Road Trip Dividing Line from Hays, Kansas

Well greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We are live on the road. I am speaking this evening at Celebration Church in Hays, Kansas, the last speaking event. I had arranged something in Ambrillo and I double-booked myself.

I hate when that happens. I will be teaching early church history class for Grace Bible Theological Seminary and our early church history classes ongoing on Thursday evening from right here in The Dividing Line studio.

So that messed all that up. But hopefully we will get together with those folks next time through. I go through Ambrillo a lot. I -40 is sort of a good place to go. You may hear a little bit of a sound in the background.

Believe it or not, I just had to turn the A .C. off. It's warm. This is the first time I've had to run the A .C. since I left Phoenix. Even the folks around here in Hays are going, this is really weird.

We normally don't have Novembers this warm. But it's sunny and warm and knowing Midwestern weather, it will be freezing by next week. Maybe by the day after tomorrow. That's sort of how it works. I haven't actually looked at the weather.

It is possible. Let me just look here real quick. We've got other things to do here. But, well, you know, down to 35 on Friday, high of 52. So, you know, right now it's technically 66, but the sun's really warm.

So if you hear that little roar in the background, that is the fan running in the other room so the A .C. doesn't have to run in here. Back behind my head you will see a precious little picture. One of the things that's really fun about traveling and speaking is you go to a lot of churches and the young people love to draw pictures.

Sometimes they're pictures of you, which are always very interesting when you look like me. Getting the bald head and beard and stuff in it can sometimes end up making me look more like an alien than anything else.

But I get given a lot of pictures and I was in, what's the name of it? It was right near Adele. The next little town over. And the church is sort of out, you know, it's off the freeway a ways. It's not much around it.

You know, I'm traveling through rural areas and great church, great singing. I can tell that they have taken a lot from Moscow. The folks up at Christ Church in Moscow sing. Man, everybody, they've belted out and they know all the parts and they're very, very good at that kind of stuff.

Anyway, really enjoyed being there. Another church, another local church had sent a pretty decent contingent. And so anyways, afterwards a number of, looked like homeschooling families came by and I was given a number of pictures.

And then I was given that one. And it was very, very well done. A young lady did it. I don't have a name or anything. I'm sorry. But, and the wind's sort of blowing it around a little bit. I'm sorry about that.

But I just wanted to put it up back there. I do appreciate all those pictures that I get given by the kids. And, you know, you never know what they're hearing. I, there are, there are things I remember from being a kid that my dad said in a sermon that has stuck with me my entire life into my seventh decade.

You never know. You get those kids under the preaching of the word and you just trust the spirit after that. Of course, they might also remember some silly things. I, I remember my mom took me to visit a couple of churches a few times.

She took me to a black church once and scared me to death. Really did because, yeah, I'm an, I'm a GRB, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist. We were taught that if you're in the true church, you do everything the same way we do it.

And they weren't doing the same way we did it. So I was pretty freaked out. But we went to this other church, which was clearly a Fundamentalist church, and we were up in the balcony. I remember thinking that was pretty cool because churches I went to didn't have balconies.

Well, until Bible Baptist, they had a balcony, which I thought was really cool too. Anyway, we're up in the balcony and I just remember the topic of the sermon. And I remember this guy just railing away down there at how pantsuits would be the end of Western civilization.

Now, if Hillary Clinton did one, that he probably would have been prophetic, I suppose, or Kamala even worse. But I just, you know, as a kid, I had to have been at the most nine or ten. Somehow that stuck.

So yeah, sometimes weird things can stick in people's minds too. But anyways, so I'm speaking this evening on the Reformation. Evidently, this is a heavily Catholic area. And so we're gonna be talking about Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide.

And taking, there will be a live stream. And they're gonna send me the link and I'm gonna give it to Rich. And so you might get to tune in if you'd like. We'll be talking. I've got about an hour to talk about the Reformation, Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide.

And then we're gonna be taking questions for an hour. And those are actually be coming through the net. I think it's one of those scan things, you know. Anyway, so we'll be taking questions for an hour.

