Category Archives: Contra

Here at StandardSacredText.com we encourage defenders of the Bible to think outside the tired old box of competing evidential interpretive schemes and look to other disciplines to make our case. I mean it is the Bible after all, the epistemic source of all life and godliness. Surely the means and modes for defending the certaintyContinue reading “Asymptotic Certainty and the Purity of Scripture”

Mark Ward is fond of leveraging I Corinthians 14 in the text and translation debate. Unfortunately he completely overlooks the fact that Paul clearly has in mind those languages foreign to the hearer. As such Ward has removed Paul from the immediate context in order to critique the use of a version of modern EnglishContinue reading “For Those in the Back, Edification Does Not Require Intelligibility: A Story”

For those familiar with Ward’s “False Friends” argument you know that the central feature is that the Church is reading words it does not understand with the secondary addendum that the Church does not know that she does not understand those words. The latter is an addendum because without the central feature the addendum isContinue reading “Mark Ward’s “False Friends” Argument is Simply Elitist”

I have been asked on several occasions how I would deal with the Mormon claim of the “burning in the bosom” and its similarity or identicality with the Spirit/Word/Faith paradigm propounded here and other places in defense of the inspiration and authority of the Christian Scriptures. The short answer is that I would not abandonContinue reading “Mormonism and the Spirit/Word/Faith Paradigm”

What happens if we broaden Mark Ward’s “False Friends” rhetoric and apply it to the richness of the Great Tradition of the West? Let’s take a look at some of the great literary works of the West and see if Ward’s rhetoric would apply. Below are random selections from a randomly chosen page in theirContinue reading “Mark Ward, False Friends, and a Plea to Undo the Renaissance”

In the aftermath of the Textual Confidence Collective debacle, Dr. Mark Ward thought it best to shoot a video declaring that he is done engaging Confessional Bibliology because he considers our side, for the most part, too rancorous. He then goes on to engage Confessional Bibliology, to share his thoughts on the problems of ConfessionalContinue reading “Ward Stops Interacting with Confessional Bibliology by Interacting with Confessional Bibliology”

Before a witness takes the stand in a criminal case it used to be, and in some place it still is the case that the witness raises his right hand, put his left hand on the Bible, and swears “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me God.”Continue reading “So Help Me God”

This week I was over at EvangelicalTextualCriticism.Blogspot.com to read a brief abstract about the possible later dating of Sinaiticus and a call for radio-carbon dating of said manuscript. It was a short article and so I wandered down into the comments and there I found the patient and measured responses of Tommy Wasserman, a professorContinue reading “Tommy Wasserman Uses Kid Gloves When Dealing With Bart Ehrman”

Usually when an episode of the Textual Confidence Collective drops the Facebook groups I am apart of start to light up with all kinds of comment traffic. This last Monday was no different. I was late to this one tread but I thought I would employ the method I proposed in yesterday’s post. What followsContinue reading “A Recent FB Discussion That Ends with Questioning the Content of the Canon”

We have finally come to the last episode of the Textual Confidence Collective [TCC]. This episode was about 30% shorter than all the others. The bulk of the conversation took place around things each member was thankful for, what they appreciated most about their own podcast, and books they recommended for further study. I wasContinue reading “The Textual Confidence Collective Closes Up Shop”