also have some clips that we're gonna try
and show this evening, and I don't know
that the show's gonna get too crazy
where we go to Rumble only, but we may, all right?
So you definitely wanna stay in tune and make sure,
'cause we might drop over there,
but some of the shows in the future
definitely were planning on going to just Rumble only,
and you never know when you could lose YouTube,
so make sure to go to the Rumble, subscribe, check it out.
We've dropped a lot of new information,
check out the show from the previous shows
and last night's show, a lot of people.
I think we had over 4,000 people
that watched our show last night,
so that's a great response,
and I'm excited about this season
that we're gonna be having.
Now, when it comes to the King James Only position,
didn't you, you had a pastor who was King James Only,
and then he ended up switching.
Tell us, what is this guy's name?
- Brian Sams.
- Brian Sams. - Yeah.
- You know what, you need to be publicly shamed
if you get away from the King James Bible.
- Yeah, Brian Sams.
- Now he was an advocate for the King James, right?
- Yeah, so I actually went to his church for a few months,
and a lot of these old IP churches,
they'll make you go through kind of
like a new members class.
And I remember that when I went through that class,
he actually stated very clearly
that the church is King James Bible only,
and he explained why.
He talked about kind of little bit of the manuscript evidence
and the reason why he felt like
it was the most accurate version,
the only version the church will ever use,
and the word of God.
But somewhere along the line,
either he changed or he was always just wrong
on the doctrine and he was hiding it
until he felt like it was most appropriate,
I guess, for him or opportunistic for him
to reveal that he doesn't really believe
in the King James Bible at all.
- I mean, do you think that someone
understanding the arguments can really go backwards?
Or do you think they had to be faking it?
- I think he was faking it the whole time.
And the thing is, he knows when he took,
'cause he took over that church that I used to go to,
it was in Jacksonville, Florida,
he took the church over and he knew
when he took the church over
that the congregation was strongly King James only
and that it would be a massive issue for them
if he changed on that issue, on that doctrine.
It would be a massive problem for people.
And it was.
- He lost people, right?
- When he changed on King James only
and decided to embrace the modern versions,
it was the catalyst for a church split.
There was a church split.
He caused a church split at that church
and a bunch of people left, including people I knew.
But my point is that it was like he was lying in wait,
like a sleeper cell until the most opportune moment
to then reveal that he's actually not King James only
whatsoever, but he had a right-hand man,
kind of like your version, like Dylan Oz.
Okay, you have Dylan Oz.
So the Dylan Oz of that church, right,
who was his right-hand man, he was never King James only.
And I remember finding this out
and thinking it was really weird.
Like this guy brought him in with him
when he came into the church.
Yeah, he brought him in with him
and he was not King James only.
He told me that the King James Bible
is not even necessarily the best translation in English.
Like the good cop, bad cop or something.
And I remember thinking that's really weird.
Like here's the guy who's working for the church,
we're King James only, he's not,
he doesn't believe in the doctrine.
And then a few years later,
the whole church ends up shifting.
He calls it transitioning.
And he put out a podcast.
Brian Sam's put out a podcast, which you could find,
you could probably find it very easily on YouTube,
but he put out a podcast basically to help other churches,
this is what he called it,
transition away from the King James.
- That's wicked.
- Yeah, like a text transition movement.
He put out a podcast to help other churches
transition away from the King James Bible.
- Yeah, I can't believe that someone would do that.
I had to take on a church at one point,
and there was a point of controversy
that I felt like may cause people to be upset,
and I let everybody know day one,
where I stood and what issues I might bring to the church,
because I think it's wicked to already have an agenda
to split the church or to go against one of its core doctrines.
Like a church should know what core doctrines you believe,
and they should not change.
I mean, our church is steadfast,
so how embarrassing would it be
for the pastor to change Bibles
just not that long after even coming to the church,
really at all, frankly speaking,
because why would you ever change core doctrine?
It's core for a reason.
It seems like there must have been a nefarious reason,
like I just want a bigger church,
and even if I split it, I'll still get more people,
and so where did this guy come from?
Did he come from, was he already pastoring?
Do you remember?
- Oh, I'll tell you where he came from.
Remember our friend, John Getch?
- Yeah, West Coast.
He's a West Coast Baptist graduate student, or what?
- Well, I don't wanna say anything inaccurate,
but I will tell you, he preached there, he worked there,
and that's where he came from.
He came from California, from that Bible college.
- How do you, how does West Coast Baptist College
constantly produce people
that just instantly change doctrine?
- Yeah.
- I mean, there was the other guy, John Guy,
who essentially just became like a liberal,
watered-down, non-Baptist, right?
- Yes.
- And we have this Brian Samms, and look,
they're not the only two people that are like that.
There's multiple people that have come out of this church
and really just kind of changed completely
on their doctrine, isn't that true?
- Well, it's 'cause they're not on a stable ground.
They're on shifting sands.
And unfortunately, Samms is another example of this,
but I have to give credit where it's due
to our friend, Dr. Phil Stringer,
who preached against this at a Bible conference
where him and his friends were preaching,
and they brought this up, this transition movement
away from the King James Bible
and toward some of the modern versions.
- Well, I just looked it up, and you're right,
you can find sermons online
where Brian Samms preached at West Coast Baptist College.
So I don't know exactly if he was just a student,
graduate, worked on staff there,
but definitely associated with them at some point.
And it's just kind of embarrassing that,
you know, one of the biggest Bible colleges
or Baptist colleges in America
that stood on the King James Bible
for pretty much all of its heritage
is sending out people that are walking away from that.
Now of course, I mean, the Bible does say that,
you know, some people are gonna walk away from the faith
and sometimes there's gonna be fakes and phonies,
so no one can always have a perfect ministry.
I mean, even Jesus Christ had Judas in his midst,
but you know, we need to make sure that the next generation
doesn't walk away from the King James Bible
and doesn't walk away from the Bible that we've had.
You know, I think that's the whole essence
of the Texas Receptus is that it was received
by the next generation.
And so I think it's important that we pass down
the Bible that we have to our children.
And I love the fact that we can have faith in the Bible
and that we have and feel like it is good to pass down
that we don't have to constantly update it
and hope and wish that maybe our children
will eventually get the scripture,
but rather that we have it.
Now, I think our guest has finally arrived.
We are definitely honored to have Dr. Jeff Riddle
with us this evening.
Dr. Riddle, can you hear us?
- I can hear you fine.
Can you hear me?
- Great, thanks so much for joining us this evening.
And we want to kind of start off
just asking you a few questions
in regards to just kind of understanding terms.
Now, our church and other Baptists
will sometimes label themselves King James only.
And I know some people
don't necessarily like that terminology.
I wanted to get your opinion,
just kind of what is your idea
when someone says King James only?
What does that mean to you?
Is that some term that you like or dislike?
What are your thoughts on this term?
- Yeah, well, I mean, it would almost require
a kind of a history of religions background
to some degree to answer that term.
Just asking me, I didn't grow up
in independent fundamental Baptist circles.
I grew up in Southern Baptist circles.
And to be honest with you,
I mean, when I hear King James Version only,
it would probably be, I would hear it as a pejorative
that, you know, I would picture a church
that would, you know, have a view of the King James Version
that probably wouldn't be from affirming it
from the perspective that I do.
I love the King James Version, I grew up using it.
Went away from it, returned to it.
I preach from the King James Version.
I think it's the best English translation.
And I am unapologetic and advocating for it.
But the primary reason that I support and affirm it
is because of the textual basis of it.
And I think a lot of folk, I may be incorrect,
I may be wrong.
I would think that maybe some people
who would be under the camp of King James Version only
would maybe primarily accept it
because of the traditional use of it in their church,
as opposed to maybe understanding
why it's an important translation
because it's based on the traditional Masoretic Hebrew text
in the Old Testament and the received text
in the New Testament.
So does that answer your question?
- Yeah, I mean, I think that it's important
to hear what other people think about these terms
'cause I know, I think James White wrote a book
about all the different meanings of King James onlyism.
And, you know, kind of hearing you speak,
it almost sounds like you're understanding
or when you hear King James only,
you're thinking of maybe what a lot of people
would call Rachmanism or this kind of viewpoint
towards the King James where it's superior
to the previous texts, like even superior to the Greek
and the Hebrew, that it's not necessarily
a preservation work, but it's almost like an original work.
Is that, I don't wanna put words in your mouth,
but is that kind of what you're saying?
- Yeah, yeah, I think probably initially,
now I think I do understand now,
having talked to lots of people
and having talked to people who are definitely co-belligerents
in advocating for the traditional text.
And that includes the authorized version
as a wonderful translation, a historic translation
that I don't think should be jettisoned.
I think it's absolutely the most useful English translation.
It's so wonderful for preaching,
liturgically, for memorization.
It connects us with our Protestant heritage,
with our English heritage.
So I'm an advocate.
But yes, I think probably I had initially
maybe the thought in the sort of the way
that maybe James White presents it.
Now I see that I think he presents a lot of things
incorrectly in that book.
But I also wanna say that another thing
that I've come to realize is
that I have a lot of admiration for those persons,
churches who came out of the 1920s
fundamentalist modernist controversy
and who I think intuitively saw problems
with the modern historical critical method
and modern textual criticism.
And so sometimes I think maybe they made
some of the right decisions for wrong reasons
and there came to be some confusion
in the minds of some of them as to why
the authorized version might be important
or that it's important not to jettison it
for modern translations.
