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So thanks for your support. Thank you to Mighty Muscadine for sponsoring today's show. Now let's get started. You're listening to Clearview today with Dr. Abaddon Shaw, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Ryan Hill. I'm John Galantis, and welcome to the Clearview Today studio. To be specific, it's been a great week. We've had lots and lots of great conversations here in the Clearview Today studio with our host, Dr. Abaddon Shaw, who's a PhD in new testament textural criticism, professor at Carolina University, author, full-time pastor, and host of today's show, Dr. Shaw.
We're proud to be an American. At least I know I'm free. Wow. It sounds like a shock, like one of those spaghetti westerns. I've been watching a lot of podcasts lately, and you can always tell who's just got this thing that doesn't sound effect. They'll just do ones that don't make any sense at all at completely random times.
They'll be talking about going to get groceries and stuff, and all of the sound effects just have absolutely nothing to do with what's going on. They just go, wow! It's great to see you. Always good to laugh, because in life we get bogged down, we get worn out, attacked, frustrated. Sometimes we're just frustrated with ourselves, as we're going to talk about today from Romans chapter seven. But humor has a way of lifting our spirits. God designed us and gave us the gift of laughter, so we can laugh and laugh at others, laugh at ourselves. There's nothing we're not trying to demean people. It's good to laugh, and I think we have in our politically current culture, be afraid to laugh at anything. We need to be done away with that, close the chapter on that book.
That was a dark chapter. A lot of comedians were refusing to play universities. They were refusing to... Yeah, because once you make it such that anything and everything you say is offensive, then there's nothing left.
There's nothing left. And at that point, it's no longer about being nice to people. It's really about controlling people. I'm doing this so I can control you. Excuse me, sorry.
You cannot be talking about people like that. No, I just thought it was funny. No, no. Did you care about the feeling?
Did you? Did you care to see how that person... Okay.
So really, it has nothing to do with caring about people. It's simply, I want to control you. I want to control you, and I want to control you, and I want to control you. And we just want to say bye. Amen. We're done with that now. Bye, bye.
We're nice people, but we like to laugh, too. In the immortal words of NSYNC... Bye, bye, bye. There you go. What is it? Oh, man, I lost it. I'm checking out. I'm signing off.
What is it? Hold on. I know this lyric. You look at those lyrics.
The verse of the day comes from Ephesians chapter five, verse 30. I don't really want to make it tough. I'm so sorry. I don't really want to make it tough. I don't want to be a loser. You've interrupted Paul with Justin Timberlake, and that's crazy.
It's crazy to me. Paul wins. Paul wins. The verse of the day today from Ephesians chapter five, verse 30 says, for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. We've been doing a lot of talking about the flesh here recently, Dr. Schein. This is a really interesting passage because this is one that you actually wrote a paper on.
Was it the last paper you wrote, or was it the one before this one? This was from ETS 2024, where I talked about this passage. I did a paper on Acts on the Ethiopian eunuch, but this one was from 2023, where I talked about this phraseology of we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For those of you who are interested, this variant is in Ephesians 5, 30, where the longer reading says, for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. The critical text only has for we are members of his body, but the majority text, or really the Byzantine text, has of his flesh and of his bones.
What is the difference between those two? What is the critical text? I remember in the episode with Dwayne Green that we just did, he referenced that a bunch.
You both referenced that. Yeah, critical text, we're talking about Nestle Island or UBS, which is basically the same thing, other than the variants that are included under NA28 and UBS 5. The critical text is a text based on recent eclecticism. Is it even more Alexandrian?
It is definitely very Alexandrian because it gives preference to the older manuscripts, extant manuscripts, which will be, of course, Oliphant B, Codex Sanadicus, Codex Vaticanus. They do a lot of other things about choose the variant that explains all the other variants. Choose the shorter reading. They do a lot of that, but in the end, it's always Oliphant B. If there is a division there between Oliphant B, then it's usually B. Pick the reading which supports B.
There is a reading where they don't do that, and I've written a paper on that as well. That's found in Matthew 27, where it talks about the spear going inside Christ. Here in this particular reading, Ephesians 5, 30, the shorter text is supported by, quote unquote, early and good witnesses. Bruce Metzger, by the way, says this, although it is possible that the shorter text, which is supported by early and good witnesses, may have arisen by accidental omission, it is more probable that the longer reading reflects various scribal expansions coming from Genesis 2.23 or not. Meaning that according to him, that's not original to the text? Of the flesh and of the bones, it's not original because somehow the scribes were harmonizing to Genesis 2.23.
Okay. My goodness, they went all the way to Genesis 2.23. That's sort of a leap, isn't it? Bruce Metzger would say the scribes added that into the word.
