The Tom Buck Saga, Nxr And Alex Jones, Saint Tarasios

Hello, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Here we are on another hot, hot day here in Phoenix. Got some storms last night. Dewpoint was through the roof this morning. And all of you in Louisiana are going, you don't understand Dewpoint.

Yes, we do. We have a monsoon, too. And right now, we're in the middle of it. So anyways, Rich said the power's been on and off down here today. So if all of a sudden, everything goes dark and we disappear, you'll know why.

This isn't a new part of town. And it's not used to getting wet. So sometimes, things can get a little wacky. That may be what's going on. We'll find out. Hopefully, it won't happen. Anyway, lots to get to today.

I only heard about this stuff a couple of days ago. And I pretty much saw it on X, at least on the things that X is allowing me to use right now. I'm locked out on this unit. I try to log in. It just goes into a circle.

Just kicks me right back to the login screen. And I have no idea what to do about it. I'm going to have to take it home. And I don't know, do they even have anybody you can call? I don't know. And it's a bit of a pain, because it's amazing how much I use that to grab graphics and stuff like that.

But I saw it pretty much like everybody else did, the Protestia article that delved into something going on that I did not know about. Evidently, starting back, I think, in February, again, I could have pulled up Tom Askell's article, Phil Johnson's article.

They're all on X, which I'm not on anymore, evidently. But there is an article at Phil Johnson's Pyromaniacs. And then there is a Twitter article, which I guess is not on the founder's website itself, but is just posted on X.

Both written in the past two days about this whole situation from their perspectives and their involvement with it. I haven't been involved with it, even though, according to everything I've read, these anonymous packets of information were sent to pretty much all of the speakers at G3.

Well, I was a plenary speaker at G3 for most of G3's existence. I mean, I started back when it was meeting at Praise Mill. I think I was at Praise Mill for at least two, maybe three before it became so big that it moved to the convention center.

And I've lost track of how many I did at the convention center. I know I was there in 18. That's when Michael Kruger and I did that Canon issue thing. And so I spoke at G3 a lot. But I was not sent this anonymous package that everyone else was sent.

And that's interesting. I think I scare people. It's like, nah, let's not send it to him. So anyway, evidently this stuff was sent to the church and Tom had to be dealing with accusations of plagiarism, quoting from commentaries, attestation, and the elders get together and they bring in other pastors and they say, you need to do this with that attestation and that with that attestation.

And they're very public about it, public within the church, going, that's what I'll do. And they're open about things and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And so I guess that's dealt with, was that March?

I think it was March because I had dinner with Tom when I was in the Dallas area back in February. Remember that big ice storm? I sort of chased across the nation in February, one day behind it. And there's this Mexican place that he and I will have eaten at, I don't know, two, three times, four times.

And so we had dinner and that wasn't going on then, I know that much. And we talked about other stuff. And so I guess because that was handled within the local fellowship, which is where it's supposed to be handled in the first place whoever these anonymous people were and are, decided that wasn't enough.

And so they start sending this packet out to all the G3 speakers, pastors, a wide number of people, including Tom Askell. And I think, I'm pretty sure from reading Phil Johnson's article, he had been called in to be a part of this from the start.

So when he received this packet himself, it's like, yeah, I already know about all this stuff, but he was a G3 speaker many times. And so he gets one as well. And so it's hard to keep track of everything without a scorecard.

And I'm not gonna try to reiterate everything. You can read the aforementioned articles from Tom Askell, Phil Johnson, the Protestia article. But what Protestia came up with was basically an accusation that the, well, not just an accusation, but there has now been admission.

Not official publicly, we represent the group and therefore, that kind of thing. But there has been admission on the part of people at Praise Mill Baptist Church, which of course was the founding church of G3.

That's where Josh Bice was. That's where G3 started. And people involved with G3, which has continued after Josh Bice's resignation, in a lesser role. They've been attempting to survive and to plan a conference and do things like that.