And so yeah, that's this evening here in Hayes, Kansas. And that's the end of that. Now, it's still gonna take me a while to get home. I scheduled it to be a fairly leisurely trip home. Just simply, you know, when you've been moving, moving, moving, moving, moving, you get tired.

I'm actually feeling really good. I could get home faster. But now it's a matter of the last places. All of the last RV parks that I booked are not KOAs. So you lose money if you cancel and change stuff.

And so I don't want to do that. Each of the days is gonna be gonna allow me to work out in the mornings, maybe do some running, stuff like that. And get back hopefully feeling good and not pushing myself hard.

Tomorrow's gonna be hard. I would appreciate your prayers for that. Tomorrow I've known from the start was gonna be my longest leg. And believe you me, the trip from Hayes, Kansas to Amarillo, Texas, I don't think there are any humans that live between those two places.

So there ain't gonna be much to look at. And I've been told, I hope I can grab it tomorrow, I've been told that the Jay Dyer-David Wood debate on icon veneration has been posted on YouTube. So if someone could verify that, that would be helpful.

What do you mean do I have to row a boat through northern Arizona? I thought all that flooding was over with. I haven't seen any stories about any of that stuff. More to come when? Don't tell me that.

I don't want to, I don't, I'm gonna have to start looking at the weather now. I don't want to run into more, more flooding. Next week-ish. Well, oh, next week. Well, I get home by Sunday, so we should be okay.

Don't freak me out like that. Anyway, see, you can't hear Rich right now, but you can hear Rich right now. And by the way, Rich, I need to tell you, where was I? One of the places I was at, you know, when you're, when you're moving so quick, going to so many different places in a single week, you forget which one, but there was one guy especially that said, please tell Rich I'm his biggest fan.

He says, I make things work around here, and that's what he does. And so I really, really appreciate what you all do, but I know he's the one who actually makes it happen. So, you got a fan that wanted me to make sure that you knew that he appreciates all the work behind the scenes, which is true.

That's, that's how it works. So, the Rich Pierce, the Rich Pierce Fan Club does have a few members out there, and they, they, they know that there has to be people behind the, the dum-dum in front of the camera.

The smart people have to be behind the camera, the dum-dums in front of the camera. So, that's how that works. You can see the sun's still up. It's flashing in my eyes here. It's right, right at that, that spot during the day.

Anyway, so, pray for, for tomorrow's travel. It's gonna be a long day, and I'm not sure what we're gonna do about Thursday on the Dying Line. We might need to do it on Friday, but we'll make it, we'll make it work.

We've got the Starlink. I've got Starlink out today. We are coming to you via Starlink, but not sponsored by Starlink. We're actually paying Starlink, but the, the local, local connection wasn't gonna do it for us, and so I had to put it out.

And man, it, it took so little time. We have such a perfect setup in this thing right now that I was able to just run out there, put the thing out, boom, boom, and, you know, 15 minutes later, we're up at full speed, and it's working great.

So, it's, it's a cool way to do things. It really is. All right, again, the, the trip has been fantastic. So encouraging to me. So encouraging to me. Had dinner with some of the young leaders from Celebration Church last night.

Great dinner. Man, that was one of the best burgers I've ever had. Then a couple of them took me to a gym this morning so I could get a workout. I've not been able to hit a leg press or leg extension machine for two weeks, and I was starting to get a little, little twitchy.

And, but we had great conversation last night. Very ministry-oriented. You know, these are serious guys. It's really exciting to, to get to meet people you've never met before, even if it's for a brief period of time, and to be an encouragement to them, and hopefully we're being an encouragement to them.

The main thing we keep hearing is, I can't believe that you'd come to our little church. And it's like, yeah, well, that's, that's what this thing allows us to do. And I'm so thankful that when I put the word out a number of months ago now, hey, I want to do a Midwest trip.

If you want us to come, let us know. And I think we covered pretty much everybody. Not, not everybody, but I think we covered pretty much everybody I could get to in a meaningful period of time. So really enjoying getting a chance to do this.

