You're listening to Clearview Today with Dr. Abadan Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Ryan Hill. I'm John Galantis, and it's finally Friday here at the Clearview Today studio. We are free again.
We got our motors running for a wild weekend. You know, you've made that reference multiple times, and I still have that. It's an old radio song from John Boy and Billy. It was like finally Friday. I'm free again.
You never remember that? You remember that, listening to John Boyle? That was back in the day when I was working at Piedmont Automotive. And they were on, and you felt guilty for laughing because they were funny. They were really funny.
I shouldn't be laughing at them. Yeah, I remember on Friday mornings, they would play that song and they had all sorts of that. Was like when radio sound effects didn't have to make sense at all. It was like pig squealings and trucks and bald eagles and stuff. Why?
Who knows? Who knows? That's just how radio was. Hey, listen, we are here in the Clearview Today studio with our host, Dr. Abadan Shah, who's a PhD in New Testament textual criticism, professor at Carolina University, author, full-time pastor, and the host of today's show.
Dr. Shah, it's good to see you today. It's good to see you today as well. Thank you guys. Today is a very special day.
We have a very special guest with us. I'm very excited to have him on the show today. And let me know when I can introduce you. Oh, here, I'll give you the drum roll. Go for it, my friend.
Oh, okay. Today we have with us.
Okay. Dr. Clark Bates. There we go. There we go.
Yeah, give me an American Eagle. What in the world? They should not have given this to me. This was the wrong choice.
Well, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. I've known, I just call you Clark, but this is Dr.
Bates. But I've known about you and what you were doing at Phoenix, and then you went on to England at the University of Birmingham to do your PhD, which you just finished. Yeah, yeah, just the summer of last year. Wow. Summer of last year.
And your dissertation is about to come out in June of 2025. That's right. Yeah, it's coming out, published with DeGroyter.
So big money German publisher. Not affordable to any human being on earth other than Elijah. It is prestigious. Yes, it's a very top-level publisher.
So I'm excited to see that. And it was an honor that they wanted to take care of it. Yeah, and I was in Birmingham for a conference that happens every other year. And I ran into you, I heard your paper, and I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. Cool.
I'm going to talk to Clark on the way out, and then we were on the bus. Yeah. And you and I connected, and I was like, Yeah, we definitely need to have you on the show. And so here we are. I love it.
Super. And your family's here with you as well. They are. Yeah. We've been on a kind of an East Coast tour for missionary work that we're getting ready to engage in.
So, yeah. That's really awesome. Very cool. We'll talk a little bit more about that on the show. But welcome to the show.
We're glad that you're here today. Yeah, I do want to dive into your work, but since we're talking about the Bible, right, talking about the Word of God, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, particularly about the book of Proverbs. This is a game that we play on the show, especially with guests. We love to play this game. It's called Proverb or Nover.
Here's what's going to happen: I'm going to give each of you gentlemen, you find upstanding gentlemen, a proverb from the Bible.
Now, here's the thing: this is where all my academic credibility comes away.
Some of these.
Well, got lost in mine several times. See, one thing you can't do in academia is use Chat GPT. The good thing is, on the radio, you can use ChatGPT all you want.
So, ChatGPT has cleverly hidden some fake proverbs in here. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to let you kind of see it. Ryan, I'm going to start with you. My friend, the lazy man buries his hand in the bowl.
It wearies him to bring it back to his mouth. Proverb or nonverb. Hmm, sounds like a proverb. It is a proverb. That's Proverbs 26, 15.
Nice. Dr. Shah, this is yours.
Okay. As a ring of gold in a swine's snout, so is a lovely woman who lacks discretion. Yeah, that's a proverb. That's a proverb. Yeah, Proverbs 11, 22.
All right. Even the ant stores in summer, but the fool naps at harvest and begs in vain.
Well, we got prov we got some proverb language in there. Yeah. Chat GPT is smarter than we give it credit for. I don't feel like it's a full proverb. I'm going to go with no verb.
It's a no verb. Good job. Good job. Good job. Good job.
You maintained your mind. You maintained it. Didn't even need a tutorial, just straight into it.
So, this is the thing: when you play with just regular people, they're like, ah, but when you play with academics, they're like, I have to get this. Wayne Green was the same way. He was like, Can I phone a friend? He's writing. All right, exactly.