So I truly have come to admire those persons
who I think took a conventional stand
and wouldn't compromise.
I just recently, I was in Northern Ireland in June
and I was speaking at a Trentarian Bible Society conference
and I went by the Martyrs Memorial Presbyterian Church there
where Ian Paisley was the pastor.
And Ian Paisley would have been a self-described,
fundamentalist.
His father actually had been a Baptist pastor
and then he had become a Presbyterian
and then he founded the Free Presbyterian Church
of Ulster in Northern Ireland.
And he was a, I was listening on Sermon Audio
just today to a sermon he preached called,
I think the title of it was Fundamentalism or Apostasy.
And he's one of those kind of persons who,
he used the authorized version, he defended it,
I think he called it the old sword.
And, but he never really articulated, I think,
the same kinds of reasons that I would defend
and advocate for it and the text underneath it.
But I really admire the fact that he and others
of his generation, of his ilk, were,
I think intuitively knew that something was amiss
with modern textual criticism, if that makes sense.
- Yeah, I think that does make sense.
And I agree with you that I wanna have the right stance,
but also for the right reason.
And I wanna make sure that I can defend the doctrines
and the beliefs and the convictions that I have
with the Bible, of course, number one,
but also making sure that it lines up
with reality and history.
What about people that would say
they only use the King James Bible
as far as English is concerned?
Is that something that you would say
you kind of agree with or disagree with?
Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting.
I have lots of friends that I've had this discussion with
and I work with the Trinitarian Bible Society,
for example, and they only, in English,
they only issue printed editions of the Bible
in the authorized version.
And when they do, obviously they're involved
in a lot of translation work,
and so when they do translations,
modern translations in other languages,
like this, in the past year they've done,
they finished the Spanish New Testament
and a French New Testament and a Chinese New Testament.
They did those translations
based on the traditional underlying Masoretic texts,
Hebrew texts in the Old Testament
and the Greek texts in the New Testament.
So they're not saying take the King James Version
and translate from it into other languages.
But when it comes to English,
they exclusively use the King James Version.
They don't do the new King James Version.
They don't promote and distribute that.
And they've held to that convictionally.
And you know, I really admire that
because I think if they perhaps had,
if they would perhaps open the door just a little bit,
it would open the way for compromise.
You know, but on the other hand,
I also have some friends
ministering in different places.
For example, I have friends who are in Malaysia
and in a Reformed Baptist Church in Malaysia.
And in Malaysia, the 55% of the population are Malay Muslims.
About 25% of the people are Chinese.
And what's left, maybe 10% are Indian or Sri Lankan.
And so even among the Chinese,
they have different dialects,
Mandarin versus Cantonese.
And so English happens to be the common language.
When they meet on the Lord's Day for worship,
their services are in English.
Well, it's illegal to evangelize melees in Malaysia.
You can't outwardly evangelize melees.
But anyways, even the people who are Christians
who come together, they speak different languages.
And in the churches that I know there and have visited there,
they use the New King James Version.
And that's not, that wouldn't be my choice
in an English speaking situation.
But I think if that church makes that judgment
in their context, I'm not going to criticize
or condemn them for that.
Most of the people there aren't,
they're not native English speakers.
And I think there would be some difficulties
with fluent reading of the authorized version,
not that it couldn't be overcome.
And I know, on the other hand, I've also met people
who are not native English speakers
who rave about how they love the authorized version.
There's an interesting, there was a book that was put out
on the anniversary, the 400th anniversary of the AV
by, what's his name, Leland Reichen,
who taught English at Wheaton
and was actually the English stylist consultant to the ESV.
And in that book that's about the authorized version,
of course, he's very complimentary
about the authorized version.
And he, there's one section in there
where he talks about sort of to his chagrin,
continuing to meet people who aren't native English speakers
who love the authorized version.
And he thinks, well, they should like the ESV
or they should like the new King James version,
but they love the authorized version.
And in the providence of God,
given the expansions, I guess, of the British Empire,
and the sun never sets on the British Empire
in God's providence, you know,
there happen to be places literally all over the world,
from Australia to New Zealand, to South Africa,
to India, to North America.
I mean, not to mention Britain itself, Canada,
and, you know, where the expansion of English culture,
English power and Protestantism, literature, right.
And so, you know, there certainly are many people
all over the world who are not native English speakers
who have a lot of love and affection
for the authorized version, and I think they can learn it.
And I had the experience, you know, myself,
I was a short-term missionary
for a couple years in Hungary,
and most European nations
have an early Protestant translation
like the authorized version in their cultures.
And so in Hungary, the first
and most influential Protestant translation of the Bible
was called the Karolyi Gospar Bible,
and it was done in 1590.
I think that's the right date.
So it was done actually 21 years
before the authorized version was produced.
And like the authorized version,
it had a big influence on the Hungarian language,
on grammar, punctuation, spelling, articulation,
phraseology, things entered into the language.
It all standardized the language.
But anyways, it's not as frequently used today as it was.
But I can say I'm not fluent in Hungarian.
I have probably an intermediate level of knowledge of it.
But I think I can sit down with the Karolyi Gospár, which
was done in 1590, and I can pretty much read it
and understand it.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, well, and again, my guess is--
I understand these are kind of coming
from a text receptive position.
Because if it's 1590, then the critical text position
doesn't really exist in the same format as much.
And again, a lot of other languages are being--
translation works are being done at the same time
of the King James.
And so they all kind of have that Texas receptus basis,
or maybe coming from the work of some
of the preceding translations, Desiridius or Erasmus
and his work.
I think it's interesting.
Obviously, the New King James is still a Texas receptus work.
I personally would still not use it.
I actually grew up on the New King James,
because my church that I went to was New King James only.
That was the only one they used.
But then I ended up going to King James only.
And there's definitely some differences
that I think are significant still,
even between those two versions.
But they do read very similar.
And what I think is interesting, though,
is-- and I think this is in your debate with James White.
He kind of brings up this idea that if Erasmus had,
perhaps had, some of the more modern discoveries,
that he himself would have been maybe a critical text
proponent.
And that this work that went out in the 1500s, 1600s
would have actually matched with the 1800s.
I know, Ben, you had a clip.
What does this clip say?
Can you set up this clip for us a little bit?
Yeah, so again, Dr. Riddle, when you debated James White,
he made this point.
And he makes this point frequently that, hey,
you know what?
Erasmus would have loved to have so-and-so manuscript
in his possession.
Or had he known what we know today,
he wouldn't subscribe to confessional bibliology.
Or he would actually hold my position or a different position
at the very least.
And let's go ahead and play the clip now just demonstrating
our point so you can see what James White is trying to say.
And Dr. Riddle, if we could get your response to this,
I think it would be really interesting.
OK.
Given that the traditional ending of Mark
is quoted by Justin Martyr around the year 150,
and it's explicitly quoted by Irenaeus around the year 180,
when do you think the traditional ending was created?
You gave an interesting--
sorry, we'll put the other clip in there real quick.
It's at the top.
It's at the very top.
Erasmus would have given anything
to have what we have today.
My concern is once you buy this confusion--
and this is not, not, not what the framers
of the Westminster Confession of Faith,
London Baptist Confession of Faith believe.
They did not have these two different texts in their hands,
and they weren't going, well, this is better than this.
They didn't have that.
They didn't have the information we have today.
That's why I said you cannot drag them into this conversation
and say, I'm the one representing them.
That is not fair in any way, shape, or form.
And so I am so thankful that today we
have so much more available to us
to be able to give a full orb defense, not
a humanistic defense, not a skeptical defense,
but to defend against the skeptics.
So that was a clip with James White and your debate.
What were your thoughts when he was making this argument, Dr.
Riddle?
Well, in leading up to that debate,
I had viewed the dividing line over the years,
and I knew a lot of his arguments.
And he didn't really bring much that was new.
He repeated a lot of the same sort of stump speech arguments.
And that seems to be, I heard that line from him,
from other apologists defending the modern critical text
and modern translations.
If they had the information we have,
they would definitely agree with us.
And of course, it's a hypothetical.
Erasmus was a humanist.
Was he even a believer?
I don't know.
But he was living in a different era.
He was living in the pre-critical era.
And he was living in a time that hadn't experienced the enlightenment or the endarkment, as a
friend of mine calls it.
And so it's a hypothetical.
And also, I mean, there's so many assumptions loaded into what James White is saying.
He's also assuming that Erasmus didn't have access to the manuscripts that we have today.
We know, for example, he knew of many of the modern critical text readings.
But he rejected them.
And he incorporated into his printed editions readings from the traditional text.
So we don't have to have hypotheticals.
What we have is what he actually chose to do.
Of course, I mean, we need to be completely honest and forthright about the evidence.
He did not include in the first two editions of his Novum Testamentum Instrumentum or Novum
Instrumentum.
He did not include in it the Coma Eunaeum, 1 John 5, 7, B, 8a.
But then he incorporated it in the third edition and I would see that as evidence of the tenacity
and God's preservation of 1 John 5, 7, and 8, that it would not be lost from the transmission
of the Scriptures.
So anyways, that's my response.
James White is offering a hypothetical.
It can't be proven or disproven, and we don't have to deal with hypotheticals.
You've got to plug in my power here.