Political Change, Communism, and the Church

Very encouraging to see the church. And they're serious people. They, they know that what happened on Tuesday could have long-term impact on the church, and it will. We, we just, I am personally very, very convinced that the left in this country will do everything they can as quickly as they can to not only punish their opponents, but to fundamentally dismantle the Constitution and our liberties.

That's what communism does, and that's what they are. They're communists. They're democratic socialists. Yeah, well, okay. Yeah. Some of us know about history. Some of us know about how these people operate.

And the reason, yes, I know everybody's going, well, it was the war in Iran. Yeah, the war in Iran was stupid. No question about it. Never understood it from the start. There was no imminent threat. Sorry, I don't believe any of that stuff.

But here's the problem. Um, that may be why it was so lopsided. But the fact of the matter is, um, elections in the future, if there even are free elections, I'm not sure how free these were either. But even if there are elections in the future, the Americans are passing away.

And the people who were indoctrinated in the United States indoctrination system called the public school system, um, don't know why this nation started. They don't have a commitment to the worldview that was the foundation of this nation.

And, um, they're voting for their own enslavement. That's how communism works. Um, you vote for your own enslavement and then you have to fight your way out of it. And that's what they're doing. So they're just doing what they've been taught to do, what the educational system told them to do.

And I just don't see how you can overcome that. And once, um, Alito and Thomas are gone, either, either they'll just go, you know, because they can't live forever. Um, or they'll pack the court. And once you've got Katonji Brown, Jackson, or whatever name is the woman who is unqualified to be a dog catcher, uh, as a Supreme court justice, and then you make them, you know, 27 of them or something like that.

The, the constitution is no longer at all relevant. If it cannot be interpreted the way it was originally written, it's, it does has no meaning. And, you know, as the guy I debated a week ago, Saturday, um, is that a week ago, Saturday?

See when you're on your own, who knows? Um, as, uh, Arun Ra said, your rights are given to you by a government. You have no human rights. You have no divine rights. Uh, it's, it's all whatever the government tells you.

And, um, that's, that's what's coming. And that's what you folks who vote for the left want. You're not going to like it once it hits, but then it's too late. Uh, you've been warned, but you don't care.

So there you go. Um, all right. Speaking of which, um, we have this, uh, starting on the 12th, November 12th through 14th, Christ is King, America after Trump, Dallas, Texas. Oh yes. The big, um, not quite right in the head NXR.

That's, that's not exactly right. That's right. Not exactly right in the head. Um, NXR 2026 annual conference, uh, with, and I've, I've noticed that Alex Jones is no longer the big head in the middle.

Now the two heads in the middle are Alex Jones. And of course, Joel Webben. Yes, indeed. Um, and so y 'all have spent 250 bucks a seat to be there. I'm sure y 'all are going to have a grand old time, um, finding out what America can do from massive intellects.

Uh, just, just the big, the big dogs, uh, that are going to be there. Um, including Dale Partridge and, uh, Joel Webben and, um, and all the rest. And, um, hopefully, you know, I, I honestly hope for the sake of everybody there that Alex Jones doesn't have a breakdown like he had when he was talking about Joe Rogan, uh, you know, right in the middle of his talk, that would be, it'd be fitting, but it might be rough for a lot of the Christians in the audience.

So, um, I imagine some people are going and will report on it. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't care what any of these people think. None of them have anything worthwhile to say to the United States.

None of them, including the Christian ministers who have prostituted themselves to stand on that stage and blaspheme the name of Christ to stand next to Alex Jones and these other guys who are clearly not Christians and are clearly reprobating their behavior.

You've pimped yourselves out. That's it for you. So long. Have a nice time. Um, but this kind of stuff is a cancer in the church and especially young men, even in sound churches are being attracted to this because of their impatience, their impetuosity.

Uh, they've been taught the boomers are responsible for everything that's going wrong. Um, and so this kind of stuff is causing problems in churches all across the land. And for some reason, the adults in the room have lost sight of the fact that when Paul writes to Timothy, Paul doesn't lower himself to a young person's level.

