Another blatant example of anti-Mormon hypocrisy and double-standards

In an old episode of his "Dividing Line" Webcast, James White said the following about how some Catholic apologists dismiss scholarship as being "liberal" without interacting with such (the topics in view were the canonicity of the Apocrypha and the earliest references to the assumption of Mary):

Well, generally, when, when Catholic scholarship gores the Catholic apologists' favourite response, they simply dismiss the scholarship as being "liberal," that has been my experience generally is that when they run up against their own scholars, because they're using an invalid defense that they're either ignorant of that scholarship and therefore they give a knee-jerk reaction saying "oh well, he must not be a real Catholic!" (beginning at the 38:51 mark)

This only shows the utter hypocrisy of James White. Why? In his (franky pathetic) response to a piece I wrote (Refuting Jeff Durbin on "Mormonism"), he dismissed much of what I wrote as relying upon so-called "liberal" scholarship without engaging in any meaningful interaction with such nor did he engage in any meaningful exegesis of the relevant biblical texts.

"My Sacred Grove Experience"

I came across the following blog post which I thought was very well done and rather moving; I am sharing it here in case others will enjoy it, too:

My Sacred Grove Experience: Thoughts on Being a Mormon and believing Joseph Smith was a Prophet

As an aside, the author of this piece works for Book of Mormon Central, an organisation you should check out as they produce great material on that great text.

Peter Enns on Original Sin

Peter Enns, author of works such as Inspiration and Incarnation, just posted an article on his blog:

5 Old Testament Reasons Why “Original Sin” Doesn’t Work

The article should be read in its entirety, but here are his five reasons:

1. Inherited sinfulness is not one of the curses on Adam.

2. Throughout the Old Testament, pleasing God through obedience is both expected, commanded, and doable.

3. With one exception, Adam disappears after Genesis 5.

4. Adam is not blamed for Cain’s act of murder.

5. Likewise, Adam is not blamed for the flood. 

I. Howard Marshall on the "city of David"

I. Howard Marshall, a leading Protestant expert on the Gospel of Luke, wrote the following:

In the OT the ‘city of David’ is the hill of Zion in Jerusalem (2 Sa. 5:7, 9; et al.), but in the NT the description is applied to Bethlehem (2:11); Burger, 136, claims that the appellation is due to Luke and is erroneous; cf., however, Jn. 7:42. Bethlehem was about 4 ½ miles from Jerusalem and 90 miles from Nazareth. Its name was popularly taken to mean ‘house of bread’. (The suggestion that it means ‘house of (the god) Lakhmu’ (Schürman, I, 102 n. 30) is to be rejected (D.F. Payne, NBD, 144) ). But the significance lies not in its name but in its being the place where David was brought up and where, according to Mi. 5:2 (cf. SB I, 82f) the Messiah would be born. Thus the attentive reader is prepared for the birth of a child to a descendant of David in the city of David. (I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke [The New International Greek Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1978], 105)

Such mirrors many comments by LDS apologists vis-à-vis the “land of Jerusalem” (Alma 7:10) question. Furthermore, such jives well with ancient Jewish interpretations of Psa 87 (understood in the Aramaic Midrashim and other texts to be Messianic) places "Bethlehem" in Jerusalem; to quote one commentator:

The text, [Psalm 87] with midrashim to be found in the Targum, the LXX, Midrash on Psalms, and elsewhere has its major fascinations, but the important idea for us is that when God writes down the peoples, i.e. makes a census of the world, this man, or Man will be born there, i.e. in Jerusalem, the ritual limits of which, as Passover practice showed, included Bethlehem. (John Duncan Martin Derrett, Light on the Narratives of The Narratives of the Nativity, Novum Testamentum, vol. 17, (1975), 86. 

In Isa 66:7-8, a Messianic text, we read:

Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? Or shall a nation be before at once? For as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.