No, and I think that's an interesting point that you make about 1 John 5, 7, and my thought,
and having read a little bit about it, is that it kind of points to maybe Erasmus' integrity
that him being Catholic, having a lot of credence and believing in the Latin translation to
some degree and thinking that 1 John 7 should be there, but saying I don't have any evidence
for it.
I don't have a Greek manuscript that is going to allow me to put this in my first and second
edition.
And if you do have one, then I'll include it.
I mean, does that not also kind of show that he handled or treated the text with a lot
of care?
Yeah.
It's an argument that says that he wanted to make sure that what he included in his
printed edition of the Greek New Testament, that it had underlying Greek evidence, Greek
foundations.
And so now you're going to be careful about that because there is a kind of a myth that
developed, a scholarly myth, and it's called the rash wager myth.
And you'll hear this repeated over and over again.
Others will say the Comioenaeum wasn't included in the first two editions.
I think it was 1516, 1519, but then they came up with a manuscript, and so he included it
in his third edition, 1522.
And some will even say that that manuscript was sort of made to order in order to convince
him.
But it's been shown, it's been proven by a Dutch scholar named Hunk de Jong, who is not
a TR advocate, but a mainstream academic scholar, that that is, that story, that whole story
is an unfounded scholarly anecdote.
There's no mention of this in any primary sources.
There's no mention of him saying, "You're making a rash wager to say I'll include it
if you could produce a manuscript."
And I wrote an article, it's on my academia.edu page, called Erasmus Anecdotes, where I looked
at this and showed that this was, that using, referring to the work of Honk de Jong and
actually another fellow, Screech, who's an Oxford scholar, again, he was not a TR advocate
but both of them agree that basically New Testament scholars starting in the 19th century
just sort of started passing this story along, this anecdote along, even there's no evidence
for it.
And as I say in that article, what they were doing was sharing the story around in order
to downplay or undermine the authority of the TR and the authority of the co-medium.
So anyways, I think, yeah, as you said, there could be a positive to it, and that he wanted
to make sure that there was Greek manuscript evidence for everything that's there.
And that's really important too, because then when there are other places in his printed
editions of the TR where we have weak, currently extant Greek evidence, it may be an indicator
that actually he had evidence for everything that he included.
And that was one of his criteria that he wanted to find, he wanted to have things that had
Greek support.
And I just got back, last week I was at a conference in Michigan at a thing called the
International Congress on Calvin Research, and it's a scholarly conference that's held
every four years, and it's devoted to scholarship and research on the great Swiss reformer John
Calvin.
I don't know if you guys view this on Calvin, Calvinism, etc., but anyways.
And I did a paper there on John Calvin's commentary on the Gospel of John, and I did it on John
Calvin as textual critic in his commentary on the Gospel of John, and one of the things
I noted in the short paper that I did was that Calvin repeatedly, in his commentary,
he kept when he would get to some issue related to the text, like the pericope adulteri, John
753-811, he wanted to make sure that it was in the Greek, not just in Latin, but it was
in the Greek, and for him that was, that sensed whether or not it was an authentic part of
the Scriptures, was there Greek evidence for it, and so, you know, he's living, you know,
in an age that's much, much closer to Erasmus, you know, he lives from 1509 to 1564, so he's
a rough contemporary to Erasmus, and so, we see in that age, this is the age, it's the
Reformation, it's Ad Fontes, it's back to the sources, and so I think that there was
a great desire when they were affirming, recognizing the received text, that they were finding
extant Greek evidence in their times.
Now, you know, sometimes in that paper that I did, there was a fellow who I could tell
was not very friendly to my pro-TR position and a well-known scholar, and anyways, he
was like, well, he said, well, you know, okay, he accepted the Prikpe Adulteri, but you know,
he also accepted 1 John 5.7, and there's only one Greek manuscript for that.
And I pointed out to him, I said, well, actually, you know, now there are actually nine manuscripts,
either where the Coma Eonaeum is either in the text or it's in the margin.
And yeah, they're all kind of late, all those nine are late.
But you know, we don't have a lot of early evidence for 1 John or for any of the general
epistles.
We don't have any papyri evidence for or against the inclusion of 1 John 5.7 and 8.
And I said, I said, also, I'm sure you would agree with me that we don't know what they
had access to.
We don't know what manuscripts Calvin had access to.
We only know what we have now.
You know, and once I said that, it's funny, he sort of like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, we don't, maybe Calvin had access to more than we know, just like maybe Erasmus
had access to more than we know.
It's kind of a bit of a contemporary hubris, presentism, to think that we have more now
than a previous generation.
Then if we take it at a spiritual level, because we are Christians and we believe in God and
we believe in the Holy Spirit, and we believe in God's providential work in history, would
we not think at this pivotal time when the Bible is being put into print for the first
time in its transmission history that perhaps God might be involved.
Right.
You know, that makes sense.
The critical text advocates, that's kind of their Achilles heel, because I would characterize
their position as almost naturalistic in a sense, that it relies almost entirely on
evidence.
It must be evidential, and I'm not discounting the importance of evidence, we're talking
a little about that here on the program, and I certainly appreciate it, but at the same
time I think the Holy Spirit is involved in this process of preservation, and I think
that it is a providential process.
But Dr. Riddle, you bring up something really interesting about extant Greek manuscripts,
and here's my question for you.
When we look at the received text today, and just to be specific, I'm talking about the
1894 Scrivener that somebody could purchase from the Trinitarian Bible Society, but some
of the readings that are in that edition of the received text might come from, as you
would put it, a minority tradition.
We of course have already brought up the Kama Yohanium as an example, but isn't it true
that perhaps that wasn't always the case, and what might come from a minority tradition
in 2023 may not have always been that way in years past?
Is that a valid position, you think, Dr. Riddle?
Yeah, I mean, that's the weakness of basing your confidence in the text on a modern empirical
method, and that is we only have access now to what we have access to, and we have to
admit with some humility that, again, we don't know what they might have had access to in
the past. But we do know that what in the providence of God ended up being printed,
what ended up being received, what ended up being the standard for scholarship, standard
for preaching, the standard for translations of the Bible into various languages, and so
forth. So yeah, we have to admit in the end that we can't reconstruct the text based
on the currently available empirical evidence. And one of my arguments against the modern
critical text is that it's based in an overconfidence in the ability to reconstruct the text. And
the proof that it doesn't work is the fact that after 150 years, there's still no consensus
about what the text is. They're always tinkering with it. They're always changing it. And now
we've entered, I've spoken quite a bit about this on my podcast and other places and talks
and conferences and such. Now we've entered into this brave new world of the 21st century
where modern scholars have jettisoned completely any idea of thinking that textual criticism
about reconstructing the autograph. That is passe. They think that it's a fool's errand.
They've said we can't reconstruct the text. There's not enough evidence. We can't.
Well even back then, I think it would be difficult because in the 1500s, they don't have the
internet. And we don't have libraries where you could simply just call and ask, "Hey,
what are all the books that you have? And let me know all the different evidences you
have." And there's been a lot of monasteries in Greece or in Russia and other places where
they have come out recently and said, "Yeah, we do have a lot more documents or artifacts
that people previously weren't aware of." And so, but again, if you're also talking
about Erasmus, there's only so much one person can even consume. He can't necessarily read
5,000 manuscripts and consume all of that to make editing decisions. Ultimately, he's
going to have to pick a handful of texts that he's going to generally base his translation
work or anything on. And so I think that's where it even comes back to just kind of the
philosophy of, is this text been received? Is this what God has providentially preserved?
Is he handing it down? And I've researched the first John five a little bit and while
many of the manuscripts that we do have as evidence are past Erasmus, I believe there
is one miniscule that you can even find that predates Erasmus's original work. And so it's
not like there isn't technically evidence there. It's just more of a philosophy of,
what are you going to accept? Are you going to accept maybe a minority reading for first
John five, seven, or are you going to accept a minority reading for the vast majority of
the Bible? Like when we talk about the long ending of Mark, I mean, there's overwhelming
support and evidence for the long ending of Mark, but then you have the modern textual
critic proponents that want to base readings on a minority text for their favor. And it
seems like a hypocrisy of James White and some of these individuals who pretty much
hold to a minority text position for the vast majority of discrepancies, yet they want to
claim that we're making some grave mistake by having a handful of places that may be
in theory a minority text reading. But I want to get your thoughts on this. The long ending
of Mark or verses 9 through 20, this is something that James White seems to scoff at and pretend
like is not really in the Bible. I mean, what are your thoughts on defending the long ending
of Mark?
Yeah. Before we move on to that, let me just say one more thing about 1 John 5, 7 and 8.
In addition to the fact that we do have a handful of manuscripts, monastic manuscripts
that are admittedly, most of them are late, but no one suggests that this was simple.
This was invented in the 16th century or something like that because we have references to it
in the old Latin manuscripts, second century, third century. And we also have a, we have
a quotation, the earliest one is from a church, a Spanish either we could call them a church
father or an early ecclesiastical writer named Prescillian in the early fifth century.
So there's not a question of its antiquity. They're just challenging its authenticity.