Yes, yes, yes. You're 100% right. He would say the scribes added because they were trying to harmonize with Genesis 2.23. And in my paper, I've argued that that is a stretch mildly put. Because a scribe, I mean, generally speaking, scribes are not allowed to do that. Yeah, most scribes, and they have been great works done. Like, for example, Kim Haynes' Eitzens' work on scribal habits is just one good example of how most of the time scribes did not tamper with the text.
They tried to be as faithful as possible. And yet there were times that they did omit or transpose or add things. Sometimes there are even some readings that are added for clarification. Some readings were added to make the text sound a little more orthodox, but it's not as widespread as, say, Bart Ehrman makes it out to be.
Right. Can I try to summarize my understanding of this? I don't want to say conflict, but the situation with critical text and majority text, and you just tell me if I'm oversimplifying or if I'm just incorrect. So critical text, which is mainly Alexandrian, maybe overwhelmingly Alexandrian, they would say, hey, listen, it doesn't matter how many manuscripts agree or disagree. These ones, even though there's not very many, they're the oldest.
So that's probably original. Majority text, which tends to link Byzantine, would say, hey, those are the oldest, but we have a vast number of texts. Oldest extent. Oldest extent. It doesn't mean they're the oldest.
It means that they are the oldest that are still, that haven't been discovered. So now we are basing our text on what we feel like would be the oldest point to which we can go with the manuscript evidence. But that is a very, very poor argument, in my opinion. But that is their argument.
Those are probably original, closer to the original because they're older. And majority text would say you should really be looking at how many agree. Majority text would say that Byzantine priority is more than just majority text. The text may be the same, but the arguments behind it is different.
Majority text may be counting noses. Byzantine text priority view is more than that. It comes from a simple understanding that if we have a text here, then there should have been a predecessor.
This text must have come from somewhere. And some years ago, Maurice Robinson wrote a paper, and again, this is not like he's the first one to bring this to light, but it was one that he presented at an ETS, that when you examine the early papyri, because papyri go even earlier than those two manuscripts, Oliphant B. When you examine the early papyri, what you find is that they're not necessarily Alexandrian because that would be pretty much a closed case. They're not necessarily Alexandrian. They are sort of Alexandrian and Byzantine.
And in fact, many times, very Byzantine. Are they looking at a number of factors to determine whether it's Byzantine or Alexandrian? Variants. They look at variants. So it's not about the location they were discovered?
No, no, no. Because location can be because of travel. Somebody may have taken a manuscript from, say, Antioch in Syria, all the way to Alexandria, Egypt. Or they could have taken that manuscript from Alexandria, Egypt, all the way to Rome.
So people could travel back then. But it's a big debate and big, it'll take us a long time. It needs a couple of shows. So I'm processing that as we're just trying to distill this in little boxes in my head. So what is the argument here where it comes to office flesh and office bones? I believe that when it talks about that, office flesh and office bones, simply in some sense, I would say, just kind of going back to my paper, I believe the long reading is correct. I believe it should be for we are members of his body, office flesh and office bones.
And it's based on the textual analysis of the external and internal evidence. The question is, in what sense is each believer a member of the body of Christ, office flesh and office bones? Paul wrote this letter to the Ephesians because there was this growing schism between the Jewish background and the Gentile background believers. By the way, this was happening in Rome as well. I was just about to ask because we've been talking so much about Romans.
I guess this was also happening in Ephesus. So he was urging them to live in harmony. And so he invoked this Old Testament foundation of the New Testament church.
So he invoked the Old Testament because in Ephesians he uses many Old Testament references. And so while he's addressing this ecclesial unity, we are members of his body, office flesh and office bones. Paul also addressed the familial unity between the husband and the wife, because later on he talks about how husband and wife are members of one another, those kinds of things, the Hausstaufen section. And he did this without compromising the order laid out in Genesis 2, where the husband Adam was made first and then the woman was made from Adam.
Now she's bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. So how amazing is that when Paul is trying to bring the Gentiles together with the Jewish background believers, Gentile background, Jewish background believers, he's still teaching them a deeper lesson, a lesson about husband wife unity without compromising the order, the role that husband plays in the marriage and the role that the wife plays in the marriage. So it's a very deep text. We went much further than we needed to go. I hope people realize that just when you think that the Bible is a simple book that you can just pick up and read and understand everything.
Yes, you can. But it has depths that I believe eternity is not enough to fathom. Well, that's why I like so much listening to you talk about text critical issues because it shows us the deeper matters that are underneath it. Just the text that we're reading, even the English versions that sit in our hands, that are the word of God.
But there's so much that's gone into making those versions possible. There's so much research and ongoing research that goes into making the Bible what it is today. We said that at the top of every episode, Dr. Abaddon Shaw is a text critic. But what I like about the show is that there's not a text critic in all of us in that Mr. Rogers type of way, but it is fun to kind of dive into the Bible and it lets you realize, man, this Bible makes sense. The word of God really makes sense.