Here you go, Ryan. He who passes by and meddles in a quarrel, not his own, is like one who takes a dog by the ears. I'm going to go navarb on that one. Oh, my friend. That's a proverb.
It is a proverb. It's a proverb. Proverbs 26, 17. Dr. Shah, the eyes of the mocker will be plucked by ravens and eaten by vultures.
Oh, my goodness. I would say navarb. That is a proverb. Proverbs 30, 17. It's okay.
It's okay. These are good. These are good. All right. Dr.
Bates: do not boast in the day of trouble, for clouds gather without sound. I want to go with Proverb. I'm so sorry. It's a number.
So close. All right, Ryan. You're in the lead. Ryan, here you go.
Okay. A ruler who lacks understanding is a great oppressor. Last round. A ruler who lacks understanding is a great oppressor, but he who hates covetousness will prolong his days. I think proverb.
That is a proverb. Good job. He hits all the easy ones. Yeah. What is with this?
Well, so sometimes if you ask GPT just to do this, it'll just give you like lean not on your own understanding. Like, not man. You got to give me obscure ones. A man, Dr. Shah, a man who isolates himself, seeks his own desire.
He rages against all wise judgment. No verb. That's a proverb. Proverbs 18:1. What translation are you?
Challenge that. Challenge that. To be fair, I asked it to give me really obscure ones. All right. The Mormon book comes.
Last one. Last one. The churning of milk produces butter, and the ringing. And wringing the nose produces blood.
So the forcing of wrath produces strife. Proverb. That is a proverb. Yeah. Proverbs 33:33.
All right. That's proverb or not.
So, Ryan wins, Ryan, Ryan unequivocally. My defense is that I'm a New Testament guy. That's not Joshua. You got two New Testament scholars. I wonder if I could do like verses from Revelation.
I'm sure that you could. Revelation or Revelation? Nah. I don't know. But, gentlemen, very, very good work.
I'm going to work top that. I love it. Well, we're excited to have you on the show today. Share a little bit about kind of your journey from where you started with getting your PhD to where you are now. Tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing.
Sure. Yeah. It's actually funny because, well, maybe not funny, but when I started this journey, I had no. Academic training at all. I had been in the military for 10 years.
I was in this small church in Oregon. Had started to lead like men's ministry a little bit and teach, and they really identified the elders there and said, You know, you seem like you have a gift of teaching. We think we'd love to see the Lord do something with this. You should probably pursue some education so that you can be better equipped for whatever it might be that God has for you to do. And so I started, I didn't know what to do, so I just started with the Bachelor's of Religion.
I started working online because I was working full-time, and that led to an IMDiv. And then, as kind of time went on, it started to be clear that maybe pastoral ministry wasn't what we were being called to. And so, I need the MDF wasn't sufficient for doing teaching at a high academic level.
So, I went to another master's degree, which took me eventually to Phoenix Seminary. And then from there, on to a PhD in the UK. And so, over that time, it started as a ministry call, and it still is a ministry call. But it kind of evolved into a much more academic call. And I don't think those two should ever be divorced, but there are certain levels between them.
And In that time, I think it was probably around my master's, my second master's degree, I started getting exposed to working with manuscripts, Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. My Greek had gotten to the point where I could read Greek.
So then I met somebody who was working with the Museum of the Bible on what was called the Greek Paul Project at that time. Which was the transcribing of manuscripts of the pastoral epistles. And they needed volunteers. This job was done entirely with volunteer work, and it's been going on for years. And so they connected me with the people there, a man named Andrew Shepard, who works, or I'm sorry, Andrew at the Shepard Theological Seminary, Andrew Smith.
And he was heading up the project and he gave me some manuscripts. And I went through this sort of training process to learn how to read them. And I went to end up going to a course in Oxford on how to work with paleography and manuscripts and reading them. And I just being exposed to that, being able to handle manuscripts when I was there at Oxford, and then being able to read them online with digital images and just see kind of this tangible. artifact of church history.
Uh Shit I fell in love with it. I fell in love with The real material of it. And I started doing or learning about textual criticism, especially with Dr. Gurry and Dr. Mead at Phoenix Seminary, and had been reading on my own, which as people have probably listened to already know is just the math just the science of trying to determine what was originally written in an ancient work.