Or even if you think about just the Latin Bible itself, it's a majority text reading
if you just consider all Bibles and all translations. It was just, it was just maybe within a Greek
specific subset, is it a minority potentially? Yeah. Yeah. So with respect to the ending
of Mark, I often have referred to the ending of Mark as a slam dunk for those of us who
are defending the traditional text. If you look at Mark 16, 9 through 20, it's in 99.9%
of the extant Greek manuscripts. There are only two early manuscripts that it doesn't
appear in, and that's Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, but those are the twin darlings,
the favorites of Westcott and Hort in the 19th century and continue to exercise outsize
influence in modern textual criticism. But even there, in both places in the manuscripts,
the scribes give evidence that they're aware of the traditional ending and they put a line
at the bottom. They leave a column blank after it and I think that's evidence that they knew
of it and it was being, for some reason, suppressed. I wrote a scholarly article on this. It's
also on my academia.edu page. It's called "The Ending of Mark as a Canonical Crisis"
and I stress primarily the external evidence related to the Ending of Mark. So it's in
99% of the extant Greek manuscripts. It's in some of the earliest Greek manuscripts,
manuscripts that have the same antiquity as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus like Codex W, Washingtoniensis,
and so it's, you know, and then I think for me another point that censures it is that
it's cited in the Church Fathers very early on. It's cited by Justin Martyr in the mid
second century, and then the one that's just, again, definitely proves its antiquity is
in Irenaeus of Lyon's work against Heresies, and there he's talking about the Gospel of
Mark, and he says, "This is the way Mark begins," and he quotes Mark 1.1, the beginning
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and he talks a little bit about the Gospel
of Mark, and then he says, "And towards the end of the Gospel, Mark says this," and he
quotes Mark 16.19, "So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up
into heaven and sat on the right hand of God."
And so he's telling us, and this is in the year 180, this is the earliest reference to
the Gospel of Mark that is in recorded history.
The first reference to the Gospel of Mark outside of the New Testament itself is a reference
to the way Mark begins and the way it ends.
So in the debate I had with James Wyatt, I said, "If you think Mark 16, 9-20 was an
invented reading, when do you think it was invented?"
Because it's being cited in 165 by Justin Martyr.
It's being cited in 180 by Iredeus of Lyon.
It's in 99.9% of the extant manuscripts.
There's no reference in church history to any controversy about this in the first 300
years.
But then there's a reference in Eusebius.
Eusebius has a letter to a fellow named Arenas, and he says, "Some people are questioning
this ending."
I think the problem was harmonizing it actually with Matthew, because there was a question
about when did the resurrection take place.
And they were trying to harmonize Matthew 28 and Mark 16, and for some reason some people
got some scruples that thought there was some kind of conflict between Matthew's account
and Mark's.
And so for a short period of time, there's evidence of controversy in Eusebius.
And I think Sinaiticus and Vaticanus reflect that, supposedly there's questions about
dating of them.
And of course some people even have challenged whether Sinaiticus is even authentic.
But anyways, but let's say they were copied in 350, that would be in that period.
But then after that, I said this in my scholarly article, there is a consensus that develops.
Organically, it's not a church council, it's not an imperial command from the emperor or
something like that.
All the churches receive this, and when they copy the Bibles, they include Mark 16, 9
through 20.
So anyways, and then as I made the point in my debate with James White, there are also
theological issues.
If Mark ends at Mark 16, 8, it ends with the women who come to the tomb, and they go out
quickly from the sepulcher, for they trembled and were amazed, neither said they anything
to any man, for they were afraid.
So this is the way Mark would end, supposedly, if verses 9 through 20 is not the original
ending.
And there are many reasons to think that a gospel, this gospel would not end there.
There's a grammatical reason verse 8 would end with the Greek word "gar," which is a
post-positive particle.
So to end it with the word "gar" would be like ending with "four," and they went out
"four."
That's a grammatical reason.
But I think more striking is in 1 Corinthians 15, 3 through 5, Paul was rehearsing the gospel
that he had preached to the Corinthians.
And he said, "I've passed on to you that which I've also received, that Christ died
for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again the
third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and to the Twelve."
And I've said he lays out there four objective facts of the gospel, the good news, the preaching
of Christ.
It's that Christ died for our sins on the cross, he was buried, he rose again the third
day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared.
The resurrection appearances are a sine qua non of the preaching of the gospel.
The resurrection appearances verify that Christ was raised, that he was seen.
He was seen, just like the burial verifies his death, the resurrection appearances verify
that he was raised.
If you look at Matthew, resurrection appearances, you look at Luke, resurrection appearances
to the two disciples on the road to Maas and to the twelve in Jerusalem, John, resurrection
appearances to the twelve on the first resurrection evening, the next week to Thomas, by the sea
of Galilee in John 21 to the seven.
If you think that Mark 16 doesn't have verses 9 through 20 originally and that it ends at
verse 8, you're positing a canonical Christian gospel that has no resurrection appearances,
and that would be a truncated gospel, and I don't think that would have been a gospel
that would have been affirmed, accepted and received by the early Christians.
I think that's a great point, and I think I heard you make that, maybe either against
James Wyatt or one of your debates, and I think I had missed it, because I heard you
say it was like, of course it would be preposterous if it didn't include either the death or resurrection,
and I never really thought about the fact that 1 Corinthians 15 does bring up the appearance
aspect, but of course you're right that Mark verse 9 is kind of where it starts laying
out the groundwork for the actual appearances under the disciples, and it gives even stronger
confirmation of His resurrection.
There's only one brief mention prior to this where the angel says He has risen, so I guess
you could argue that the resurrection is present before verse 9, but it's a lot stronger evidence
when you get verses 9 through 20, and you even have Him ascending, and so I think that
that's a really great point.
I want to ask you, and this is just, I don't know if you know this or not, but I've heard
this and I'm just kind of interested, John 7 verse number 8, because you'd mentioned
how many manuscripts were in support of the long ending of marketing, so it was only two.
I've heard, and I was just curious if you know this or not, that there's only one manuscript
in evidence for the alternative reading in verse 8, because in John 7, 8 it says, it's
Jesus Christ speaking and he says, "Go ye up unto this feast, I go not up yet unto this
feast for my time is not yet full come."
But some modern versions will take the word yet out of this particular verse and I've
heard, and I just don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard that only Sinaiticus
has that alternative reading where they remove the word yet and that pretty much every other
manuscript has this word yet found in there.
I know the text of Septus of course does, but I'm just kind of curious, I think it's
an interesting point in this context of, you know, they get so mad at us for 1 John 5,
7 maybe having a handful of manuscript evidence or even potentially one, yet many Bibles are
basing, like the long A mark on 2, like you said, or maybe perhaps here in John chapter
7 verse 8, a very small minority of manuscripts, and this to me does have doctrinal implications
because it almost seems like Jesus is kind of lying in a sense because the next few verses
tell us he does go up to the feast, whereas that word yet makes it clear he's just saying
I don't want to go right now, the timing's not right, I'm going to go later, whereas
he just said hey, I'm not going and then he ends up showing up later, then that seems
like maybe he was being deceptive or dishonest or maybe he just wasn't aware or he could
have changed his mind, I guess, if you want to make that argument, but it just seems disingenuous
to claim that that word wouldn't be important doctrinally because I do think it's doctrinally
important.
I don't know if that's something you've ever been asked or you've thought about.
Do you know, do you have any thoughts on the support for that, for taking the word get
out?
Yeah, I honestly, I've never studied this, that verse and that variant.
So I haven't taken notice of it in the past.
It wouldn't surprise me that there would be a passage in the modern critical text that
would be based on the support of only one extant manuscript.
There are multiple places where that's the case.
And actually, this is an argument that's been made against the modern critical text.
It was made by Theodore Letus, and if you're familiar with Maurice Robinson, who is an
advocate for the so-called Byzantine text, he makes, he has a critique of the modern
critical text that there are many places in it where if you follow the text, it gives
readings that aren't supported in any extant Greek manuscripts, so they cobble together.
Now, again, you could find a manuscript where it has this word, a manuscript,
let's say there are three words, A, B, C. Right, there's just not an exact copy somewhere.
Okay, so the modern critical text in a hypothetical verse has three words, A, B,
C. Right. And there are some manuscripts where it says A, C. There's some manuscripts that it
says A, B. There's some manuscripts where it says A, B, D. Yeah. But they go with the reading in the
modern critical text, A, B, C, and there's absolutely no extant manuscript that has that
reading. And so if you're interested in that, Maurice Robinson, in his ... Let me just hold on
one second. I'll grab this. Are you familiar with his Byzantine ... I'm not familiar. That's
interesting. Well, actually this article is ... You can find it online if you just Google it. Because
he has an appendix in this. It's called The Case for Byzantine Priority. Again, it's not ... He
doesn't agree. He's not a TR person, but he has a section and it's titled A Problem of Modern
Neclecticism, Sequential Variant Units, and the Resultant Original Text. He's simply making the
point that there are many places in the modern critical text where, again, a reading over the
course of a verse or several verses where you can't find any extant Greek manuscript that agrees
with what you find in the modern critical text. Right. When some people make that argument,
I'm sorry, some people say that there's no receptors like that.
Well, they might, but my point would be this, that I thought you were getting at this,
that it's, I think you were saying it's hypocritical for them to criticize the TR
for places where it has maybe light external, currently extant external evidence and support
when there are many places in modern critical text where it has readings that don't exist in any
extant manuscripts. Here's the difference is we're not claiming that the TR is based on
reconstruction of the currently available empirical extant evidence. Right. That makes sense? Yes,
they are. Right. But their method leads them to do something that choose an eclectic text that
doesn't, that isn't, or often in many places, isn't reflected in any extant manuscripts.