Absolutely. It hangs together. And there's so much, the thing that amazes me, I think, is that ongoing research, the exploration into plumbing the depths of God's word. There's stuff that's still being discovered, not new scripture, but there's the ways that the Bible fits together.
There's variants that are being resolved. Even as we're speaking, there's research that's happening. I think that's an exciting thing. Speaking of the depths of God's word, the way we ended things yesterday on the show really left a lot of people wanting more. People were writing it and saying, I was just getting into it.
I felt the exact same way. We were just getting into the conversation yesterday when we ran out of time. But Dr. Shaw, if you remember, you were bringing up a lot of the things that we do. There's things literally about us.
You know what I mean? It's not just things we do, but things about us that kind of diminish, take away from the glory of God. And your advice was start writing some of those things down. Look at them every day. What's keeping me from living out the Christian life?
I went home and did it. You know, I put it in my notes app and man, it was, it was a really great time of just being able to pray and being able to look at these things critically and saying, okay, this is a condensed version of who I am. And these are the things I don't like. It's very eye-opening. It is. There are, I would say several layers of sins that we have to deal with.
The external layers are very simple things like, oh, I need to do better at that. You know, maybe I need to pray more. I need to read the Bible more. I need to go to church more. Okay.
That's great. But then we go deeper and then you find other areas where there are certain sins that you're dealing with. And these might be habitual sins. These may might be coming from that list of sins like envy and covetousness and those kinds of sins. And then when you get on a deeper level here, we're talking about sin that is part of our system, our psyche, our makeup, which is so deep and it is so ingrained. It has so defined our personality, our makeup, our very life of who we are, that we don't even see that as sin.
And yet it is probably the worst kind. And as we begin to grow in the Christian life, God wants to deal with even that. And the reason he wants to deal with even that is not just because he wants to make us holy, which is true.
But if you go back to Romans for a quick moment, there's a purpose behind that. So let's read Romans chapter seven, verse four. It says, therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ that you may be married to another to him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.
Okay. The key that I want to understand here is that we are to bear fruit to God. And then it says it again in verse five, when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.
Okay. So here you find that word fruit repeated several times. And so the question for us is why, why is fruit mentioned again and again in the book of Romans, by the way, Paul mentions fruit several times. He talks about having fruit among God's people in Rome. He talks about in Romans six, 21, what fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed on and on. And then verse 22, Romans six, it says, but now having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness. And then and then of course, the passage we just read Romans chapter seven, verse seven, verse five and four and five.
So when we understand that we died with Christ, we were buried with him. We have risen to walk in the newness of life, that we are no longer married to Mr. Law, that now we are married to Christ. Don't go back to the law, stay with Christ. And what will pull you back to the law is not just keeping certain commandments, it's operating by certain principles. Even if those principles are faulty, even if those principles are contrary to how God works, they're so part of our system that we feel like they're normal. This is a normal thing. I'm not hurting anybody.
I'm not an evil person, but this is just a normal thing. I'm not asking you an example of some of those principles because I feel like this is going to really unlock something for somebody who's listening to the listening to the show because it did for us when we heard it in the message. Yeah, because it's a foundational thing that we operate on principle, but a lot of times when we say that, because it sounds good, but then it's like, well, what principles do we operate on?
I don't know. Yeah. So for example would be being mistreated by people, right? That could be one of those things that maybe you went through or being hurt by people or some other thing that comes from a negative experience that we have created a way of dealing with those things. We have created our own persona, our personality. This is very much who we are. This is how we handle things. And so that becomes part of our personality, okay?
So that we won't be hurt again or that we won't be taken advantage of again or somebody is mistreating us. Oh, I walk away. I walk away. Sounds good, but you walk away not just because you don't want to fight that person. You walk away because this is your way of de-engaging or I was a bad word, kind of disengaging from, but that does not help because at times you can misunderstand the person.
At times your family needs you and you are disengaging because that's how you build up this personality to do that. Sometimes it's becoming just agreeing. You're very agreeing person.
I'll give into that. Now it's not wrong to be agreeing as long as that is something good, but agreeing can also be a passive way of disengaging. These are things, these are principles.
This is a law that we have sort of created by which we survive. Yeah, I can, I can speak to that like as an agreeable person. Like I'm more agreeable than I'm disagreeable, but a lot of times agreeable people can use their agreeableness as a weapon.