But evidently there has been an admission now that this anonymous packet came from people involved with the church and with G3. And I'm just like, I'm reading these things, and I knew we needed to talk about it, briefly anyways, when at the end of Phil Johnson's article on pyromaniacs, he, the last sentence literally says, again, I wish I could have pulled it up, but the last sentence literally says, G3 needs to close up shop and disappear.

When someone who was a plenary speaker and was, I don't remember a year when he wasn't there, says, you just need to throw in the towel. That's big stuff. That's, yeah. And then Tom Askell evidently was involved because I guess some of the people at Praise Mill reached out to pastors when they didn't get the response, I guess they were looking for, against Tom Buck from his church, and allegedly were told they should do this anonymously.

That was one of the big things. When Tom got his package, he was like, oh, anonymous. Oh, sure, okay, we'll give this a whole lot of credit. But when the admissions were made, yes, we were told to do this anonymously.

Evidently, Tom contacted some of the pastors, I know one of them, who allegedly had said, had given the consensus that this should be done anonymously. And that pastor was like, I never said any such thing.

I never suggested you send out anonymous hit pieces on people. So that raises a lot of questions as well. So I've only texted with Tom a couple times once this hit. And so I've hesitated to take up his time, going back over stuff that I'm sure since March, he's had to go over far more times than he really wants to.

And so I just sit back and I'm like, all this anonymous stuff. I mean, literally people going to Lindale, Texas. Okay, I've gone to Lindale a bunch of times. I've spoken to Tom's church a bunch of times.

I can show you where the RV park is, south or north? Which direction is that? South, down toward Tyler. The nice RV park down the way that Tom's come down to and I've shown him, I'd set up my telescope to look at some planets one time.

And so I've been there. Someone from the church actually traveled to Lindale and sent those things out. And paid for the postage at the Lindale post office box. So it looked like someone from Tom's church was sending this stuff out rather than the actual people who are doing it.

I mean, who has time to be doing things like this? Who even thinks of doing stuff like this? It just leaves me stuttering to go, why? What's the motivation? Now, I have some theories from some stuff Tom had told me back in February that are just running around the back of my mind.

But, you know, I was never involved with the inner workings of G3. I'd get a phone call normally from Josh Weiss. G3 is gonna be at such and such time. We'd like you to speak on such and such topic. Yep, I can arrange that.

And that was pretty much it. I mean, that was all there was to it. And Rich will tell you, we were the odd men out at G3. We, you know, yeah, we were weird. The, you know, I remember one year Omaha was there and he went and I had been standing for hours.

We would have this huge line of folks at our table. They would reach across the room and people wanted to talk and they wanted to get book signed, take pictures, ask questions, and mainly give their own story as to how we had helped them with this and how we had helped them with that and got them out of Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, King James only-ism, whatever.

And so we were out with the people most of the time. You know, there was a green room you could go to that would have food and they'd have lunches and dinners and they were pretty fancy. And, you know, I would go, but I'd eat and leave and go back to where the people were.

And I wouldn't schmooze, I wouldn't network. We're not very sociable people, I guess, but I just didn't figure that's why I was there, you know? So I never had any decision-making authority, nothing.

I was just a B or C level speaker. I mean, I was a plenary speaker, but the lower end of the plenary speakers, you know, daytime stuff, not the, if you spoke at night, you were A level, you were one of the big guys, and I never spoke at night.

So I was B level at best, maybe C level, that type of stuff. And so I didn't know all the players. I probably met more of the other people more at the Washington, it wasn't the national one. We did one in Washington, and that's when I got to go to the Bible Museum and stuff and do some of the fun stuff we did there.

And we had this dinner that we walked to this restaurant. And, you know, that's where I got to meet more people, but I still, I stink at names. I just, because I'm not trying to create connections and, you know, I'm going to contact this person, see if I can get them to do this for me or that for me.

This is, that's not a part of who we are or we've ever been. So I always felt a little bit on the outside. I really enjoyed, I appreciated, because I knew there were people that didn't want me there. I appreciated the fact they kept having me come back.