I wanted to go back before we left it to one more thing about the ending of Mark.
Sure. You know, if you go back and you read the old guys, you read like Westcott and Hort,
and you read their discussion of Mark 16, 9 through 20, they would say, "Well,
what happened?" And they'll say something like, "Well, there was an original ending."
So, they would say there was an account Mark wrote or Peter wrote or whoever Peter,
some person wrote. They wouldn't believe probably in the authenticity of the Christian tradition
that Mark actually wrote the Gospel of Mark, and it's the same John, Mark, and Acts, and that he
was a companion of Peter. But anyways, they would say well the Gospel originally had an ending, but
it was lost. It was lost. The original ending was lost, and someone came along later and wrote the
ending that we have now here and added it. So, but what's the problem with that explanation for
those of us who are who are Bible-believing Christians? If there was an original ending
that was lost, that would mean God didn't preserve his word. Right. Okay, so then,
no one really, if you go back and read the literature, you know, no one suggested in
the 19th century that Mark originally ended at Mark 16-8. That's an idea that's really a
novelty in the entire history of Christianity. It's only since the late 20th century that you
will find people saying, "We think Mark 16-8 is the original ending." And I really think that came
about as the result of the influence of modern literary criticism. You'll hear people like Dan
Wallace and I've heard some contemporary evangelical preachers, they get real excited about,
"You know, it ends here with the women trembling and they went away and said nothing. And oh,
it's our task now to finish the story. It's intentionally ended this way. We will go out
and finish the story and tell people and so forth." And, you know, they're superimposing
contemporary avant-garde literary ideas anachronistically to this ancient text.
And I just don't think that, I mean, no one ever posited this until the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s forward.
At least the older guys, the West gotten hoards to their credit. At least they said, "Well, it
wouldn't have ended at Mark 16, 8, but the ending is lost." I mean, that's a wrong hit of you, too.
Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. But the whole idea that there would be some dramatic,
you know, authentic reason for it to end at verse 8, I think it's just very misguided. So there,
I always say, the much simpler solution is Mark 16, 9 through 20 is the original ending.
Right. It's authentic. It seems so much easier. I mean, you think about a lot of these
textual critics that are on a never ending search for what they would consider to be
the autographic text or what is, what could be considered equal to the autographs. Of course,
now they're saying there's no way to even find it anyway. But through CBGM and these other methods
that they're using to get closer and closer to, I guess, an unattainable goal, they're searching for
it. Whereas for somebody who would hold the confessional position that you do, Dr. Riddle,
King James-only-ism that you and I would hold, Pastor Shelley, it's like you open up your Bible,
you read it, and you have what amounts to that which is equal to the autographs. But I think
what's also super important, and you brought this up, is that if, I like to call it the real ending
of Mark, if that ends in verse 8, God didn't preserve his word. And that, to me, is the
number one Achilles heel of the opponents, is the doctrine of preservation. Because you're right,
if the gospel ends in verse 8, you have God's word being lost, he did not preserve every word.
And this speaks to the importance of highlighting the doctrine of
providential preservation. You have some folks who would say, well, the majority text,
they always go with the majority text. They posit that the majority text is always right.
And the issue with that is, and we saw this with your debate, your two debates with
James White, Dr. Riddle, it's that Mark 16. Sure, there's a majority of manuscripts that underlie
verses nine through 20. However, you also debated him on Ephesians three, nine, which is a minority
reading and has more of a minority tradition behind it. And so my point is, is we're not looking to
just number of manuscripts, but rather we're looking to what has been received. They would
say, the opponent would say, hey, older is always better, but we say received is reliable.
I agree. I agree. I think the doctrine of preservation is the key. And, you know, of course,
you know, I'm coming at this from a confessional perspective. I hold to this, the second London
Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, and in chapter one and paragraph eight, we look to
the confession as a subordinate standard. Of course, scripture is our primary authority,
but I think it articulates the biblical doctrine of preservation when it says that God's word,
by His singular care and providence, has been kept pure in all ages and is therefore authentical.
I think it's basically just articulating a plain sense Christian understanding of the scriptures,
a supernatural understanding of the scriptures. You mentioned earlier that sometimes people who
advocate for the modern critical text seem to take a purely naturalistic perspective on it.
We as Christians, we believe in a God of providence, a God who is sovereign, a God who directs
things, who as it says in Hebrews, upholds all things by the word of his power.
We believe that's true with respect to the scriptures.
We could talk about a biblical doctrine of preservation. Just in June, I was in
Northern Ireland and London for the Trentarian Bible Society. One of the talks that I did there
was on the doctrine of preservation. It's on the TBS website where I was making that point.
It sort of fell out. Up to about 1900, systematic theologians typically wrote about the doctrine of
preservation of scripture. Then with the rise of modern textual criticism in the late 19th century,
you can look at the systematic theologies and just stop writing about it. There's so much written
about inspiration. I know that inspiration is obviously of paramount importance as well,
but we had all these people like Warfield and others who were defending to the teeth
the inspiration of scripture. And of course, it became a flashpoint in the fundamentalist
modernist controversies of the 1920s and so forth. But what was lost was a defense of preservation.
And really the two are connecting. If the Bible is, if God has inspired the word,
what good is inspiration if he's not kept it for us?
Exactly. Well, and we, you know, made a film about that because I feel like you're right that this
doctrine has kind of been left hanging a little bit. A lot of people maybe
haven't really thought about the idea of the preservation of God's word. And, you know,
we actually included a small clip of your debate with James White on this point. And I want to
play this clip here in a second. It's clip number three, but you kind of cornered James White in
your debate and you brought up the idea of like, well, what, what is settled? You know, what,
what portion of scripture does it, it doesn't matter what the evidence is, or is there any verse
that basically in the Bible is locked in? And, okay, I'm sorry. I think it's clip four. I, I
might've said that wrong. It's clip four that we want to get set up, but you basically asked him,
would he change any verse for, if we found enough evidence, would he be willing to change
any verse in the text of scripture? And you got him to admit that he would. And so I want to play
this clip real quick and then get some, some more thoughts on this, but let's go ahead and play clip
four based on your method, but based on your method, if there were a discovery of ancient
documents that most scholars agreed, what makes this the earliest reading, you would be willing
to change your position on any texts within the new Testament based on evidence that might be
uncovered. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So based on the evidence... Well, I didn't stop the clip
there, but... If there was evidence found... The first part of that particular clip we actually
kind of put in our film, The Preserved Bible, where we talk about just essentially the history
of the Bible and just how the scripture was preserved all the way up to the time of Christ.
You know, Christ is quoting the Bible and talking about it being authoritative and
how it makes sense that it's going to continue that same train of preservation all the way to
us today and forever. And yet, James White seems to have zero confidence in any verse.
And that just seems almost the antithesis of believing that the Bible is preserved,
saying that you would potentially change any verse of scripture. I mean,
do you have any respect for a theological position that says that we don't even have a single verse
that we can even rely upon? Yeah, I mean, I think you could kind of tell back at that clip,
it's been a long time since I looked at that. Could you tell I was sort of surprised that he
answered so quickly? Yes. I was like, really? Because I thought he might say something like,
and I thought I might say something like, yeah, the true text is there somewhere. It's either
in the text or it's in the apparatus. This is sometimes something that's often said,
that people are advocates for modern critical text. But he went out there and said yes,
he would change it. And I think he thought that he was grabbing some kind of high ground
as the debate continued. I think he began to realize he had made a mistake.
He tried to backtrack it.
Yes. So he started trying to backtrack. And then in the debate with Peter Van Cleek,
he didn't want to talk about it. Ask and answer. Ask and answer.
Yes.
Because I think in the back of his mind, he realizes he's painted himself into a corner here
with a pretty untenable position with respect to the Christian epistemology.
If we are not confident about what the scriptures are, our epistemology as
Bible-believing Christians is decimated.
Well, and it almost shows no faith in the scripture itself or that God gave us the
Bible and it kind of just undermines Christianity as a whole.
I think that, you know, in his mind he probably, and again this is just me speculating, I think
in his mind he felt like he had a superiority over us in the sense that he actually adheres
to evidence, logic, and reason and we're just these unreasonable people who have just already
decided what's true and we won't harken, we just kind of close our eyes and our ears and
and we just ignore evidence and reality and that he somehow superior to us because yes,
of course, I'd be willing to change any text, but then that shows the absurdity of his position
and kind of the lack of faith in my view of the fact that God would give us the Bible. I mean,
what's the point of even having a Bible if literally every single verse is potentially wrong?
And not to mention, Pastor Shelley, the way he speaks is that of somebody who does have certainty,
though, which I think also points to some hypocrisy. And here's what I mean by that.
In your debate with him, and I know we've called back to it a bunch, but I thought it was just
such a substantive debate, really. But Dr. Riddle, what I noticed is on Mark 16 that James White made
several theological arguments in opposition to the real ending of Mark and said that accepting it
would lend credence to continuationism, or this idea that the apostolic gifts are still valid or
still in effect today. And so he made theological arguments against this section of Mark. And here's
my point is that he says that but then also says, "Well, if there's new evidence that's uncovered,
I'll change my position." Well, hold on a minute. You're going to change your position about a text
that you just tried to invalidate from a doctrinal perspective? Like you just undermine the text and
said, "This can't be true. Here's the theological reason why." But I would still accept it later on
if there was evidence unearthed in the future. You can't have it both ways. And if somebody really
truly was skeptical and said, "Hey, any new evidence that's uncovered, I might change my position,"
I think you would see them have perhaps a different tone. But go ahead, Dr. Riddle.