He calls Timothy to maturity. He encourages him to patience and steadfastness and a willingness to suffer and, and to do the work of the ministry, not to get all frustrated and angry and start acting like the world.

Um, and acting like the world yourself, which is exactly what you have when you have people like Alex Jones coming to speak for reasons we cannot even begin to understand. So, um, that's coming up this weekend.

I'm sure that there will be some interesting, uh, stuff coming out about that. Uh, but in case you were wondering, that's, um, that's, that's what's going on there. Um, these are sort of related. So I suppose it, it, it's fitting to, uh, sort of put them together.

Papyrus 75 and the Early Text of Luke and John

We have in the background today, uh, manuscript P75, which is an exceptionally important, um, Gospels manuscript, which I may have described to you before, but I've also been showing my facsimiles in the churches.

And so when I last showed it in what context isn't always clear. Um, this is the, uh, end of Luke. You can see Luke on right there, Kata, uh, Luke on, um, and the beginning of John. So the gospel according to John, NRC and Halagas.

P75 extremely important. Uh, I know I've mentioned in the past that fairly recent studies, recent studies in 30 years, um, have indicated that this manuscript and Codex Vaticanus have a shared ancestor, that Vaticanus is not a copy of this, but they both have a shared ancestor.

And since this is 175 to 200, that would mean the ancestor has to be really no, uh, no later than 150, which is extremely early. So when Vaticanus and P75 agree on a reading, that is an incredibly ancient reading from two different lines, uh, going back to the same ancestor.

And so that has a tremendous amount of weight. Obviously in John 1, 18, it has, uh, monogamous theos. And, um, but what's interesting is this is also right up here at the top. One of the, uh, yeah, it would definitely be one of the earliest and more complete, uh, recordings of the resurrection and post-resurrection appearances.

And in fact, right here is the Ascension, the Ascension, um, so it's post-resurrection appearance, but then it includes the Ascension. One of the Christological realities that honestly we generally ignore in the Protestant Church, okay, there is no such thing as a Protestant Church, in Evangelicalism, what a return note.

I mean, it's just not something we talk a lot about. Um, and it's right there. And what's interesting is there you have, uh, they worshipped him. It's right there. Um, proskuneo being used, worship of Christ in an obviously very religious context.

So the meaning of proskuneo, proskunesis, um, dependent upon the context in which it's used. And in this context, it's being used religiously. And so Jesus is being worshipped in his post-resurrection state.

So right there, written long, long ago, 175 -200, a very accurate manuscript. I think I've mentioned to you many times that it seems like this scribe copied letter by letter instead of word by word or phrase by phrase.

Uh, the errors that he makes tend to be single letter errors rather than phrases, words, transpositions, things like that. So that's what we have, uh, back there. And that is relevant, uh, because a couple of days ago I started seeing this stuff, uh, popping up and let me see what I've got here.

Where did I put that thing? Uh oh. Oh, I don't know why that's there. Um, don't know why that's there either. Oh, okay. Here's the other one. All right. I'll just use this one. Um, I started seeing popping up on my feed stuff about Westhoff.

Okay. So, uh, Dan McClellan was the first one I saw. And accusations of plagiarism and all the rest of the stuff. And, you know, people started sending it to me. And I, I even said in our sort of private ministry chat channel, I'm like, well, look, um, until West responds, what is there to say?

Wes Huff and the Allegations of Plagiarism

Um, right now, if I were to try to dig into this stuff, I'm going with what people that I don't trust at all, like Dan McClellan, are putting on a screen. And without the author's response, then all this is, is the standard knee jerk, social media, answer now, you're guilty if you're simply accused, uh, type of situation.

So, uh, West responded pretty quickly and he put a video out today, which I listened to. It's not long video. He talked about where the source of the papers, um, academia .edu. Yeah. You know, I have an account too.