And what I mean by that is you're not going to, an agreeable person typically will avoid conflict, but they'll also agree to whatever someone's saying with the idea that yeah, I'm going to agree to it so that when it fails, you'll see that was right. Or I just want to move past this. I'm going to say whatever you need me to say in order to get past this and because, but even so, I'm not one bit with you. I'm not connected here. I have already disengaged. So thinking a little introspectively for myself here, you know, some of the things that I struggle with whenever there's conflict or whenever there's, you know, kind of tension between me and someone else is I tend to get very detached, very cold, like I'm going to keep you at arm's length, whatever you say, fine.
I guess still agreeable, but very, very kind of emotionless, detached in a way of self-preservation maybe or, or just maybe like we said, just kind of moving past, moving on. Right. Now, why is that harmful? Because in a, in an average situation in the world, nobody would say, Hey, no, that's not right. In fact, people would say, no, that's a good thing. That's the way you kind of cope with what's happening. That's a good mechanism.
I wish I could do that. Why is that not a good thing? Because that would prevent you from bearing fruits. So what is God going to do? Keep in mind Romans 7 is not just an isolated passage. It goes along with other passages of similar themes throughout the Bible.
One such that comes to mind is John 15, because in John 15, Jesus talks about I'm divine. You are the branches. As long as you abide in me, you'll bear much fruit.
Right. And what happens, what does God do in this abiding process? The biggest thing he does for us is he prunes us. So we think, okay, I'm not a bad person. I don't do bad things. I don't, you know, go out there and commit sexual fornication. I am not envious, angry, adverse, none of those things. I must be okay. And God says, yes, but I desire more fruit.
That's right. It's not just fruit. You're bearing fruit. You're not bearing fruit. If you look at John chapter 15 for a quick moment, it says every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away and every branch that bears fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit.
That's very hard for us to understand because we think, or I think that, Hey, look, none of those big sins. And yes, I am bearing fruit. Give me a break.
Right. I'm bearing fruit. I must be good. I was like that in childhood a lot because my sister was usually the one to act up and I was like, compared to her, I'm golden. But then my parents would get on to me about something. Hey, you didn't do that.
I was like, are you serious? I'm the golden child. I'm doing great. But that can happen even in ministry because we go, I'm not doing some of those outlier, you know, outside the outer ring sins. Neither am I doing the second layer.
What is this third layer? What are you doing, God? Why are you increasing pressure in my life? Why do I need to be pruned? Because God is not satisfied with us just bearing one or two fruits. He wants us to bear much fruit and much fruit happens with pruning.
So circumstances will come, situations will happen. And in the process, what God is doing is he's pruning us so that we will bear more fruit. So take the fruit from here in John 15 and put it alongside Romans seven and then see how those things work.
Because again, this is not just taking a word here and a word there. What does Romans seven and verse five say? It says Romans seven and verse five says for when we were in the flesh, the simple passions, which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.
Right? So previously all this was bearing fruit to that. But now what does Romans seven, verse four say? Therefore my brethren, you have also become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.
Married to another. That's the same. That's a different analogy, but the same principle. In Romans, it is marriage. In John 15, it is the vine and the branches. There's still a connection, the connection, just like marriage, husband and wife become one flesh. So also the vine and the branches are one flesh. Okay.
One tree, same thing is happening here. Right? So when you put those two things together, you begin to realize this is not some, uh, something that we are finding in Romans seven alone. This is also in John 15. It's also a beautiful picture of how the Bible will take a negative and turn it into a positive. So it turns, it goes from, you better deal with sin in your life because sin is not good. Hey, listen, no sin is not good, but look at what God has in store. This is why you deal with the sin so that you can bear fruit, not just so you don't get in trouble.
And the design is for you to go from bearing fruit to bearing much fruit and not bearing fruit to death, but bearing fruit unto God. It's a great image, I think of spiritual immaturity versus spiritual maturity. Cause when I was immature, seriously, like me personally, as a kid, all I cared about was not getting in trouble. I don't do bad things because I don't get in trouble.
And that's what immaturity literally is. And then as you spiritually mature, even as you physically mature, you say, no, no, I want to do the right things. Like I want to work out. I want to get right with the Lord.
I want to eat healthy because it's going to benefit. Right. Yeah. You see the golden side of it. That's so good.
That's right. Make sure you join us next week. Same time, same station. We're going to be diving into another great topic here on the Clear View Today show. Thanks again to our sponsors for making today's episode possible. Don't forget that you can support us by subscribing to the show on iTunes and you can always support us financially at ClearViewTodayShow.com. John, we're coming up on the weekend.
What are you going to listen to today? So definitely want to encourage every single person who's listening to this to be in church, be worshiping God. If you don't have a church family, you can always join us online, ClearViewBC.org. You can also follow us on Facebook, YouTube, we stream all of our services there. Big, big thank you to everyone over at Pray.com. Still pushing 5k followers for Dr. Shah. If you are watching on Pray.com right now, come on over to Dr. Shah's page, hit that follow button. Thank you to everyone who's giving to the ministry.
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