Yeah, I can't remember if it was in that debate. You were right when you said that he wanted to
present himself as, "Well, I'm open-minded, and these guys are closed-minded, and I want to
deal with the evidence, and these guys don't want to deal with the evidence." They want to retreat
into their phideistic presuppositions about the text. That's kind of odd, too, because he claims
a lot of times to be a presuppositionalist apologist. And then he wants to have, though,
for evidential proofs for things according to his framework for these passages in the Bible.
But at any rate, I think at one point he had said, "If they found 20 manuscripts,
there were the oldest manuscripts of Mark that had it, then that would tilt the scales."
And just as you said though, another thing that stunned me in that debate was when I asked him,
I asked him whether or not he thought Mark 16, 9 through 20 was orthodox. And he said,
"No, it's not orthodox." And I mean, that's dumbfounding too, because this is the passage,
this is a passage that's been received that appears in 99.9% of extant Bibles, that's in
every Protestant translation from the Reformation era up to the late 19th century. And so you're
saying that for 2000 years, we were wrong about this. God allowed gross error in the churches and
in her doctors and pastors to receive this text. And, you know, again, yeah, he was arguing, I mean,
sadly, really, he was arguing from our perspective, because we accept this as part of the authentic
Word of God, he was arguing against Scripture. Right. And that's, I think, I think that was
striking to a lot of people who watch that debate. I agree. Well, and, you know, when it comes to
orthodoxy, you know, it just seems like whether or not you agree with it, you'd have to at least
admit historically, you know, and that's kind of what my view of orthodox is, is just what's the
traditional historical viewpoint that they accepted that text. And it seems like James White makes
a lot of blunders from a historical perspective. I know he's said, wasn't it, is it the first John
Five where he claims that nobody of antiquity had quoted that? Yeah, in the debate with Peter Van
Kleek, Dr. Riddle, do you remember how there were multiple claims made by White that, oh, well,
nobody quoted from the textus receptus. Give me anybody from the first century, second century,
third century, fourth century, et cetera. He tied to back him into a corner and make the claim that
there is no evidence, whether it's patronistic evidence, whatever the case may be, that there's
no evidence of anybody quoting from any distinctively TR reading when you, Dr. Riddle, have come forward
with many quotes of antiquity. You brought a few up even on this broadcast, Irenaeus of Lyon being
one of them, that totally demolishes that argument. Yeah. Let me, I want to go back
for one second and then I'll come to that. One more insight. I'm sorry to be so scatterbrained.
Oh, that's okay. No problem. But one insight. When I was asking James that question, I'm just
remembering back that debate, I was trying to get him, I thought when I asked him, "Do you think
that Mark 16, 9 through 20 is Orthodox?" I was actually trying to get him. I expected he would
say yes. Right. I expected he was thinking it's Orthodox, but it's a late edition, late uninspired
edition. There were several moments, so I was kind of dumbfounded by his responses.
What I was leading toward was Bart Ehrman, who James White debated one time in 2009
and speaks about incessantly. Bart Ehrman, one of his best-known works in textual criticism,
the book that really made his name, is a book called The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
And his idea was that the textual variance and corruptions were not made by heretics,
who took the orthodox text and corrupted it, but his view is that it was the orthodox scribes who
kept adding things and harmonizing and so forth, and they corrupted the scriptures.
I was asking him that question because the trap I was trying to get him into was,
in my closing argument, I was going to say there's no difference between James White and Bart Ehrman.
He can't debate Bart Ehrman. All they can have is a mutual dialogue. They believe the same thing.
Bart Ehrman rejects the authenticity of Mark 16, 9 through 20, so does James White.
Bart Ehrman rejects the authenticity of the woman taking an adultery, so does James White.
And I was fully expecting he was going to say yes, and in the end I was going to say,
"Bart Ehrman says that the orthodox scribes corrupted the scriptures. James White says
the orthodox scribes corrupted the scriptures." But he went beyond that to say something that
truly is outstanding. It is amazing that he's saying Mark 16, 9 through 20 is unorthodox.
It's not just a spurious edition. It's an unorthodox spurious edition. So anyways,
back to... Well, I think that was a good point you made there because even in our film, we
kind of put Bart Ehrman in there with some of his quotes and James White. And it's funny, they seem
to just make a lot of the same arguments. So I think that you're spot on as far as that comparison.
I'm not saying that they theologically agree, but at the same time, they seem to make a lot of the
same arguments when arguing against a TR position. And it seems like James White maybe is just a
little bit off or maybe ignorant of some of the history around this. And so, you know,
he's making claims that surprise even you in this debate. I mean, because again, like he said,
with the Van Cleek debate, he's just kind of just lying, or maybe just at best case scenario,
ignorant of the fact there is many people of antiquity, fathers of antiquity, church fathers,
and individuals, even if they're heretics, still quoting from the Texas Receptors.
There's plenty of patristic evidence. I misspoke earlier, patristic evidence. Go ahead. I'm sorry,
Dr. Riddle. To address then the other question before I took this back, you were asking about
when James White says, for example, "Show me some passage in the past." What he did that with,
he did this with Van Cleek, and he's done it in other contexts, particularly in relationship
to the Comuneum, he'll say things like, "Why doesn't Athanasius ever cite this?" You know,
Athanasius who was there at the Council of Nicaea. And why wasn't 1 John 5, 7 quoted in the
proceedings of the Council of Nicaea, where Arius was condemned, and the Trinity was articulated,
and affirmed. And I've pointed out in a couple of podcasts that we actually don't have a lot of
extent. The writings of Athanasius, we have some things, we don't have everything he wrote. And so
it's another kind of example what we're talking about with the text of the New Testament. Not
everything that's available to us today was available in the past. We don't have today
what was available in the past. And I made the point that we don't have any minutes or we don't
have any minutes of the proceedings of the Council of Nicaea. They don't exist. So we don't know
what passages were cited. And then with respect to the rise of Athanasius, I have a book that has a
collection of Athanasius's writings and it's nearly exhaustive of everything that Athanasius wrote.
And I recently did a podcast where I looked at the scripture index. And if you were thinking about
maybe what would be the passages you would pull from the New Testament to argue as proof texts
for the Trinity. And if three passages come to mind for me, Matthew 28, 19, and 20, the Great
Commission, where Christ says, "Baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
A second one would be the Comio and Aum. And a third one, though, would be the Pauline
blessing in 2 Corinthians 13, 14. "Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of
God and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all." And so I looked at the, you would think,
okay, Athanasius, he's writing, you know, for the Trinity. If you look at, look at that scriptural
index in the volume that I have that is nearly exhaustive of all of his writings, there's no
reference in his writings to 2 Corinthians 13, 14. Does that mean 2 Corinthians 13, 14 wasn't in
his Bible? Yeah. No. Yeah, of course not. Right. And so, and so just because we don't have extant,
it's an argument from silence. Yes. Just because we don't have an extant reference where he cites
1 John 5, we know it was a controversial passage. Maybe he didn't cite it. Maybe we don't have any
extant evidence of a citation of it because it was controversial. So, so anyway, so it's deceptive.
It's the person who hears that argument and is influenced by it is someone in my opinion,
if I can say so with respect, who has not thought reasonably about it,
because it's an argument from silence. Now, the other thing you were talking about, though,
that was one point and I did a review of Peter VanCleek's debate with James White.
I think Peter did an excellent job. I think he did well. I think he won the debate, in my opinion,
but I noted in my critique that that was one place where I wish he had appealed to some of the
empirical evidence, because I think there is a place for us to point to the empirical evidence.
Peter was making more of a theological argument, which I think is the most compelling argument,
but just as you said, James White is up there saying, "Can you show me anything from the
6th century, from the 5th century, from the 4th century, from the 3rd century?"
Yeah, I would want to speak up and say, "Uh-huh, yeah, 2nd century. Here's Justin Martyr
citing the traditional ending of Mark. Here's Irenaeus of Lyon citing the traditional ending
of Mark. Here's a Spanish Church Father citing the Comayoneum. Here are old Latin manuscripts
citing this." So we do have evidence for TR readings in the transmission history.
We might wish we had more, but we actually, in the end, don't have a lot of early
extant evidence period from the first few centuries. Well, and it seems like James
White just speaks so authoritatively that people will sometimes believe some of these statements,
even though they could be proven wrong. I know I've seen another debate, and I forget the person
who you debated, but they brought up Sinaiticus, and James White just emphatically says, like,
Sinaiticus was not found in a trash can or near a trash can or anything like that. He's just like,
that's just a lie. You know, he found it in a red cloth. And, you know, for our film, I did a lot
of research on this. And it's, you know, it's kind of like one of these mistruths that he's kind of
saying here, because when you actually read about the discovery of Sinaiticus by Von Tischendorf,
he does say in the kind of latter portion of the book that a clerk handed him an older manuscript
and it was in red cloth. But then in the next breath, Von Tischendorf is saying these are the
same parchments that I had previously recovered out of a trash can or out of a wastebasket that
was destined for the flames. And so it's just kind of convenient how James White pretends like that's
not real or kind of just misleads the audience on that particular point. And I don't know if you've
studied that particular contention as far as like Sinaiticus, its discovery, where it was found,
but I've even heard Dan Wallace in a recent lecture, I think, or a lecture, maybe discussion,
saying that he personally believes that Von Tischendorf lied about the discovery of Sinaiticus
and that it wasn't actually found the way that he described it. He just made the whole story up
to try to make it seem like he didn't steal it from this Catholic monastery. So he kind of says,
well, he found it at my Catholic monastery, but he didn't actually find it in a waste
basket. And it wasn't really supposed, it wasn't really destined to flames because it's on vellum
and animal skin doesn't burn well. And so obviously he lied about all that, but you know,
of course we can still trust the fact that this is an authentic source and it's a legitimate.