And man, just like him, um, I did change a, um, email address. I dropped the domain name that I had for a while. Uh, that email address will haunt me the rest of my life. It is in my Apple settings. I've even called Apple and had them work with me.

We cannot get rid of it. We cannot find it. I get a bunch of Apple stuff that's just sent off into the ether because Apple can't fix it. And I can't fix it either. Um, which is rather frustrating when you think about anyway.

So evidently he had an old academia account. He can't get back into that account because the email's no longer valid. And so that stuff's still there, but that stuff was never published or submitted according to what he said.

Um, and he just honestly said, Hey, I, I take ownership. They were bad papers. Um, I was young, didn't know what I was doing. Uh, I've learned a lot since then, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. All right. Um, I'm not gonna get into all that.

I will mention this. I saw this morning, yesterday morning, it was early this morning that, uh, one of the alleged plagiarisms was from AOMin .org. And what I think that was, I have not had time today.

I've got other things going on, but I think what that was is I saw Dr. Alan Kirshner also comment about some of the use of his materials. Now, Alan used to be on our blog team and in the chat channel and stuff like that and real sharp guy.

And evidently it was about, see, so what happened is I had Alan on the dividing line. I don't remember when it was. Um, I'm sure somebody could pull it up for you rather easily, but, um, I had him on the program once to discuss the textual variant in Luke 23 when Jesus says, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

And it bothers people to no end that that's a textual variant because everybody knows it. It's, you know, I have that verse memorized. Don't tell me that's textual variant. Uh, that type of thing, but it is a textual variant and it's a major textual variant and it's an important textual variant because it's spread all across the manuscript spectrum.

The Textual Variant in Luke 23:34

Now the ECM on Luke hasn't come out yet. Why? I do not know. Um, I, I would like to get some more information as to why there seems to be this massive delay in any further CBGM studies being done. As I speculated a couple of weeks ago, I, I wonder if they're not going, hey, we can, we can do this via AI better than we could do it before.

So let's try to be consistent with it. Um, I'm not sure how you would do that. And I can't imagine, honestly, even if they went back over the stuff that they've already produced, and produced the hard copies of, I can't imagine it making all that much of a difference.

I can only imagine it making the process faster, but I don't see how it would really impact a whole lot. I'm speculating right now. I don't know. But Luke's not out. That's all I can tell you. Um, and so I would really, really, really be interested.

This is, this is one variant that when Luke is published is going to be the first thing I look at to see what ECM has chosen. Um, because I've not seen anybody try to like manually, um, figure out what the computer analysis is going to lead to.

And I haven't really thought about it, but I, I sort of wonder if somebody maybe hasn't thrown that at Grok or Claude or something. I'm probably throwing it at Claude. Um, I just don't know that Claude would have access to the same database that the ECM would have access to using CBGM.

Anyway, um, hopefully someday that will all be accessible to everybody with equal ease, or the whole world's going to descend into darkness for a while as communist, communism hopefully dies its last, last death.

But, um, hey, we didn't, we didn't learn after 120 million deaths. So who knows how many more it's going to take before we finally figure out this is sheer stupidity. Um, anybody that's read Romans 1 knows it's sheer stupidity, but that's another issue.

So back to that, I'm going to be looking forward to that. So we had Alan on to, he had written a paper somewhere in the back of my mind. I think that was a preliminary paper and he, for publishing, he did something later, but he gave us something that I think is still on the blog somewhere.

And that's what was being referenced, uh, this morning that I saw something from AOMN. And I think that's what Alan was referring to when he posted something on X, um, about the article that he had written.

Dan McClellan, Scholarly Authority, and the Asherah Debate

That's what I'm running with right now. Anyway, so, all right, so Wes has responded, he's put that out there. Um, here's what I'm finding interesting. What is the motivation of these people who are chasing Wes Hough around?

What has he done? I mean, okay, he, is it just the Rogan thing? Or that debate he did with that guy who didn't have a clue what in the world he was talking about, but he's sort of a talking head that I guess sort of disappeared anyways.