That's really what it comes down to. Applying those principles to To the Bible and to the New Testament, particularly, was really intriguing to me.
So when I got to do my PhD, I was ready to do a PhD in textual criticism on the New Testament, but I was always kind of. I always still wanted one foot in sort of theology. I never really divorced that. I've always been very interested in the Christian faith and the historical faith. And so I was introduced to a type of commentary manuscript.
Is very kind of very unique. And so obviously. Everybody's read a, you know, even today you get Bibles that are commentary Bibles, like the MacArthur Bible or something like that.
So historically, you have these commentary Bibles. They existed since the fourth century. The most prolific preacher in the Greek church was John Chrysostom, and so Chrysostom commentaries are everywhere. But these commentaries started around the 6th or 7th century. We don't have an exact date.
But they were unique because rather than be one person's commentary, it was a collection of various patristic sources, just excerpts, and they are mashed together. To sound in some ways to sound like one person is speaking, even though it's different people. And they were called a katena. Catena is just a Latin word that means chain.
So it was like links in a chain of the manuscript. And mostly found in Byzantine. Yes, yeah. All of our manuscripts of these are later. They're around, I think the earliest we have is a 10th century manuscript.
So quite a few centuries removed from the origination of the actual manuscript. But they were very popular. They were from, at least from the 10th century until about the 15th, they were mass produced. And so no one had, the work in these manuscripts had been really involved in the Old Testament. A lot of people in Europe had been doing work on the Old Testament, particularly the Psalms.
But very few people had touched the New Testament. And so I got involved with the University of Birmingham at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing there. It's called ITSI, and Professor Hugh Houghton, who runs that institute. And they were doing at the time what was called the Katena Project. They were focused on this work.
Now, I didn't become a member of that project, but I did go to work on Katena and eventually got funding from the university itself to do the project. To give a context, that's the same. Hugh Houghton, who held a conference. I mean, I guess they hold a conference every other year that I went to back in April. Right, right.
That was his conference. Was your mentor professor, right? Exactly. Wow. Very cool.
So, yeah, so he worked with me on those, and I spent. You know, three little more than three years, looking at the book of Ephesians in these manuscripts, I looked at a hundred manuscripts of that commentary, made a what we call a critical edition by identifying certain manuscripts to compare with each other, translated that into English, and then wrote a commentary on the theology that's in the katena. It's like a commentary on commentaries. Yeah, essentially. Like Spurgeon, you know, wrote his little book called Commenting on Commentaries.
Isn't that right? A commentary on commentaries. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, something like that. Like he inception commentaries.
Yeah, I wanted to know. What was in it? You know, a lot of the research has just been about how they look and the text of them and sort of the scientific aspect. I wanted to know what they said. Why do you think no one was doing, or very few people, were doing the New Testament?
You said that no one was really doing the New Testament. Do you think that's significant? I think it's primarily just because of where our interests in sort of text criticism have been focused. I mean, for. Centuries, we've really been focused on the biblical text itself and working on creating critical editions.
But now we're at a stage, I think, where we have so much evidence for that. And we're seeing the production of these, what we call the Editio Critico Maior, the highest critical edition of any, of each book of the Bible, of the New Testament you can get, that we can start to turn our attention to other things. And so in the past, these manuscripts were only important insofar as what they told us about the biblical text. We didn't have time to look at the commentary. But now, I think we're in a place where now we can start asking questions.
Well, what about these other aspects? What about these other features? And we're seeing an increase in interest in what we call paratextual features, which are the things in manuscripts that are not the main text, but inform things on the text. And commentary is part of that. And so people are very interested now in these other things and what do they tell us.
And I think that's great. I think we should be looking at that. It does a lot. We were talking about this before the show. It does a lot to help us understand the history of the.
Church, the history of manuscript tradition, how the church fathers or the church pastors or bishops at the time, how were they viewing the text, and so those kind of things, and helps us. Have a more accurate understanding of the church past. It's a reminder, too, that these are actual people. I mean, helping us understand their perspective instead of just this was a robot that was copying, copying, copying, copying. No, these were real people who were kind of adding their thoughts and their interpretations.