We did attract a fair number of folks. So, but I just didn't have the connections with people for me to even be tracking with some of the names that I'm reading right now. Did I meet these folks? Probably.

Do I remember who they were? No, sorry. The names aren't necessarily connecting with stuff like that. And I never did any of the other local stuff. Just that one thing in Washington, which wasn't exactly local for me.

That was, I happen to remember that was the Grand Design. That's how I remember which trip it was. Which RV did we have? That was the Grand Design. The one where Google tried to kill me. Rich will always remember the phone call he got that day.

I need that Garmin RV thing, and I need it overnighted now because Google routed me on this route, this two lane road. And I come up on this bridge and it says like 12, I forget what 12 feet something.

And it was higher in the middle and lower at the edges. And I'm like, I got no place to go. I can't back up. There's traffic. I'm sitting here just waiting to hear as the air conditioner is ripped off the top of the thing.

Somehow I got through there. But yeah, I remember that trip real well. But anyway, so I don't have all the connections that a lot of these other guys have. But I'm just gonna tell you this. Tom and I have this joke.

When we did that, what was that unpopular movie? Was that the name of it? When we did the unpopular movie, and it debuted in Texas, in Dallas. I have this memory, and this is a joke that Tom and I laugh about all the time.

I would put my hand on a Bible and put my other hand up and I would swear that Tom Buck wore overalls to that event. Because I have this amazingly clear memory. There was this young guy that came up to me afterwards.

And he was going into ministry in a Baptist church. I think it was a Southern Baptist church. And he was asking me questions. I'm like, you know, I know who you need to talk to. And I handed him off to Tom Buck.

And I remember the whole night after the movie played, it's not the longest movie, it's a good movie. Seeing Tom over there in his overalls, talking to this kid. You know, just being a pastor to this kid.

Now, Tom tells me the only pair of overalls he owns, I gave him. And I hadn't given him overalls yet. So he wasn't wearing overalls. But man, and I think it's just because of his Tennessee background.

I just see him in a straw hat with a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth, you know, and in his overalls and just sort of a little drawl going on. And Tom Buck is the guy you call to tell him anything.

You know, I mean, talk about anything from making fun of the Dallas Cowboys, which I love to do with him all the time. It's so much fun. Really enjoyed that part of my life. But then the serious stuff, you know, your mom just died, and Tom Buck's the type of guy you'd call.

Because that's what you tell Tom. Because he's a pastor. He's been at that church for 20 years. He's got a heart as big as Texas itself. You just know that he's not into self-promotion. He's not into any of that stuff.

My mom used to use the phrase, salt of the earth. I'm not sure where she got that. Maybe it's some Midwestern thing. There was a bunch of things she said that over the years I've been sitting there going, wonder where that came from.

But the one that I use and continue to use all the time is, well, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I mean, she said that so many times and that pops into my mind. Anyways, sorry about that.

Had a little bit of a brain seizure there. He's just salt of the earth. He is the guy you wish lived next door. You would trust him with anything. Pastor's heart, loves the word of God. You know, he loves apologetics.

I mean, he's put up with me for all this time. That was the church we did the Eric and Cantor presentation at. You know, they were willing to do that. I mean, that's not exactly, let's get all the people in the door type stuff.

You know, he's not trying to make that a mega church and do all the rest of that kind of stuff and all that stuff. So, you know, I've known this guy for years now and I just sit back and go, who would be so heartless as to try to damage this man's ministry and his church?

Why? I just cannot even conceive of the motivation. And so, you know, I don't know everything. So maybe some of them would say, well, we had our reasons, whatever. But, you know, he's gone through a lot of stuff over the past few years.

You know, the stuff with his wife and the anonymous stuff there and the Southern Baptist Convention and all the rest of this garbage. You know, you really could not blame him if he got just a little bit on the bitter side.

