Jephtah’s Daughter and Mary Example

Given the phenomenon of disappearing videos after faux scholarship of members of A & Ω has been exposed in the past by Albrëcht & co., TurritinFan’s (TF) article entitled: “Wishful Exegesis – Jephthah’s Daughter and Mary Example” (Thursday 10 February 2022 [7:17 pm EDST]) may be changed or taken down or doctored after the current publication of this series of articles (Albrëcht will store a screen shot undoubtedly).[1] After avoiding all Albrëcht’s articles/books for about two years, Dr. White and TF now go on record for the first time with their best efforts at a defense that they are somehow biblical for their anti-Mary beliefs. So many have left A & Ω (even employees) which has no answer for Mary and the Evangelists and other articles in the last two years. These works have been downloaded in the thousands and ten thousands (tracked and recorded by Albrëcht). Their force is now irresistible, such that former claims of business with Islamic apologetics for over two years no longer stave off the inevitable. After feigning ignorance and dismissing thousands of inquiries as pablum, the time has come to try to defend one of A & Ω’s centerpieces: “A person cannot be a good Christian and believe in Mary’s perpetual virginity.” For A & Ω, this is a hill to die on, despite delaying any battle for victory for nigh two years. TF, in collaboration with Dr. White, proffers their attempt at a breakthrough, sallying out with the remnants of their forces to burn the main siege engine (Judges 11:39) battering their dilapidated walled fortress at A & Ω. Let’s see what two years of study by a team of full- and parttime apologists, with tons of financial and technological resources, have managed to publish, through all their benefactors’ generosity.

            Given the fact that TF’s 10 February article (after months of unrealized personal assurances to Albrëcht that responses to the book and related articles were immediately forthcoming) looks strategically designed as a coup de grâce to dreamily cut down the retreating Albrëcht-Shamoun, following upon their heels after TF & Co’s anticipated 9 February 2022 victory over Albrëcht-Shamoun in a battle royale.[2] Of course, given the supermajority-evangelical audience voting the victors to be Albrëcht-Shamoun, reporting in their comments and by vote how miserable TF & Co.’s defeat was (from the point of view of the audience), the 10 February article by TF now looks more like the A & Ω team gathering on the heights of the citadel after their walls (besieged for two years!) have irreparably been broken down by Albrëcht-Shamoun’s engines of war. What TF anticipated to be a mopping-up exercise by the 10 February 2022 article, carrying fantasies of carnage to be displayed on Gospel Truth, now looks oppositely to be a weak last gasp for survival on their acropolis overlooking their kingdom of anti-Mary-dom with their huddled masses of anti-Marys hoping for divine deliverance by the prophet White. His secret weapon, like great prophets before, is found in a special Kool-Aid recipe he has prepared for his acolytes.

            Let’s first contextualize the online response by TurritinFan (TF). TF has – to his credit – been constantly debating Albrëcht, both before and during publications of PatristicPillars.com articles and books for about two years. TF is to be commended for his fearlessness in going against both Albrëcht and Shamoun who are separately very successful and highly intimidating. TF, though sincerely devoted to Dr. White (from my limited perspective), is not competent to write on matters of Greek. From my understanding, this is not a fulltime work for him. To his credit, he devotes time and energy to his beliefs, but he has done more damage than good by depending on Dr. White for advice on the Septuagint (LXX). A & Ω managed an insufficient and impoverished response, understandably acceding to their fans’ pleadings to thwart the gadfly become plague that Albrëcht-Shamoun have become to this extreme strain of Evanglicalism or Fundmentalism. The 10 Febrary article is the first response to these two years’ worth of challenges:

A Believer in White’s Supremacy in Scripture Leads to the Immaculate Conception! (28.V.21)

Blessed are they who hear the Word of God and Guard it (14.V.21)

“Joseph…do not be afraid to take Mary.” (14.II.21)

The meaning of “Until” in Matthew 1:25! (7.II.21)

PROJECTING SEX ONTO TO THE NEW TESTAMENT? The Perpetual Virginity Defended! (23.I.21)

Does “come together” of Matthew 1:18 mean something sexual? (18.I.21) The Definitive Guide for Solving Biblical Questions About Mary: Mary Among the Evangelists (9.X.20) Who Are the Brothers and Sisters of Jesus? (18.VIII.20) Luke’s Gospel and Mary’s Justice from the Womb (16.VIII.20)

“What is it between you and me, o Woman?”(13.VIII.20)