And it helps us humanize that process. Right.
So, what was the focus of your dissertation? I'm guessing your dissertation that you did at Birmingham was based around the work that you were doing with those manuscripts. Yeah, the main focus was that creating that edition of Ephesians and then creating the commentary, which was really the edition was there for me, was to serve the commentary because I needed that before I could do the next step. And that was the primary intent. I want to continue research on this.
broader idea because I think I think the more we look at them, the better we'll know why they were made. It's a very strange type of commentary.
So, understanding what was going on in the church at the time and then comparing that with what you find in the katena will inform why they make that. No one's really asked that question yet, which I always, for me, I'm always like, that's like my first question. Why wouldn't you ask that question? But, you know, everybody comes at it from different degrees. And as we learned, you know, even with the conference in Birmingham.
These manuscripts can give you all sorts of information about multiple things, depending on what you're lasering in on. You know, I did a presentation there simply on the changes that they made to the biblical text in the commentary where they would make adjustments to what it actually said. And some of the things that that pointed out, and if you dig deep enough, you find that the patristic sources are actually changing the language of the biblical text to fit the theology of the time. Because certain things, like something as simple as a preposition in Greek at that time, could mean the difference between heresy and orthodoxy for them. It didn't mean that much in the time of Paul, but by the fourth, fifth, sixth century, those things mattered.
And so you actually see them making adjustments to make sure Paul continues to be orthodox in their understanding. From a pastoral perspective, Dr. Shah, how does the study of commentary in addition to the biblical text?
Well, just the way we began this conversation, and Clark or Dr. Bates mentioned about like a John MacArthur study Bible or David. With Jeremiah's study Bible.
So let's say 500 years from now, somebody were to take these study Bibles and do a dissertation on them as to how did these various popular preachers, or some of them have PhDs, some of them have THDs, how did they view a certain portion of the text? Your focus was more on Ephesians 5, am I right?
Well, it was the whole book, really. The whole book.
So if you were to take, let's say, John 15, you know, 500 years from now, if Christ doesn't return, John 15, and just see what these various preachers had to say about that at, say, The latter part of the 20th century or the first part of the 21st century. How were they seeing being in Christ or, you know, something like that? Yeah. I would say that's a very simplistic way of explaining. But you think that would be a legitimate dissertation that someone could write?
Yeah, of course. To see where the church was. How was the church viewing the millennium? How are they seeing like this world coming to an end? I mean, what's going to happen?
Or 9-11 happening? And how are they reading John 15? I mean, you never know how this may be seen one day.
So something like that. True. I mean, we see right now we see PhDs being done on Reformation readings of scripture, and that's 500 years ago. Wow. You know, so it's, it's, yeah, it's very legitimate.
And honestly, you could probably even do it today. On living or recently deceased pastors, and it'd still be literate because what you're doing is you're trying to understand a movement. You're trying to understand interpretational philosophy and all these other things and what impacts that. And that does happen throughout history. And so, I guess the larger question is then to what end?
Because I know that a lot of scholars are there, they're like, okay, I want to understand this. But I think you guys are doing something different because it's more like, I want to understand this to benefit the church. I want to understand this to benefit either my congregation or the community at large or really all of humanity, but the church. We're getting this PhD for a specific reason and for building the kingdom. And I think that's kind of what sets you guys apart from a lot of other scholars who maybe just want to be like, hey, this is just what I believe.
And this is what I'm going to write my paper on. And beyond that, I don't know if I have much of a reason other than to write a book about it. You know what I mean? How does that factor into like your view? For me, it's in the service of the church.
Of course, the service to the Lord is all about him, but also serving the church body. Because if you're just doing it just to do research, And you can do that. And there's some very legitimate, solid works that I have used that just research for research's sake. I find more fulfillment when I know that this is how it's going to benefit the church body. It may not be like immediately, every day people are going to open up your book and say, How do I read this?