The setting of this verse is that of Jerusalem, as seen in verse 6 (emphasis added):

A voice of noise from the city, a voice from the temple, a voice of the Lord that rendereth recompense for his enemies.

Andrew Perry, a Christadelphian, in his commentary, Isaiah 58-66 (Lulu Books), pp.206-7 noted that (emphasis in original):

The man-child is delivered before the “travail” of Zion, which is an evident figure for the Assyrian invasion and particularly the blockade of Jerusalem. Zion (feminine) was delivered of a male before she was in labour . . . The best link is with the prophecy of the Rod of Jesse (Isa 11:1) who is predicted to “come forth” and be a “standard” for the people (Isa 11:10; 59:21).

In the same work (p. 206 n. 3) Perry, commenting on the setting of the birth of this Messianic figure being Zion, notes that, “This does not mean the child was born in Jerusalem; it could have been a nearby village (cf. Mic 5:2).”

If Evangelical and Catholic critics of the Book of Mormon wish to attack Alma 7:10 in the Book of Mormon, they will have to, if they wish to be consistent, attack the inspiration of various biblical (both OT and NT) texts, too.

Robert Sungenis on εως ου in Matthew 1:25

Commenting on the use of εως ου in Matt 1:25, Robert Sungenis wrote the following to defend the Catholic dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity:

Other factors mitigate against regarding Mt 1:25’s use of heos hou as terminating the action of the verb. For example, Mt 1:25 contains a significant textual variant. One major Greek manuscript, Codex Vaticanus (B), omits hou (οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως ἔτεκεν; ouk eginosken auten heos eteken). Even more discrepancies appear in Mt 26:36. Codices B and 067 contain heos hou, but Codices D, K, L, W, Δ, Θ and 074 contain heos an; while Codex Sinaiticus (א), and C, 28, 33 contain heos; and Codex Alexandrinus (A) and P⁵³ have heos hou an. This evidence shows that the Greek transcribers saw no difference between heos and heos hou, otherwise they would not have replaced one with the other. In their minds, all the heos conjunctive forms were interchangeable, in the first century and long afterwards. (Robert A. Sungenis, The Gospel According to St. Matthew [The Catholic Apologetics Study Bible, volume 1; Goleta, Calif.: Queenship Publishing, 2003], 196)

To say that this is a desperate attempt by Sungenis to defend Catholic Mariology is an understatement. To think that, as one Codex (B) lacks the pronoun ου in Matt 1:25 “proves” that εως and εως ου were understood to have the same meaning as one another would mean that, based on the textual differences between John 1:18, ancient scribes and early Christians understood υιος (“son”) and θεος (“God”) to have the one and the same meaning!

As Eric Svendsen, author of Who is My Mother? The Role and Status of the Mother of Jesus in the New Testament and Roman Catholicism (Amityville, N.Y.: Calvary Press, 2001) wrote in response to Sungenis on this issue:

Sungenis has suggested here that if we can find instances of heos hou that act as textual variants where either heos an or heos alone appears in the NT, we have thereby established that heos hou is “interchangeable” in the minds of the scribes who composed these manuscripts with heos an or heos alone. Unfortunately, such a suggestion betrays a misunderstanding of how textual variants and scribal glosses came about. When scribes were copying a new manuscript from a parent manuscript, they rarely made intentional changes. In the majority of cases, the scribes either misheard (in the case of auditory copying) or misread (in the case of personal copying) a word or phrase, and wrote the resulting variant in its place. When they did make intentional changes, it was because of one of three reasons: (1) to make contextual sense, (2) to make grammatical sense, or (3) to make theological sense. Yet, in each case, the change is made precisely because the scribe sees a difference in the word or phrase in the text as opposed to the word or phrase in the variant he is supplying.