The Virgin Birth & Mary the Perpetual Virgin (5.VIII.20)

MARY IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE: THE ARK AND THE PROPITIATION FOR SINNERS (22.VI.20)

A Biblical Primer on Mary in the New Testament: Luke the Marian Gospel (17.VII.20)

 A SHORT PRIMER ON THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (28.III.20) Of course, A & Ω’s nearly endless delay does not mean that the TF 10 February article must be a bust. Instead, I wish to underline that it is an act of desperation since Evangelicals and Protestants across the globe have united with Albrëcht-Shamoun in admitting that A & Ω bears an irrelevant anti-Mary message that is neither an essential piece of the Reformation, nor justifiable by Scripture. In response to thousands of emails by Evangelical pastors and laymen thanking Albrëcht for his message of Marian unity on the Bible, TF in collaboration with Dr. White have managed to eke out a response of a little over 1,000 words of their own against a minimum of 100, 000 words of biblical arguments by Albrëcht & co., a paltry response after two years, though at first look the article totals about 3, 263 words on 10 February. This, per se, is not an argument against the substance of TF’s 10 February article, but let’s keep contextualizing his response. Of the 3, 263 words, a lot of space is strangely taken up by wordy, unnecessary block quotes from Greek works. For our part, our articles and books are accessible to an English reader, and they lay out grammar, syntax and vocabulary in an easy to understand way for those unfamiliar with Greek, since perhaps 98% of A & Ω and Albrëcht readers taken together do not know Greek and cannot even pronounce Greek letters. What, might we guess, is White & co.’s M.O. for dumping so much Greek on their lay readers? (1.) One possibility is that this article is shock and awe. If sympathetic Evangelicals and vulnerable others see the fancy Greek and appeals to specialized scholarly-sounding words, then they might conclude that White and TF are scholarly and the article must thereby be a tour de force. So, given the fact that Albrëcht & co. are from Churches that hold for the Eucharist as a Sacrifice and have a priesthood, the 10 February article might help anti-Mary-laymen fans to believe White & co., since A & Ω know all this Greek stuff…Impressive! (2.) Another possibility (summoning me by name to write this article) might be that the article was meant for me directly (since most readers know no Greek to benefit from the 10 February article), with an underlying giddy belief that I (and Dr. Sebastian Brock) failed to do an adequate lemma search on the largest Greek database (TLG) and somehow didn’t know that the Hebrew “idiom” (“knowing not man”) is present more than once in the OT (which is not my contention). My contention, as correctly cited by TF at the outset of the 10 February article, is that among the passages repeating this idiom (“know not man”), Mary “quotes” the singular form of the idiom as only found in Judges 11:39. There are a number of scholarly reasons to solidify this point, which same reading is historically recognized, too, by ancient authors in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, as well as in modern biblical commentaries (This will be provided in my Part II). Dr. White and TF claim that there are other places where the idiom at the root of Mary’s citation can be found elsewhere in the Septuagint (a true statement), but do so to superficially create a specious narrative to confuse the reader into believing that our claims of an “exact citation” of Judges 11:39 means the same as saying “the exact idiom” or merely “exact same syntax.” As in almost every show on podcasts and on youtube that Abrëcht and co., have done, as well as in our book, the criterion of exclusivity was used, not for an idiom in isolation, but for exact words taken directly from Judges 11:39. We will explore this in Part II of my response to Dr. White and TF.

Next, as a matter of contextualization, approximately 850 words out of the 3, 263 in TF’s 10 February article are simply full sentences, pericopes, or block quote selections in untransliterated Greek. There is, per se, nothing wrong with this. But, contextually, it means that there are only about 2400 words of potential refutation in A & Ω response to two years of publishing on Mary that touches on all the Gospels, Acts, and Paul’s epistles. Furthermore, of these 2400 words, about 1,000 words are taken from citations from us in Mary among the Evangelists and from summaries of Albrëcht’s words in the 9 February debate! This means that there are 1, 400 hundred words potentially belonging to Dr. White and TurritinFan, though even this is less since I have not subtracted yet the English biblical texts they quote from their total. This one point, namely, Judges 11:39 represents the only objection thus far found by White and TF contra Albrëcht & co. in two years??? This 10 February article-production better be an A & Ω version of the Manhattan project winning the war with either Fat man or Little Boy (viz., nuclear bomb) after almost two years of being retreating from even one pitched battle concerning Mary by putting out an exegetical study. Will A & Ω donors, fans, and White-supremacy supporters get their two-year’s money’s worth after their merchandise purchases, donations, and stipended invitations for Church talks? Let’s find out what two years of moneyed study buys by an organization whose full and parttime employees are dedicated to apologetics and the Bible!