Um, what, what has he done? Is it, it, it just strikes me that the reason that these people are doing what they're doing is, it's, academia is ours. Academia is for unbelief, it's not for belief. Um, and so we have to make sure that we attack you and make sure that you're, you're considered to be unreliable and not truly scholarly because, you know, for Dan McClellan, the majority of scholars, and he gets to determine what that is, and he gets to determine what the parameters of scholarship is and everything else, but for Dan McClellan, the majority of scholars is the same thing as thus saith the Lord.

I mean, that's the final word. You can't question that. If you question that, you're just not even worth looking at. And so, uh, I started thinking about what the motivations would be here for digging into, you know, 10-year-old papers that weren't even submitted for coursework from what I understand.

Um, still, it's still problematic to not have proper citation, but if it wasn't, but if it was a draft or something like that, you know, that's the whole, that's the whole reason to wait to see what in the world is going on in a situation like that.

It's also a good reason not to post the paper anyplace. Um, but, uh, the motivation of folks, and I started thinking about it and, you know, we've commented on a bunch of things that Dan McClellan says, and I saw, uh, Gabe Hughes put out a, um, tweet where he was talking about, uh, he says, Mormon Dan McClellan claims the Bible teaches there are many gods and a god as a wife.

He commits the same error the Israelites did when they worshiped the Asherah, but presents their idolatry as the way God is. And so, that was sort of his summary of this brief, uh, video that he posted where he took some clips from McClellan's appearance on Rogan.

And, um, I want to see if I can find, and I don't think, Dan McClellan is a Mormon, so he, well, sort of a Mormon. Uh, let me, let me see if I can find this. Here, here we go. Let me, let me show you something here.

Um, I think I have to drag all this over here. Dan McClellan is a... Stop it! Uh, da-da-da-da-da-da, and then I go like that, and I go like this. I, uh-oh, yeah, here we go. All right, hopefully, wait a minute, you couldn't hear that, could you?

Uh, that wasn't coming out of the speaker. That was coming out of mine. Do I have to change my audio to, yeah, I have to change my audio to that, I hope. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Hey, at least I noticed it. Let's see if this works.

Okay, so this is from when McClellan was on with Rogan, okay? Uh, here you go. This is a gift for, for you, and this is, thank you, this is a replica of my favorite artifact from the ancient world. A friend of mine named Robert Algott, uh, runs this website called...

Okay, according to what I'm seeing, I'm still up, and the video is not, so maybe you could switch over to the, uh, to the video. Relics3d .com, and he makes these, and this is, this is what's called the Contilla d 'Azurud, and it's one of my favorite artifacts because we have an inscription over top, and then a drawing of a male and a female deity, and the inscription talks about, uh, somebody asking for or thanking somebody for blessings, uh, by Adonai of Shomron, or Jehovah of Samaria, the Lord of Samaria, and his Asherah, and so, um, I think the majority of scholars agree this is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these two deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Asherah.

Now why... You can take that down, um, so that, so here, I looked this up, by the way, uh, that's a, if you want to buy that from that guy, it's on Etsy. I don't like getting things on Etsy, um, but it's 750 bucks.

Now, he may have gotten it cheaper because he was going to be giving it to Joe Rogan, um, but 750 bucks for that facsimile of this thing that was found from around 800 years before Christ, uh, from northern Israel, and so I did a little looking around, and it's like, okay, let's, let's think about this for just a second.

You go on Joe Rogan. First of all, this guy's not a Mormon. This guy says Joseph Smith was a false prophet. He doesn't really believe God has spoken. He calls himself a Christian, but doesn't believe anything Christians believe.

Uh, he gets, he is his own pope. He gets to just make stuff up as it goes along because he's the greatest scholar alive. He knows more than anybody else, uh, in total, and so he just gets to redefine terms as he, as he stumbles along, and so you're going to go on Joe Rogan, and what you give him is a pagan representation of a deity and his Asherah.

Now, there's all sorts of scholarly discussion as to what that means that he didn't bother to tell you about. Um, there's all sorts of discussion about, uh, how to interpret this particular material. There is, uh, great debate, so the majority of scholars is just what he, he makes up.