But, you know, so far from what I've been able to tell, he hasn't. And, you know, still expresses deep sorrow when I send him some meme about the cowboys. And he knows I love him. And though the cowboy thing, I mean, it's been so long since they went live.

I mean, now I'm starting to talk to him about how old he and I are, because we remember the last time the cowboys actually won the Super Bowl. It was the last century. Anyway, so it's all over X. And I just wanted to, you know, make a few comments because I've spoken at G3.

And I'm not, you know, some people are asking that G3 remove all their stuff like that. I'm not asking that. You know why? That stuff that we did, I want to get to as many people as possible. Okay? I mean, I have referred people to the dialogue discussion that Michael Kruger and I did on the Canon, dozens of times.

Because I think it's still really valuable. The presentation I made on, and this was not usual for G3, but the presentation I made on the harmonization of the synoptic gospel. That's the kind of stuff we do.

We recognize that we're sort of unique in doing that stuff and it's helpful to people. And so I don't care who has it out there. I want it to get to as many people as possible. So I'm not even thinking about stuff like that.

But yeah, there you go. There's my comments. Spent a lot more time than I thought I would on it. Let's go from that odd situation to this odd situation. When I saw this, I think it was Hitler hated Christ on X that posted this.

I could be wrong. It could be another guy. And again, I don't have access to X at the moment. Very frustrating. Yes, I've tried different browsers. Yes, I've cleared my cache. Yes, I know those basics.

Alex Jones and the Rise of Christless Nationalism

But when I saw this, it was part of a video. You might as well let them know what we're talking about or they're going to be going, what is he talking about? When I saw this, it was part of, when I first saw it was part of this video presentation.

Somebody did this long thing with this guy. Now, same guy, Alex Jones, that Jay Dyers hooked up with. And did Alex Jones say some good things during COVID? Did he recognize that weird stuff was going on?

Well, yeah, a lot of people did. Yeah, I did. Has he been wrong about everything? No, not everything. But could somebody put together a massively long video of all the stupid, dumb things he said that never panned out?

Of course. He's a muckraker. He's a click monger. He's a run with anything that will get people really excited type guy. But he's not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination. And the video that I first saw has this long thing where he's going on and on about this transgender woman who is a guy who dresses like a woman and manages to make himself look very attractive as a woman.

And it's this whole thing about, my genetics tells me you're a woman and you're just a pretty beautiful person and blah, blah, blah. And he's just going on and on and on. He has no clue of a Christian worldview, none at all, zero, nada.

And it just goes on and on. And you're just like, oh, this is painful to watch. And then you look at this group and there's one fellow in there that I was interviewed by him, I don't know, less than two years ago at one of the Fight, Laugh, Feast things.

We got along just fine, but evidently he's flipped his lid since then. Sort of sad, at the time it seemed like he was trying to stay balanced. But I mean, here's your rogue's gallery of the wacky elements of, well, it's NXR, wild, Christless nationalism.

And they've put this guy up front in the middle. The title is Christ is King, America after Trump. Why do you have Christ is King up there? I mean, how is this not actually blasphemous? I mean, I know that there are people who are saying, you can't say Christ is King because that's offensive to Jews, it's offensive to this group, offensive to all of us.

Okay, so maybe they're just trying to push back on that and say, we're gonna be offensive. Okay, fine. But there's meaning to things. This man does not know Christ. And there are other people in this group, you really wonder, well, they do either.

And please, whatever you do, whatever you do, do not stand here and say to me, this is missionary dating. This is missionary dating. Yeah, we know Alex needs Jesus. And so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna love on him for Jesus.

And we're gonna bring him to our Christ is King conference. And we're just gonna hope that he listens and comes to know Jesus. Please, please don't do that. That is not why this man's in the middle of this picture.

That man is in the middle of this picture for money and power and clicks. That's the only reason he's there is to get butts in the seats, period, end of discussion. And if you think anything other than that, you're a blooming idiot.