But overall, there may be a massive shift in their thinking of okay, so this is how The church was reading this scripture on, say, um. Uh the the The household passages in Ephesians. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I think I like to think of it: my driving question or my driving interest in this was I wanted to know.
the aut the commentators on their own terms so that I understood them better. And I've always gleaned.
some very important sort of interpretational ideas from Patristic theology, but it's It's such an impactful thing to be connected to the past and to know that you're not sitting out here sort of as your own as a ship on the open water. You know, you have a link to the past and you can read these things and you can, if you understand the sort of ideas and where they're coming from for them, you can either look at that and say, yes, that is a fantastic way of interpreting this. I've never thought of this before. Or you can say, I see why they think that, but that's not linked to what the scripture is saying here.
So maybe we don't follow that. But it's a matter of wanting to understand the people that came before me and finding where the Spirit has inspired them in such impactful ways that it moves me and hopefully will move other people. And being able to have the humility to say, I don't think that's right. But now I know why I don't think that's right. And I can say that's not just because I'm a Reformed Baptist in America and I think my way is right.
It's just I see why they say that. And they didn't get that by reading Paul. They got it by. This other way. And so, as a result, I think the people around you and the people in your ministry will grow to, I know at least this is true at Clearview.
And I think with your ministry and your church as well, it will grow, they will grow to appreciate the Bible more because they see a leader who is diving into it. They see a leader who is like almost, almost desperate to uncover what is God really saying here. Do you want to talk about your missionary work for just a little bit? I know we got about maybe eight minutes left. Yeah, I can, I can make a quick, yeah.
And, you know, this is just one of the things where I think academics, you know, we talk a little, I'll say this really quickly, but coming out of the academic world, it's very, very difficult for people to find jobs and work and things like that. I think that's a well-known thing now. But one of the things I would like to see more. Especially PhDs, if they are from a particular faith background or coming out, I would like them to start thinking about where they can best serve the kingdom and less about where I can get the next job. Wow.
And I say that because I went, when I was doing my PhD, my thoughts were really, it was always about ministry, but in the back of my head, I was still really thinking about where's the next job going to be. And in the process of doing my PhD, I ended up in Italy for a while doing conference work, and I met with a Protestant pastor who runs an institute there where he trains Protestant pastors. Through him, I learned, I was completely ignorant of what the situation was for Protestants in Italy. I had no idea. And all of the pastors there, they don't get paid to be pastors.
They are full-time workers.
Some of them are retired, and very few of them are missionary supported outside of Italy, from funding outside of Italy, but almost all of them work full-time jobs.
So they do this because they're called to do it. It is a ministry, and they do not have resources. There are no seminaries for Protestants in Italy. They can't leave Italy. to get an education and very few of them have the money it would take to do an online course.
So this institute run by a man named Pietro Bolognese, it's called the in English, it's called the Institute for Evangelical Formation and Documentation. We say I-Fed, I-F-E-D, because in Italian that's the initials. It has existed in Padua, Italy, for about 25 years. And he has been training pastors and Protestants through online and hybrid courses for that period with the goal of planting churches.
So they plant churches in Italy, Protestant churches, wherever they can to try to grow the gospel there. The gospel. It's important to know that your average Protestant church is about 20 people. Wow. There's not a lot of people in these churches.
It's a very hard, difficult job for these men. They're outcasts by most people. Most Italians don't know what Protestantism even is, but they think of it's like a cult because it's not so much.
So there's opposition. It's not like apathy. It's like it's the opposition, and you have it on both sides. There's apathy on one side and opposition on the other. Wow.
And so they deal with this all the time. And so we're there. I'm going there. My family's moving there to serve these men. I got to meet with these men.
I went to a pastoral training conference with them and spent a week with them, a lot of the men that they work with, listening to their stories and praying with them and worshiping with them. And at the end of that, Pietro had asked me if I would consider joining their institute. They needed someone to run their library, and they also needed a professor of New Testament, and they needed someone with a PhD-level background who, in his words, who also understands that this is ministry. And it was kind of like he was describing the exact same thing. Same things I had been thinking my whole life and was worried I was getting away from.
And he looked at me and he said, I think that you might be the one that we're praying for. And that's what we need. Wow. But he also said, this is a missionary job. I can't pay you.
So we were like, okay, well, you know, and I expected that would be the case, you know, knowing what I knew. And so, you know, we agreed to do that. I felt this was exactly what the Lord would put us in this place for. And my wife and I prayed about it for quite a few months, but we came to that conclusion. And I told him, I don't know exactly what it means to be a missionary, but I'm going to find out.