There, somebody else would say, well, the majority scholars actually say this because it is argued as to whether this is as simple as he'd like to make it, but the point is, why in the world, you know, so, so you can understand as a goddess, a consort of Yahweh, as a cultic object, a sacred pole or tree symbol, which is very common in the Old Testament, um, or a hypothesis or aspect of the cult associated with Yahweh's presence, a mediating position, so it's interpreted in different ways.

Uh, the, the, uh, it's not complete, obviously, it's fragmentary, so it's not like you have a whole bunch of context to try to put it in, but why in the world would you give that to Joe Rogan? I mean, so Gabe was saying, well, you know, Mormons believe God has a wife.

That's true, but, and I suppose someone like Dan McClellan would try to make that kind of connection because they do try to make the connection to Deuteronomy 32 and the misreading of the text saying El Elyon is one God and Jehovah is a separate God and stuff like that.

Um, and they all accept the idea, unknown to Joseph Smith, not taught by general authorities of the Mormon church, at least not officially that I'm aware of, that the Old Testament is a, uh, cobbled together mishmash of contradictory texts and that you literally, in most Old Testament commentaries, you literally cannot assume a consistent context for more than about three or four sentences.

So you can have something four verses up that would be very easily harmonized. What you've got down here, you can't do that. You can, you can automatically assume contradiction. You can automatically assume disunity because the assumption is all this stuff has been redacted so many times.

There was no Moses. There is no original source. There is no Ausgang's text. Um, so we can do what we want. You, you can create anything you want out of this mess. And, um, once you go there, then the New Testament just becomes something you can form into whatever you want to form it into.

So anyway, uh, that's how it's being approached. Now there are all sorts of references to Asherah and the Ashrim in the Old Testament. Um, you, you cut down the Ashrim. So those would have been the poles.

So those would have been like the fertility poles. But when you think about it, when you think about the history of the Northern Kingdom around this time period, what is the testimony of the prophets?

What is the testimony of the historical books? It was a period of apostasy. It was a period, especially of syncretism, syncretism. So joining the worship of Yahweh with the worship of the pagan gods, that was the whole reason behind wiping the Canaanites out is that if you don't, they are going to invite you and your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, they're going to invite you to idolatry.

And so what does every good king of Israel do? He destroys the high places. He cuts down the Ashrim. He banishes the Baals. And what does, what do the bad kings do? They bring them back in. And, but what they do and what's plain in regards to worship at the temple is what is particularly repulsive to the prophets and to God is the syncretism, the joining of these pagan religions to the worship of Yahweh.

It's either Yahweh or nothing. And the whole idea that, and you go to almost any theological seminary, not, not the best, but almost any theological seminary, what you're going to be taught is that what we see at this time period where you have the worship of the one true God being joined with the pagan gods around, that's the original form of Israelite religion.

That only later, as we get more toward the post-exilic period, develops into monotheism. So Dan McClellan's famous saying, there is no monotheism in the Bible. So when you find monotheistic texts, oh, that, that's just put in later.

See, there's, there's no way to disprove this kind of scholarship because it's, it's non-disprovable. You have started with an assumption. You started with, this is what I'm going to find. And no data is going to be able to contradict it.

So honestly, you could ask someone like Dan McClellan, what evidence, what could function as evidence for you that Moses existed and that he taught that there is one true God? And you, there's, there's nothing.

We have the song of Moses in Psalm 90, but that wasn't Moses. Does it teach monotheism? Yeah, but that came much later. We have everything in the Pentateuch that says that Jehovah is the only true God.

Yahwist, Eloist, Deuteronomist, Priestly, it's all different sources edited together, long, long, long after. And if they want to go, and, and you don't have any manuscripts, you're talking about something from 1400 years ago.

When, when we find some, something scratched on a rock from 1400 years before Christ, it's much more than that. It's 3400 years ago. When we find something scratched on a rock from 700 BC, we're excited.