You can't see nothing that's right in front of your face because that's why he's there. And everybody knows it. Anybody with an iota of common sense knows why he's there. He can't say anything about Christ being King, not anything that would be truthful.

So here we're looking at this. And I said, we'll see by the end of 2025. Well, we're not even done with 2026. And the dumpster fire is roaring. The dumpster fire, there's the dumpster fire. I don't know how else to describe it, okay?

Okay, you've got Ogden over on this end. You've got our not quite Roman Catholic, who knows what group he's with today. He's been kicked out of how many groups? I don't know, but he's still a Romanist and he's clearly impacting others of these people in that direction.

They're collapsing on that stuff. They were never truly reformed. They were never committed. I don't know what the funny guy with the blood on his shirt is doing at any of these things. I really have no earthly idea.

His stuff during COVID was great to watch, but I guess there's a political guy down here. And of course, good grief, Dale Partridge, seriously? Yeah, I know, that's embarrassing. But you put Alex Jones massively in the center of this.

If that doesn't tell you this is Christless nationalism, I don't know what would. I mean, talk about handing us, here, put this on a shirt if you wanna know what Christless nationalism looks like. There it is.

Just absolutely astonishing. Saw this and went, wow. Don't know who the moneybags is behind all this stuff, but I said before, they got hold of somebody that's given them money to buy them all their equipment and do all that kind of stuff and the travel and all the rest of that stuff.

And here's the problem. Once you owe your soul to someone like that, they want payback. And you're gonna have to keep getting weirder and weirder and weirder. To keep the clicks coming. I told this man that, right there, Joel Webben.

I told him on the phone. I remember, well, look at that. There we go. Well, see, there you go. Yeah, there you go. There. I didn't know it would do that. You didn't even know that either. Well, there you go.

All right, well, I didn't mean to put its finger up his nose, okay? That was not intentional. Hello! All right, well, I don't know where that went, but I can take this down anyways. We don't need to have a signal up there.

I told Joel Webben. There we are. I told him on the phone. I remember I had just, I had stopped at a rest stop along the highway, somewhere in Central moving into Western Texas. The last time Joel Webben and I talked on the phone.

And I told him, Joel, you are trying to get people to follow you. And he's talking about, well, you know, these young men, they need guidance. They need to know what the gospel is. We're gonna try to get to them.

I said, Joel, the people you're gonna try to get will end up taking you far beyond where you ever think you'd be willing to go. And he's got Alex Jones coming? I told him. I told him, I warned him. And there he is.

Um, that's going to be a stinker. Big, big time stinker. All right, now I wanted to play, to read this X-Post, but I'm just gonna have to summarize it for you. Again, if anybody works for X, could you let me back in, please?

I mean, it works at home. My home unit and my phone, they both still work. But this one, just like, no, we're not gonna let that one back in again. It's like, okay. Oh, yeah, I was gonna play this video, which I cannot do because I didn't download it because I thought I'd be able to play it off of X.

The Veneration of Relics and the Case of Saint Agatha

You all saw the head of St. Agatha stuff that started rolling around on X. Head rolling around. I didn't mean to put it that way, but it could. If the guy had dropped it, it would have rolled around on the floor.

You all saw this video. It just looked up St. Agatha. It'll probably pull up almost immediately. Someone had mentioned it to me, and then it came up in my feed. There's this skull, allegedly of St. Agatha, who allegedly died under the persecution around 250 AD.

And they're kissing this skull, and they're putting it into this statue of her, and then closing it up and putting a crown on it, and they're carrying her procession and doing all the kind of idolatry that Rome is just so deeply committed to.

And I made a comment. Someone had posted that, and they had said that the reason that Protestants are all upset about this is Protestants have no idea what true worship is. This isn't worship, this is veneration.

Okay. So the Latria-Dulia distinction, stuff we've talked about for years and years and years, debated Patrick Madrid on it on Long Island, many, many moons ago. Calvin talked about it in the Institutes.