The point is, whether the change was intentional or unintentional, scribes never made the kind of changes that Sungenis suggests above; namely, that a scribe knowingly substituted one word for another simply because he saw them as interchangeable. Indeed, if they were really synonyms (hence, interchangeable), we would expect the scribe to make no change at all. Scribes were reverent copyists, taking every precaution to get the original wording right. That means if heos hou was the original reading, and the scribe intentionally changed it to heos an or heos alone, he would do so only on the assumption that there is a difference in the two constructions—he would never change it on the assumption that there is no difference between them, in spite of Sungenis’ odd insistence to the contrary.

Given Sungenis’ explanation above, one wonders whether he would treat other textual variants the same way. Is Sungenis willing to argue, for instance, that monogenes huios (“only begotten son”) is interchangeable with monogenes theos (“only begotten god”) in John 1:18? As a less theologically loaded example, does Sungenis wish to postulate that the reading, “watch yourselves, in order that you do not lose that which we have accomplished [eirgasametha]” is interchangeable with the variant reading, “watch yourselves, in order that you do not lose that which you have accomplished [eirgasasthe]” in 2 John 8, and that the copyists “saw no difference in meaning between” the two statements?

William Loader on Jesus' use of Psalm 82 in John 10

Psalm 82 in John 10:34-39--Angelic Elohim?

Another interpretation avoids the blandness of this [the θεοι/gods being human judges] approach by referring to the way Psalm 82 is used in Qumran. Emerton drew attention to 11QMelch, where the elohim ("gods") among whom God takes his place in council and holds judgement (82:1), whom he rebukes (82:2-5), and whom he addresses with the words, "You are gods, sons of the most high all of you; nevertheless you shall die like men and fall like any human prince" (82:6-7), are heavenly beings, angels. This is also better OT exegesis of the original. For in 11QMelch Melchisedek assumes God's role as judge in the heavenly council. The original psalm uses the word elohim, which can mean either God, gods or angels, to refer to beings other than God (ii 9). The LXX translates: θεοι. Jesus' argument would then be as follows: if it was valid to address these heavenly beings as "gods" or "sons of God," is it not all the more valid for the one God sanctified and sent into the world, to be so addressed? The use of θεος here would be similar to its use of the Logos in the prologue and would not have the effect of watering down the concept of sonship to the same degree presupposed in the more common interpretation [that holds that the gods are human judges] . . . On balance, [this] interpretation coheres better with the context and the Christology of the Gospel as a whole. (William Loader, Jesus in John's Gospel: Structure and Issues in Johannine Christology [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2017], 342-43; comments in square brackets added for clarification are mine)

The High view of Adam in the Testament of Abraham

The following translations of the Testament of Abraham come from The Pseudepigrapha (English), Translated by Craig E. Evans, assisted by Danny Zacharias, Matt Walsh, and Scott Kohler. Copyright © 2008 Craig A. Evans as found on Bibleworks.

So Michael turned the chariot and brought Abraham to the east, to the first gate of heaven; and Abraham saw two ways, the one narrow and contracted, the other broad and spacious, and he saw two gates, the one broad on the broad way, and the other narrow on the narrow way. And outside the two gates there he saw a man sitting upon a gilded throne, and the appearance of that man was terrible, as of the Master. And they saw many souls driven by angels and led in through the broad gate, and other souls, few in number, that were taken by the angels through the narrow gate. And when the wonderful one who sat upon the golden throne saw few entering through the narrow gate, and many entering through the broad one, straightway that wonderful one tore the hairs of his head and the sides of his beard, and threw himself on the ground from his throne, weeping and lamenting. But when he saw many souls entering through the narrow gate, then he arose from the ground and sat upon his throne in great joy, rejoicing and exulting. And Abraham asked the chief-captain: "My lord chief-captain, who is this most marvelous man, adorned with such glory, and sometimes he weeps and laments, and sometimes he rejoices and exults?" The bodiless one said: "This is the first-created Adam who is in such glory, and he looks upon the world because all are born from him."And when he sees many souls going through the narrow gate, then he arises and sits upon his throne rejoicing and exulting in joy, because this narrow gate is that of the just, that leads to life, and they that enter through it go into Paradise. For this, then, the first-created Adam rejoices, because he sees the souls being saved. "But when he sees many souls entering through the broad gate, then he pulls out the hairs of his head, and casts himself on the ground weeping and lamenting bitterly, for the broad gate is that of sinners, which leads to destruction and eternal punishment. And for this the first-formed Adam falls from his throne weeping and lamenting for the destruction of sinners, for they are many that are lost, and they are few that are saved, "for in seven thousand there is scarcely found one soul saved, being righteous and undefiled." (Testament of Abraham 11:1-12 [recension A])