I'm just curious, have you heard anything about this or kind of the history of Sinaiticus?
Yeah, I don't feel like I'm an expert on that. There's a book, if you want to look at like a
mainstream source on Codex Sinaiticus, David C. Parker, who taught at the University of Birmingham
and who's very much a mainstream modern textual critic. He wrote a book that's published by the
British Library. I think it's called The World's Oldest Bible, but it's a pretty deep discussion
Sinaiticus and many of the peculiarities of it. But he does discuss in there the whole
Simoni. He discusses all the issues related to Constantine von Tischendorf supposedly coming
across it in St. Catherine's monastery and kind of the myths and intrigues that sort of entered
into that. And it was really a question of, right, did he sort of illegally take it from there?
Did he use the power of the Russian government to force them to give it up? And then it went to
the Tsar, I think, and then they sold it when the communist revolution came in Russia. They sold it
to England. And so now it's in the British Library. I actually saw it when I was in June.
But at any rate, there are a lot of questions about that. And then he also discusses the whole,
there was a claim by a Greek fellow named Simonides that he had forged it also.
And I know that some people, some contemporary people who are advocates for the King James
Version and/or the traditional text have seized upon that and made much of it.
I don't know. I did a podcast on this and I think the title of it was "Is Sinaiticus Forgery?"
I think my sense is that the people in mainstream academy and maybe people we might actually be able
to have an influence upon with respect to their bibliology, sometimes maybe their view of us
already that we're conspiracy theorists and so we ought to approach that with caution.
And what we ought to do is just say, you know, whenever it came from, wherever it came from,
let's just deal with it as it is. If it was copy, if it's a manuscript that was copied in 350,
then okay, let's look at that. You know, regardless of where it came from, how it came about,
it has had a, you know, along with Vaticanus, it has had a big influence in shaping the modern
critical text. So without passing judgment on ideas about its origins, again, we just have to
evaluate, okay, here are the readings it has. And I think just aside from, again, speculations about
its origins and so forth, we can just say, we don't think it's reliable. Yeah. I mean, even in our
film, you know, that we made when I talked about Sinaiticus, I just took von Tischendorf for his
word. I, you know, I don't think that because, because let's say it's worse than that, that's
still my position is still right. I'm just saying, even if you just take them at their word, there's
problems with this particular text and it doesn't fit in line with the idea of the preservation of
scripture. It's got serious issues when it comes to the minority aspect of its writings. Yeah,
obviously there's, there's a lot of issues here. And the thing that kind of amazes me
about the critical text position is it almost seems like every document that they would predate
or say is older is just always very reliable. It's like, it almost seems as if they're never
finding an old document that has any problems or could potentially have any integrity issues.
It's just always legitimate and great and we should just accept it as being very authoritative
and you know that doesn't really seem to coincide with Scripture. Scripture talks about
corruptions of the text. The Apostle Paul talks about how there's many which corrupt the word of
God and it seems to stand to reason with all the warnings about people changing the Bible
that this has been a practice that has happened throughout all centuries and so it kind of dumb
founding to me to see that there's no one you know on the critical text position side ever seeming
to put any scrutiny to the integrity of some of these older manuscripts or documents but
even if we do take them as all 100% authoritative I think that we can still defend our position
and we don't even we don't even need that that's just kind of an extra side thing and just to
piggyback just to piggyback off of what you're saying of course the saying older is always
better that seems to be the philosophy that they would employ but if you think about it logically
speaking here let's say you have a text that has been I'll use the word corrupted whether it goes
through one transmission or 15 transmissions I don't think that changes the fact that there
were issues with the first transmission if you go all the way back to the first time that it was
copied so we don't look at the age of documents in order to authenticate them but rather
we look at what the church historically has received and has passed down and I know we've
taken a lot of your time this evening and we want to be respectful of that we'll kind of try and
wrap up here but when it comes to this argument of which Bible you know you kind of have one side
advocating for the Texas Receptus position and you kind of have this critical text position on
the other side. Of course there's some smaller groups that would maybe go from a majority only
or Byzantine but for the most part most people seem to be kind of on the Texas Receptus side
or the critical text position. From your perspective Dr. Riddle, why would you
argue or advocate for the TR or your position? What's your number one argument? If someone's
saying I don't know which Bible to use, what is it that you kind of, what is your main or your
strongest argument for what Bible you're using? Well I think when we look historically at the
transmission of the Bible, it's clear that there was a convergence I think of providential events
that took place with, you know, in the 16th century there was kind of a perfect storm of
things happened. There was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Turks and Greek manuscripts came
into Western Europe. You had the Renaissance or the revival of classical learning. You had
the invention or paper brought into Europe from China, the invention of the printing press,
and then you have the piece de resistance is the Protestant Reformation, a movement of God in which
people were led to want to recapture Primitive Christianity aside from the excesses and errors
of Romanism. And what was the Bible that was printed? What was the Bible that was translated?
What was the Bible that was used? What was the Bible that was preached? Well, it was the received
text, the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Old Testament. It was the textus receptus of the
Greek New Testament that was used. And again, there was this technological revolution. I've
mentioned this many times. We're living through a technological revolution right now, the digital
revolution. But during the printing revolution, I think there was a providential stamp of approval
placed upon this text. The challenge to it is really a novelty historically speaking. It's only
been in the last 150 years that we've had the modern critical text. And really, it's only been
about the last 75 years where there's been this, particularly in English, this avalanche of
competing translations, rival translations. And so historically speaking, and this would be
connected theologically to, again, the doctrine of preservation, which is the most likely scenario.
And I think it's most likely that God has preserved his word through the received text.
And when you say that, do you mean the received text family? Or would you point to one specific
edition, maybe the Scrivener? Or do you point to one edition, Dr. Riddle?
Yeah, I've said before that I feel like I'm in agreement with the statement on the scriptures
from the Trinitarian Bible Society. And so they make reference to the family of the printed
editions of the traditional text. However, again, if you followed some of my conversation,
or even if you've just had your own conversation with people, a lot of times the challenge is,
which TR? Which TR? They never think about, well, which modern critical text?
Right. They only impose that on our side. Right, that's right. When someone says that,
you know, Scrivener's TR, I don't, I haven't found anything in it with which I disagree.
Show me where you think there's a problem with it. I don't, I don't, I don't see any problem with it.
And it seems that there is, it seems there is a consensus among those of us who use the TR
that it, it is now the, it is the TR in 2023 that people read, use and translate.
And it wasn't back translated.
It was not back translated. I did a lecture on that at the Kep Pure Conference last year
where I pointed out that, you know, yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a silly, it's not reverse
engineered. Scrivener did not back translate it from English into Greek. So anyways, yeah,
so I don't, I don't think that answers, I don't think that answers your question. Yes, sir. Or not.
But that would be, that would be my thought, my thoughts on it. Well, thank you so much. I would
love to ask you more questions, but we've already taken a lot of your time and we appreciate you
being a guest on our show and giving us your expertise on a lot of these areas. We know that
you've studied it and- I'm ready for another two hours. What are you talking about? I know. Well,
obviously Ben would- he can stay up- he doesn't even go to bed until it's like light up in the
next day. So, but we greatly appreciate being on the show and thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you guys for the invitation. I enjoyed it. I apologize for being a little running a little bit
late. No problem. And I should have also watched the previous episodes and I would have put on a
shirt and a tie. No, you're fine. If you'd watched previous episodes, you might have dressed in a
t-shirt. So we kind of change it up. It's not an every week thing. So we just felt like for this
topic, let's approach it with a little more respect, a little more gravity. A lot of times
I like to have a shirt and a tie on when I do my podcast and I'm just coming in and this is what I
had on. So sorry. You're great. We go casual and all in between. So thank you so much for
being on here and you have a great night. All right. Thank you guys. God bless. So it's great
to have Dr. Riddle on here and also reflect on some of his debates. And one of the questions
I kind of wanted to get to, but he's already kind of covered it, is in Revelation, James White
always makes a big deal about how in the latter section, Erasmus is just randomly just like
deciding what the text is there. And it kind of reminded me of the point that he was making about
how the critical text apparently does do that in several places where there is no,
they're not just translating from a particular work. They're literally just making up their own
translation for the text. And that's what's accused of Erasmus by James White in the book
of Revelation. But, um, you know, that's kind of a lengthy question to kind of expound on. So I
didn't want to necessarily open the can of worms again, considering how long our debate was. Yeah.