I mean, nobody today reads any of that stuff, and so they don't recognize any of that stuff anymore. But anyway, this guy writes back to me, and we have some back and forth. And in the same thread, as I recall, someone posted a clip from the last program where I talked about Terracios, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.

And I had mentioned the unusual way in which he became Patriarch, and the irregularities, and how even Pope Hadrian, I may not have mentioned this, but even Pope Hadrian in his letter to Nicaea II, which today is called the Seventh Ecumenical Council, remember, that's all later.

It took Rome a long time to even recognize it as a valid council. There were other churches in the East, took even longer than that. We're talking centuries here. So again, nobody at the time could have known, okay, Hieria, that's being anathematized, this is going to be established, Frankfurt's not going to make any difference, and this is going to be the Seventh Ecumenical Council, this is going to be the last Ecumenical Council the East and the West has agreed upon, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Nobody knows that at the time. So that's an issue that's relevant. And so I had mentioned it in the context of, hey, ask these guys, Stephen Boyce and the Orthodox guy, Alex Sorin, I think, ask these guys, how did anybody know?

Could anybody have known in 764 that the council in 754 was teaching something that would be anathematized in just a matter of decades? How could they have known? And how could they have known in 790 that now what was being promulgated from Nicaea II was going to be upheld and not overthrown the way Hieria had been overthrown?

There is no way of knowing. There is no way of knowing. It's all, well, because we tell you so now in hindsight a thousand years later. That's how it works. So I made some humorous comments about, I think Terracios would be a great name for a cat or a dog.

I don't really think it would be. But evidently, since he is a saint, you have to believe that. So I just wanted to give you some information, okay? Give you some background. Because this is another illustration of how there's one group that can do church history and there's two groups that cannot.

Tarasios, Nicaea II, and the Political Formation of Icon Veneration

Oh, it's not that they don't play at it. It's not that they don't write big books about it. It's not that some of them who, people who convert to Roman Catholicism pretend, oh, the church fathers are ours and that's why I convert it.

There's one group that can be honest with church history. It's not the Roman Catholics and it's not the Eastern Orthodox. Because both of those groups claim the authority to define what was taught in the past.

You can't contradict that. So if Nicaea 2 says, icon veneration is apostolic. Yes, sir. Well, what's the evidence that? Doesn't matter, sir. I don't want to be anathematized, sir. That's what you do. Now, you may play games with it.

You may try to make it considerably more nuanced than that, but fundamentally, just, you know, it's like with the papacy. And the funny thing is the Eastern Orthodox can see that the Roman Catholics do this.

They can't see it. They do it with this, but they can see the Roman Catholics do this. Status cognitum specifically states that what Vatican I said about the papacy is the ancient and constant faith of the church.

So why study church history? You now know what the ancient and constant faith of the church was, and you can't come to other conclusion. Now, do Roman Catholic historians come to other conclusions? Every single stinking day.

And that's why you call them liberals. But they come to that conclusion because that's what history says, and they create, it's sort of like, it's sort of like Roman Catholic politicians. Well, personally, I'm opposed to abortion, but I don't want to force my views on other people.

And so they end up schizophrenic. They have their personal views, allegedly, and then their public position. They live in two different worlds. They're just a walking, laughing contradiction. And the same thing happens within Roman Catholic scholarship.

Roman Catholic scholarship goes, oh, yeah, obviously, these Petrine passages do not establish a papacy. And that wasn't what the early church was about, and any of that kind of stuff. But then, when you get religious, you accept the traditional understanding of these things.

So anyway, Saint Terasios of Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, 784 to 806. That's a long time. That is a very long time to be in that position. Feast day, February 25th, if you're really excited about something like that.

But 730 to 806 are his life dates, anyways. So, yeah, that's not gonna work. Um, he has a patrician birth, born around 730 in Constantinople to George, a respected judge, and Eucratia, remembered for her piety.

His family later connected by kinship to the future patriarch, Photius, fairly well-known. Now, here's what you gotta grab. He rose through the imperial bureaucracy to senator, then to Patasecritus, which is the chief imperial secretary.