And we joined with a group called Mission Quest. It's our mission agency. And yeah, and we spent this last year just bringing up the funding. And I. Talk to Pietra every two weeks by Zoom to keep that connection.
We're preparing to move to the city of Bologna, my family, and serve the rest of our lives to the church in Italy. Wow, wow. Wow. Yeah, when you shared that with me, we were on a Bus headed back from where were we? Gloucester?
We were going to Gloucester Cathedral. Yes, yes. And on the way back, we had talked prior to that, we had talked about connecting. And then I was like, you know, that's so important. That's on our heart.
Missions is a very important part of our church. Of course, we do evangelism in our neighborhoods, in this community, and all of that, but we also believe in reaching people far away. And Europe, unfortunately, has become a very unreached people group. It really has, yeah. Because at one time you had the bastion of theology and churches and Christendom, but now it's sadly.
Very hollow. We saw that in England as well, but also in Italy. And I think there's a shift coming, a good shift. Yeah, it feels that way. It feels that way, but it's still far away.
And so we need pastors who will be trained there to. To go into that part of the world and start planting churches. And maybe we'll see a big harvest over the next few years. Maybe it'll be hundreds of years later. But either way, I hope in our generation we can.
Do what we can for the kingdom of God. That's right. It takes people stepping up and being willing to be obedient to that call, just like you and your family, Darth. Yes, that's a big commitment. That's a big sacrifice.
And so, I mean, you're raising funds, and it's sad that you have to do that, but that's part of the work. And we, as a church family, want to. Supports you, and that's why you're on the radio show. That's right, that's right. How can our listeners support you?
Yeah, yeah. If anybody listening wants to know more, I mean, obviously, they could email me or my wife. We have an email that's B-A-T-E-S Bates in Italy at gmail.com, exactly as it sounds. We have a missionary page, it's at a place called missionquest.org backslash 250. That's our missionary page.
You can reach out to us either way. If that's also where you would partner with us financially if you'd like, but we can talk to you more about what's going on in the reality there. I like to give people a comparison to put this into context. And we're in North Carolina. I did a little bit of scientific research on Google.
And there are more Southern Baptists in North Carolina. Than there are Protestants in Italy. That's incredible.
So, if that can put into perspective what's going on, and as Dr. Shaw has pointed out, in our experience, we've been to Italy quite a few times, my wife and I already, and the harvest is ripe there. People are searching, they're desperate in need, but the laborers are incredibly few. And so, we're there to try to do some work, do what we can, move the gospel forward. But we'll need more.
We'll need more people coming. We'll need more people to help. If people listening want to be a part of that and see the gospel grow in Italy, we'd be more than happy to talk to you and share with you and maybe even pique your interest to come and join us on the mission field today. BatesinItaly at gmail.com. We'll plug that in the description of that show.
That's right. And if you're listening on the radio, you can always text in to our radio show to get that contact information 52-582-502. We can put you in touch with Dr. Bates, and maybe God's laid on your heart to step up and answer that call to ministry. And praise God for that.
That's exciting. Amen. Dr. Bates, thank you so much for being on the show today.
So good to have you. Jumping in and playing Proverb or Nobel Prize with us. Yeah, that's. I'm gonna take that definitely. I'm just gonna definitely be a fun way to show fellas.
Good show. I think we did a good job. Absolutely. Absolutely. Guys, write and let us know what you got from today's episode: 252-582-5028.
Thanks to our sponsors for making today's episode possible. And don't forget that you can support us by subscribing to the show on iTunes, or you can always support us financially at clearviewtodayshow.com. John, what do encourage me you want to leave listeners with as we go into the weekend? Definitely just want to encourage you guys to take everything that Dr. Bates said here to heart today.
The harvest is great, but the laborers are few.
So we just want to encourage you guys to give, give generously. You can also support the Clearview Today Show on Prey.com. You can support us at clearviewtodayshow.com. Thank you to everybody who has followed us on Prey.com. Just crossed 10.5K.
I cannot believe it. Every single time I look at it, my heart just gets a little bit more grateful.
So we thank you. We love that you're supporting the show, supporting the kingdom, and we will see you next time. That's right. We love you guys. We'll see you Monday on Clearview Today.