So maybe if we have them next time, we could go down that rather trail. Uh, I think there's
a lot of fun stuff we can talk about. I mean, if you want to speculate at the end of the day,
it's like, look, what we have right now, the evidence we have right now is not necessarily
the evidence that Erasmus had during his time, you know, what's extant in 2023. You know, perhaps
there was more back then when the received text was put together. So I look at that stuff and I
think, well, how does he even know? How does anyone know really? I like what's a lot of
conjecture is when you know what I do like, I like what Tony the Baptist said in the comments. He
said, let's put Sinaiticus to the test by getting it and seeing how well it burns. Just the test.
I'm willing to finish the job. You know, I'm willing to make a sacrifice and to burn this
thing. It was supposed to be according to Tischendorf and I'm kind of upset they didn't
finish the job. Yeah, exactly right. You know, it's just funny all the speculation about Sinaiticus
and you know, I don't know what's right or wrong regarding that issue. I just find it funny that
people on the critical text position side, like Dr. Wallace, are saying he's lying about it.
It's like, you're already starting off with your hero of the faith as being just a bold face liar.
It's like, what else is he lying about? You know, it's kind of, it's kind of strange that
you're going to pretend like this is the most trustworthy document that we've ever had of
antiquity, but he's lying all about how he even discovered it. And you know, it's also funny when
you read von Tischendorf's account, he's not even as excited about Sinaiticus as he is the gospel
of Barnabas. And that made me think of a point you're bringing up about the idea of, if someone
asked me, how authentic do you think the gospel of Barnabas is? I would say it's trash. And it's
like, well, if there was enough evidence to put the gospel of the Barnabas back into the Bible,
would you do it? It's like, no, because you know, you're bringing up how in Mark 16, James White's
saying it theologically has issues. Yeah. So if it theologically has issues, no matter how much
evidence, those theological issues didn't magically disappear. That's exactly my point.
So it's like, well, you know, it's like, how much evidence would you need to bring the book of Enoch
into the Bible? Right. No, see zero. But you, you articulated it better. You know, James White,
he makes a theological argument against the real ending of Mark and invalidates the text,
all right, doctrinally by saying it's unacceptable doctrinally because it teaches continuationism.
And then later on admits that he would accept it. So I guess all those doctrinal issues that
you just cited in opposition of the text magically go away if it has sufficient evidence backing it up
from a manuscript perspective. That's ridiculous. Right. I like what Christopher Flood said. He
says, why does James White remind me of a hairless cat? I don't know. I've never gotten that picture
from you know, it doesn't he does. He kind of gives me that vibe too. So I really like this comment.
Well, y'all are kindred spirits. You know, I just I don't have a problem ragging on James White
personally, just because you know, if someone's going to have such a lack of faith in scripture
and claim that we can literally change John 3 16, it's hard for me to take them serious as even a
Christian, you know, it's hard for me to believe that James White is even sincere in his faith,
when he has that strong of a stance against the Bible, because, you know, at some level,
if you do believe in the preservation of scripture, which I do, I believe this is
literally God's Word, it literally is God. And for someone to have looked at all 66 chapters,
all 1100 chapters, or I'm sorry, 1100 chapters, 66 books, yes, all the 30-something thousand
verses that are here in scripture, they've seen them, and the Holy Spirit didn't even tell them
that one of them was the Bible. You know, I have a strong question of whether or not you have the
Holy Spirit inside of you. I mean, and you know, that's Van Gleek's point is, hey, the Holy Spirit
is dwelling, you know, inside of us and that's confirming Scripture and keeping it preserved.
You know, from James White's perspective, he wouldn't preserve any verse because he's saying
none of them are authoritative. And boy, is that a problem. Yeah, before 1894, or I guess it would be
1881, I do think that the Holy Spirit played a role in the determination of what reading was
authentic. But again, a lot of this stuff is overblown because when you look at the differences
between these editions of the received text, they're so minor and so minuscule. Pastor Anderson has
talked about it, that it's really no big deal. But on James White, here's the thing, and people
will say, "Oh, you guys harped on him so much in this interview. Why'd you do blah blah blah?"
The guy is making a negative impact. I know people. Before this interview, you asked me about the
church I used to attend that changed from the King James only position to accepting the modern
versions. I know people who went to that church who changed their position on the Bible, who changed
their position on providential preservation because of James White. They got his material,
it infected them like a virus, and then they changed their mind. They changed their position.
They were corrupted on that doctrine. He is making a negative impact, which is why we need to fight
back vehemently against his influence. Well, and of course, he's not the only enemy out there.
There's a lot of enemies. And you know, that's why our shows. Yeah. Well, there's Joe Biden.
Yeah. Like so. And of course, you know, our podcast, we're trying to be really broad. We
don't want to just only stick to one particular argument. But I think the King James Bible
is an important argument that we talk about regularly. But you need to join us again next
week. Next Tuesday, 8 p.m. We're having another special guest. It's a it's someone from info wars.
And I'm really excited to have a new guest on our show and to talk about some new issues. I think
we might still bring up some things about the King James Bible as well. But, you know, from a
different perspective again, and I like getting more perspectives, other people's ideas. And you
know, even Dr. Riddle, you know, he kind of his, you know, group or his upbringing, they have a
negative view of King James only ism. And, you know, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but
it's kind of my understanding that people like that. They kind of think of Ruckman and really
Ruckman ism often makes the same arguments as the critical text position. You know, it kind of made
me think it's like James White, Bart Ehrman and Ruckmanites all seem to be making a lot of the
same talking points. And I could see why people could have a visceral reaction to the term King
James only when they're in that particular camp or they hear Ruckmanite type arguments. And of
course that's what James White usually advocates against is Ruckmanism not necessarily our position
or the the Texas Receptus position but more so this over the top you know strange viewpoint
that Ruckmanites will sometimes put forth where they even deny the preservation of scripture.
They think that God had to like rebreathe on the translators and they wrote a fresh copy and it just
it kind of just denies reality in a lot of ways and it doesn't seem to fit in with the
purpose of why they got originally inspired and and then not preserve it and has to like constantly
rebreathe it or something like you know this is bizarre right yes and what you said about
ruckmanites being in lockstep with critical text advocates is so true on this issue both camps
deny the preservation of the hebrew and the greek they both deny the preservation of the hebrew and
the greek they think the masoretic text and the greek received text are not equal to the autographs
and of course the ruckmanites do this because they cannot find an edition of the received text that
matches the king james bible word for word 100 percent of the time because it doesn't exist
it wasn't translated that way but right we saw one ruckmanite who used to be our friend who took
what was supposed to be a representation of scrivener's tr and tossed it on the ground
and claimed it was a corruption of god's word the ignorance of that is baffling it is absolutely
baffling and it makes our side look inept yeah it's it's a shame and again it's kind of similar to
james white rejecting the bible you know you're rejecting the bible again when you claim it's not
in the greek and and lying about it too yeah so it's an important topic and we want to cover it
we want to cover even more about this subject so tune in with us next week tuesday 8 p.m we're
going to have another guest again the week after that so we're going to still do a kind of a mini
series here a mini season and you want to keep checking in 8 p.m baptist bias make sure that
you're signing up for our rumble channel because we're not always going to have everything on
youtube and youtube may not even last and so we're trying to get everybody to go and follow us on
our rumble channel of course you can check out a film about the preservation of scripture preserve
bible.com and one other plug i want to make i preach the sermon series on the translators
to the reader and honestly i think that it's really helpful to kind of understand some of
the arguments for the king james bible and just the philosophy of how the king james bible even
came into existence because the translators to the reader which is usually attached to the front of
the king james bible if you kind of have a little bit nicer one or a bigger one it makes it abundantly
clear that those who translated the king james bible agree with us and have the same philosophy
of us that god providentially preserved his word in hebrew and in greek and that they were faithfully
they were god's secretaries they were god's stewards to transmit the text faithfully into
english and in fact they were even coming upon previous works that were great of the past they
weren't necessarily rebreathing the scripture or coming up with something new and you know that is
the philosophy that i agree with that i believe and i'm excited to continue to talk about this
subject with even other guests and with other individuals so that's pretty much going to wrap
it up for us you know on this episode ben do you have any last thoughts for us before we go
i want to invite everyone to go subscribe to the preserved bible youtube channel you talked about
some of the censorship that we've endured as a church the original upload of that documentary
was actually taken down because it was on a channel that got nuked by youtube
however we actually put the effort in to create a preserved bible youtube channel that people can
go to just search preserved bible on youtube scroll down a little bit you'll find the channel
which includes the full documentary deleted scenes as well as well as the full interviews
it also includes the full interviews that are on that channel that you can watch from beginning
to end and i also want to make the note that i'm probably going to chop the film up a little bit
and put some documentary clips some clips from the full film on that channel as well
so you can watch bits and pieces of it if you don't have time to see the entire thing but i
want to invite you again to subscribe to the preserved bible youtube channel today for more
content just like what you saw here on this episode now i think that's a great plug and you
know maybe we should make some shorts even from that particular content so um that's pretty
much going to do it for us here on the baptist bias thanks for enduring a long podcast this evening
but you don't want to miss next week you don't want to miss the episode after that
we got we got some really cool guests that are going to be coming on the show some different
topics and of course we like to have our serious discussions and we like to have some comedy
and everything in between so god bless you thanks for tuning in ben sign us off we appreciate your
support make sure you tune in again next week for pastor shelly dr jeff riddle this is ben naeem
signing off god bless you all we will talk to you guys again after a while