So, I mean, it's not a direct connection, but you can think of people who become senators in our form of government, and then become like secretary of state, or something like that, which is a higher position of authority.

It's in a different branch of government. But he is the chief imperial secretary to Empress Irene and her son Constantine VI by around the year 780. So, who is this man? Is he a theologian? No. He is a politician.

He is a highly placed chief imperial secretary. He is a patrician. He is high up in the Byzantine world, shall we say. But he is a politician. So, what happened? Well, layman to patriarch in a matter of days.

Most records say it was one week. One week. He's a layman. He is a politician. He has political power. What happens is Paul IV resigns. The ailing patriarch withdraws to a monastery and recommends Terracio, still a layman, as the one man able to restore the church.

Well, remember, who is he a secretary to? Empress Irene. And Empress Irene wants to have an ecumenical council. All of this, folks. All of this is the political machinations that brought about the seventh ecumenical council that if you are a faithful Roman Catholic or a faithful Eastern Orthodox, due to the epistemological systems of those beliefs and your rejection of Sola Scriptura, you have to believe what this council decided.

And fundamentally, you have to believe what the imperial secretary to the Byzantine Empire in 787 decided you had to believe. That's where it comes from. That's what you believe. You bury that under all sorts of religious language, but that's what it boils down to.

Irene puts his name to a great public assembly of clergy officials and people who proclaim him the fitting choice. Reminds me a little bit of how the last Democratic candidate for president became chosen when Joe Biden was finally admitted to be mentally incompetent, which he had been for years.

Same thing. Then staged reluctance. And even Price, who wrote the book on Nicaea II is written by Dr. Price. He's a Roman Catholic, but he's very even-handed. He's just a tremendous historian, obviously.

Even he recognized it. Tarasius protests his unworthiness and the burden of the office, a show of humility before accepting. So I've read his statement, Tarasius' statement, and I mentioned this briefly on the last program.

Fundamentally, he's like, I am insufficient to bear such an office as this. You could probably put something up now. Well, I mean, over in the corner there, but I'm insufficient to do something like this.

And, you know, all this false humility. Look, folks, before his name ever got mentioned on anybody's lips, Irene had already determined he's the next guy, and he's going to bring about this council that I want.

I, Irene had decided, she is an iconophile. So phileo, to love. So she is a lover of icons. Over the past decades, the official position of the Byzantine government has been iconoclastic. Take the icons down.

You're not to have icons in church. You're not to have them up on the wall. Hieria, in 754, had condemned the veneration of icons. She wants to reverse that. And she is working on the political stuff.

We're going to see her in a moment. She still had some work to do. But who are some of her greatest allies? The monks, the monasteries, that were deeply committed to the iconophile cause. And so this is planned out.

This is why Tarasius, in one week, so see, rapid ordination, in a matter of days, he passes through every clerical grade. Can you imagine what that looked like? I mean, by this time in Byzantine church history, there is ornate ceremony, there is dressing, there is all this.

And to go to the first step, then to the next step, and then the next step, with the same guy, like, the next day, and then the next day, and then the next day. I asked a guy on X today. I said, I'll tell you what.

You know, because he objected to what I had said about Tarasius. I just can't believe that he would object to Saint Tarasius, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my only response was, I'll tell you what. Tell me anybody, anybody in the pre-Nicene church, so pre -325, that would have accepted the emperor of the empire taking one of his imperial secretaries, or, well, it's her, but taking one of his imperial secretaries and making that person, in one week, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople or the Bishop of Rome, for that matter.

Show me anybody who would have accepted that happening before the Council of Nicea. He's like, I don't have to, that's just speculation. He ducked and dodged, because he knows I'm exactly right. The primitive church would never have allowed this to happen.

Never. And any honest person knows that. You are being dishonest if you're sitting there going, well, I don't know, we can't know, we can't know for sure, baloney, you know it. Quit deceiving yourself, you're being deceived.