Part I: Dr. White’s “Critical” Problem

(The first 100 Words Betoken Disaster)

First of all, what – among many nugatory possibilities – might cause us to want to dismiss this poor study from the beginning and not even write a full refutation? Answer: When a self-proclaimed biblical scholar, in collaboration with TF, doesn’t know the difference between a critical and non-critical edition and when he can’t use the word “scholarly” meaningfully on a question meant to undermine use of the Septuagint as a source for St. Luke:

There are also some minor problems. For example, the Septuagint text of Judges poses significant challenges, because there are many differences between the text that Rahlf’s (one of the most popular critical Septuagints) labels A and that Rahlf’s labels B.  As it is not a scholarly work, A&K’s work does not recognize, much less address this issue.  Even assuming Luke/Mary had access to one of the two Septuagint Judges, A&K’s book does not identify which is the correct one, or how they conclude that Luke/Mary had access to that one, as opposed to some other Greek translation and/or the Hebrew text itself.

Dr. White and TF expose (after citing block quotes from Mary among the Evangelists) their first proof of ignorance in the highlighted materials. One of the first questions I ask Master’s students (not even doctoral students), when teaching these B.A. graduates seeking a Master’s degree in an accredited course on scientific methodology, is to answer me whether Ralfs’ Septuagint is “critical”? Answer: The work does not claim to be a critical edition.[3] Yet, Dr. White and TF believe that it is critical. By definition, a critical edition is scientific and, thus, scholarly, and uses nowadays a scientific stemma/tree or description of relevant manuscripts whenever they are more than one. Such an error would be forgivable as a lapsus calami if an article were written after an hour (versus two years), based on poor memory, or as some sort of innocent mistake, were it not for the fact that Dr. White and TF claim that our work is based upon Ralfs (which is not critical!), and ours is “not a scholarly work.” So, pitting non-critical Ralfs, as if critical, against a popular book as a dichotomy is already silly. Since Ralfs is not critical, we see that they shot themselves in the foot by confusedly admitting Ralfs’ work is “critical.” Conclusion: this is just flailing about using jargon that sounds scientific. In reality, TF’s first claims are meaningless since the deity himself would be unable to make sense of what their point could even be about: “a non-scholarly [if critical means scholarly] [popular(!)][4] critical edition.” The proper term for this in academia nowadays is “theological bullshit.”[5] In this vein, Dr. White has already been caught on camera making similar mistakes claiming there can be in today’s English “critical translations” into English of Greek texts (viz., English) for Eusebius that he will await to be published, as if we have organized the manuscripts (on computers?) of English translations that lead to a critically printed edition in modern English of an ancient text to have the “critical translation.” It is true that over a century ago, the term “critical translation” was thrown around for English-corrected versions of non-critical and critical biblical texts, but here “critical translation” means a correction of original text that is reflected in the (English) translation. There can today be translations made from critical editions but they are not the critical text prepared by the scholar/s from a stemma/tree and relevant manuscripts. Dr. White’s and TF’s lack of precision in this paragraph is compounded on another matter that might have been forgivable as a spelling error otherwise, but they are unaware that proper name “Ralfs” not “Ralf’s”; just another nugatory element in this panoply of amateurish jargon betraying no familiarity with the Septuagint. Let Dr. White, explain to his listeners on Firing Line where scholarly publishers sell in print “critical” editions of Judges, let alone of the whole Septuagint!

            White/TF continue: “Even assuming Luke/Mary had access to one of the two Septuagint Judges, A&K’s book does not identify which is the correct one, or how they conclude that Luke/Mary had access to that one, as opposed to some other Greek translation.”[6] This is not necessary since A + B both read: “knew not man (ouk egnô andra).” Anything else is besides the point. But let me illustrate how little White & TF understand about working with ancient texts:

            Due to the number of manuscripts, the dearth of published patristic quotes from the Septuagint for an apparatus, lack of Syriac biblical quotes influenced by the Septuagint,[7] and even Old Latin quotes (since a fully critical edition -especially Judges- of the OT is not yet available in Old Latin[8]), we have not sufficiently advanced to supply a satisfactory list of Bible quotes in other languages and Fathers (apparatus patristicus), even if we were able to organize each separate Septuagint book’s ancient manuscripts and create a stemma/tree for each book. Judges is just such a case.[9] If Dr. White had really been capable of arguing from this perspective, he would have reported to me the manuscript history (after two years) and reported more than two published-printed texts (Ralfs). Ralfs two recensions (called nonsensically “two Septuagint Judges”) were at that time irreconcilable, so that the variants in A + B could not be connected by a family tree culminating in an hypothesized head of a matrix/family or autograph reading (I do not think Dr. White and TF understand that or they would have stated this facile point). What is also embarrassing is that Dr. White and TF fail to identify for readers A + B. Evangelicals would respect the fact that the are based upon the Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus (A + B). It is essentially Dr. White’s and TF’s argument that because Ralfs did not, then, have evidence to trace these two famous manuscripts back to a reconstructed post-167 BC text, then for us not choosing between them is some sort of vice.[10] Yet, Dr. White demands that I must do so in order to even speak about Judges 11:39, although both published (and edited) manuscripts attest the same exact words “knew not man.” What is more, the 20^th century problem in Ralfs of A + B is considered essentially solved in the 21^st century (where Dr. White and TF apparently do not live), strangely missed by these two self-described biblical experts.[11] This, apparently, is Dr. White’s advice to TF about what a scientific investigation demands from Mary and the Evangelists (which is written for a popular audience and does not claim or imply a contribution to lower criticism or the scientific apparatus of a future version of the book of Judges). Should not Dr. White reject on his own principle any edition of the Septuagint used by an author that is not “critical” (= Ralfs)? Why bother with Ralfs-Judges since Dr. White and TF allege other (better[!]) critical editions are available? Ralfs (contra the links below), per White, cannot be scholarly since it cannot be called “critical.” Since Dr. White and TF do not know the difference between a semi-critical and critical edition, they confuse or conflate them. So, Dr. White and TF claim the following of Ralfs, namely, it is: one of the most popular critical Septuagints.[12] This is laughable (Septuagint means all the books taken as one collection or volume with all its individual books – but it is also not synonymous with the “Old Greek”). It would be ad perpetuam dei memoriam (eternal memory!) if Dr. Whit on Firing Line should give his listeners his personal favorite list of all the “popular critical” editions of the LXX-Judges. Let him quote the introductions that describe in each edition of the LXX “critical” and include the book of Judges or quote a peer reviewed journal book review calling more than one “popular” edition of the LXX “critical” that contains Judges. If there were but one critical edition, why did Dr. White not shout from the housetops the superiority of another “critical” and “popular” edition and use that to resolve the problem of Judges A + B by the stemma codicum (tree) in superior critical edition (which of course does not exist in reality for Judges)? The reason is …Dr. White and TF probably don’t know how to distinguish a critical from a non-critical edition. Their first self-composed paragraph is such a disaster that I am required to produce more than one article simply to refute the absurdities in these 1,400 potential words of actual composition by Dr. White and TF (not yet subtracting their block English citations from the Bible). As you can see, this article represents faux scholarship that has no purchase in a peer reviewed journal or publication demanding scientific rigor.