And Abraham said: "My lord chief-captain, who is this most wondrous judge, and who are the angels that write down, and who is the angel like the sun, holding the balance; and who is the fiery angel holding the fire?" The chief-captain said: "Do you see, most holy Abraham, the terrible man sitting upon the throne? This is the son of the first created Adam, who is called Abel, whom the wicked Cain killed, "and he sits thus to judge all creation, and examines righteous men and sinners. For God has said: 'I will not judge you, but every man born of man will be judged.' "Therefore he has given to him judgment, to judge the world until his great and glorious coming, and then, O righteous Abraham, is the perfect judgment and recompense, eternal and unchangeable, which no one can alter. "For every man has come from the first-created, and therefore they are first judged here by his son, "and at the second coming they will be judged by the twelve tribes of Israel, every breath and every creature. "But the third time they will be judged by the Lord God of all, and then, indeed, the end of that judgment is near, and the sentence terrible, and there is none to deliver. "And now by three tribunals the judgment of the world and the recompense is made, and for this reason a matter is not finally confirmed by one or two witnesses, but by three witnesses will everything be established. "The two angels on the right hand and on the left, these are they that write down the sins and the righteousness, the one on the right hand writes down the righteousness, and the one on the left the sins. "The angel like the sun, holding the balance in his hand, is the archangel, Dokiel the just weigher, and he weighs the righteous deeds and sins with the righteousness of God. "The fiery and pitiless angel, holding the fire in his hand, is the archangel Puruel, who has power over fire, and tries the works of men through fire, "and if the fire consume the work of any man, the angel of judgment immediately seizes him, and carries him away to the place of sinners, a most bitter place of punishment. "But if the fire approves the work of anyone, and does not seize upon it, that man is justified, and the angel of righteousness takes him and carries him up to be saved in the lot of the just. "And thus, most righteous Abraham, all things in all men are tried by fire and the balance." (Testament of Abraham 13:1-14 [recension A])

And Michael went up into heaven, and spoke before the Lord concerning Abraham. And the Lord answered Michael: "Go and take up Abraham in the body, and show him all things, and whatever he will say to you do to him as to my friend." So Michael went forth and took up Abraham in the body on a cloud, and brought him to the river of Ocean. And Abraham looked and saw two gates, the one small and the other large, and between the two gates sat a man upon a throne of great glory, and a multitude of angels round about him, and he was weeping, and again laughing, but his weeping exceeded his laughter seven-fold. And Abraham said to Michael: "Who is this that sits between the two gates in great glory; sometimes he laughs, and sometimes he weeps, and his weeping exceeds his laughter seven-fold?" And Michael said to Abraham: "Do you not know who it is?" And he said: "No, lord." And Michael said to Abraham: "Do you see these two gates, the small and the great? "These are they that lead to life and to destruction. "This man that sits between them is Adam, the first man whom the Lord created, "and set him in this place to see every soul that departs from the body, seeing that all are from him. "When, therefore, you see him weeping, know that he has seen many souls being led to destruction. "But when you see him laughing, he has seen many souls being led into life. "Do you see how his weeping exceeds his laughter? Since he sees the greater part of the world being led away through the broad gate to destruction, therefore his weeping exceeds his laughter seven-fold." (Testament of Abraham 8:1-16 [recension B])