Dr. White claims, he does not explain, to his reader something significant about Ralfs might be key due to there existing separate versions of the same biblical book: Judges A & B. Next, Dr. White and TF imply that when there are two competing “translations” (not recensions) of a biblical text (above so-called labels[13] A and B) so that writers are obliged to choose and justify reading A over B. Dr. White and TF seem to show no awareness that these are variants within a text called collectively: Septuagint (= one edition of the text). They do not understand, it seems, that A and B are not separate translations, even for Ralfs, especially if they are both called by Dr. White and TF “Septuagint”.[14] Rather, they are two recensions (edited/corrupted-same-translations) in the same LXX with different interpolations, corruptions, additions, and omissions that Ralfs cannot trace back to a common family to resolve how the differences came about. When 80-90 percent (let us assume) of “label” A matches B, would you call these two different translations (For Dr. White and TF the answer is apparently “yes”)?[15] They even assert that there are possibly “other versions” or separate translations of Judges(!) available in AD 70? If they knew something about the LXX, they might know that Emmanuel Tov has tried to purify the contaminated version of the so-called LXX from second- and third-century AD contaminations and return Genesis, for example, to a hypothetical “Old Greek” purified translation, reflecting something like the text of the 2^nd century BC (but this is an hypothetical and unfortunately poorly received text that is purifying the LXX text). What Dr. White is unlikely to talk about on the Firing Line is naming allegedly separate and independent translations of Judges into Greek (available to Luke and Mary [sic]) around 70 AD). Dr. White and TF want the reader to consider these fantastical editions might account for the exact same wording as the LXX and suppose that Luke and Mary (sic) might be thought to have had a copy (from the same store, no doubt, where they might have gotten the relic of the Holy Grail!). This is the production of fairyland biblicism. If there were a competing translation with the “Old Greek” (vs. post-Origenistic amalgamations) it would be a reasonable expectation (depending on the aim of the published work in question) to investigate it. But Dr. White’s and TF’s alleged translations exist (which would not then be called or published as “Septuagint” since they are different translations than the Seputagint, like for instance, the Greek version of Daniel) only in the rich fantasy life of Dr. White and TF. Were there an alternative/competing reading for “know not man” between Judges 11:39 in A & B, then I might be forced to choose between them. But there is no variant, so there is no controversy. As we will see, Dr. White and TF distract us by arguing that lines in Judges other than “know not man” versus the very title of their article “Judges 11:39” – centerpiece to their argument, somehow calls into question our using Judges 11:39: “know not man.” These reasonings lead to the absurd conclusion in New Testament scholarship that, for Dr. White, nobody can cite a standard, critical, acceptable (by peer review publishers) pericope from the OT for comparison with the NT, unless they purportedly resolve each variant in the book of the Bible in question, even if the writer’s chosen citation does not admit of variants where s/he is comparing citations within the manuscript tradition. Of course, using the Dr. White litmus test, all Biblical journals are doomed not to be scholarly.

So, the rhetorical technique is as follows: Undermine use of the invariable citation in both (“labels”) A + B: “know not man” (Judges 11:39) by appealing to variants elsewhere existing between the same two recensions of the same translation in the same book of Judges. This is what strikes Dr. White and TF as “scholarly,” presumably. Then they commit a methodological error by presuming that part of proving plagiarism demands that I must prove how the plagiarizer has access to the plagiarized original: “how they conclude that Luke/Mary had access to that one, as opposed to some other Greek translation.” Why is this necessary (despite their appeal to the fairyland translations available in AD 70)? Where is a scholarly principle here? Is it just obvious to these non-scholars that this is reasonable? When Dr. White teaches at college and catches a student plagiarizing, if Dr. White can’t show exactly how that student got a hold of the plagiarized book that s/he cited without attribution, then does Dr. White throw up his hands and say: “Clearly this person has not plagiarized because I do not know how they got their quote from this text that they cited verbatim”? If Dr. White and TF demand identifying the modality of physical access, let us say, of Josephus who cites from Judges (per the article above from Phillip Satterthewait [footnote 11]), applying (contrary to scholarship in print) Dr. White’s rules, we are forced to call into question all ancient verbatim citations that are exclusively shared by two authors alone in virtue of the fact Dr Satterthewait doesn’t know if Josephus got them in Antioch or elsewhere! For Dr. White and TF to grant, furthermore, that Mary could have had access to the Greek Septuagint is to grant the absurd, which is unsurprising since this entire paragraph is an amalgamation of confusion. These guys don’t know anything about how to engage a critical text.

In summary, this paragraph looks more like the following strategy: Dr. White and TF presume -rightly- that 98% of people reading and listening can’t read a critical apparatus to a scholarly edition. They already know that lower critics who are Evangelicals have very little to do with Dr. White since he makes no contributions to Scripture scholarship. He need not worry about them, for they already ignore him. So, given Dr. White’s gravitas and prophetic spirit among a specified following, they will accept on his authority that person B cannot be said to quote another person A in literature, unless said person B can be proven to have access to the entire book from which any hypothetically verbatim quote came, as is clear in Dr. White’s mind above. For Dr. White and TF, it looks like Luke had to have the whole “book.” Why can’t Mary (who contra Dr. White cannot be granted to know Greek) have access to a hymn using the quote, a popular anecdote, a bedtime story? Will only a book do? Notice the unscholarly restriction, quite myopic, that Dr. White and TF think ancient people quote only validly from an earlier author when the later quote’s literary source can be traced back to the whole book proven available to them.[16] This might be a forgivable error in a B.A. student that can be easily corrected, but it shows how poor or really non-existent is the scholarship within A & Ω that Dr. White and TF demand that the “book” had to be available for consultation by Luke and, more absurdly, grant it available to a Hebrew (certainly illiterate) Jewess, Mary. Two years of preparation and this kind of sloppiness and absurdity is the end product. The entire point is asinine, although Dr. White surely knows that Greek fragments dating to the time of Christ agreeing with the Septuagint were unsurprisingly found in the Holy Land and that Luke has been admitted by all published scholarly commentaries of which I know to quote liberally from the Septuagint. This miserly demand is required by Dr. White and TF for proof that Ralfs “popular critical” “labels” A and B must be shown to be available to St. Luke, though we don’t even know where St. Luke composed part or the whole of the Gospel of Luke(!), nor where he went to get his sources! Leave aside that Ralfs A + B is one translation for both Ralfs and Phillip Satterthewait (2015[!]), but two “Judges” and different “translations” for Dr. White and TF. To burden me to show where either Mary (sic) orLuke got their copy of what is essentially Ralfs A or B edited document in a 1^st century manuscript (laughable too since any 1^st century speculation is only that since we have nothing from the 1^st century for the NT and much of the LXX) of the whole book of Judges (whose principal manuscripts are 4^th century), as even Dr. White must know, is an asinine demand. This is clearly a pseudo-scientific critique whereby White-only enthusiasts can feel relieved that, finally, he has a defense for his anti-Mary life’s work. Finally, I respond to the last of Dr. White’s and TF’s first 100/1400 words, noting the following: “as opposed to some other Greek translation and/or the Hebrew text itself.”[17] Notice that Dr. White acts as if St. Luke conceivably did not use (for the phrase “not know man”) the Septuagint version (irrespective of the LXX book where it might come from)! This incredible supposition demands, in the face of his own quotes from the Greek LXX, showing the word order, syntax, and idiom nearly exactly as Luke writes it, demanding, too, that Luke (the author of Luke and Acts) was a capable translator and preferred to translate something parallel to the LXX from Aramaic and/or Hebrew (what an exercise in futility!) although he had on hand the LXX.[18] I’d like to see how that applies in the Gospel overall and specifically in chapter 1 of Luke. What do scholars, according to Dr. White, use to prove that chapter 1 of Luke, verse 34, is a Hebrew translation (or even Aramaic translation) from the proto-Masoretic passage of Judges 11:39: “know not man” in place of St. Luke using any book of the LXX for Judges 11:39, such that Luke’s personal translation happens to coincide in basic word order, vocabulary, and syntax with any of the 10 February citations from the LXX? For Dr. White and TF, it is worthwhile proposing, as if practical and reasonable, that some book of the LXX is not the source for St. Luke’s phrase…really?

Part II has arrived! James White’s A&Ω’s Wishful Thinking about Real Exegesis Pt. 2.

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[1] See: https://turretinfan.blogspot.com/2022/02/wishful-exegesis-jephthahs-daughter-and.html?m=1.

[2] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXl_qWXC3N8.

[3] See, for example: https://www.academic-bible.com/en/bible-society-and-biblical-studies/scholarly-editions/septuagint/the-septuaginta-edition-from-a-rahlfs-and-its-history/#c5512. Note that Ralfs is exactly opposite to Dr. White’s claim: it does not claim to be critical (I don’t think Dr. White will know why). Do you know where there is a claim that it is critical? Answer: Wikipedia (Dr. White’s source?)! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Rahlfs%27_edition_of_the_Septuagint.

[4] The notion of a “popular” edition of the LXX would be quite something, since those who read Greek beyond koine, those who actually look at the LXX (which even Dr. White admits is practically nobody [see footnote 18, below, Firing Line]) must be in the hundreds throughout the world per Dr. White’s own summarization of the affairs around minute 44ff of his show on the LXX.

[5] See Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005),61: https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article-abstract/19/4/412/955558. One sample extract would be the following: “[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

[6] Dr. White and TF show their unawareness of any studies on Judges (LXX), here:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/07-judges-nets.pdf. Secondly, as noted in the article, Dr. White’s appeal to “other translations” is likely not knowing that the Origenistic Hexapla uses post-Lucan sources (post AD 70) in its parallel Greek columns and post-70 AD translators (post-mortem regarding Luke) that are responsible for nearly every contamination of the Old Greek text. Finally, Dr. White and TF are unaware that there are now A I-II-III recensions and I-II recensions of B. If this challenge to us were to makes sense, it would ask which of five possible recensions (minus the Old Greek) we opt for.

[7] See, e.g.: https://syriaca.org/work/166.

[8] See https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/textual-history-of-the-bible/35211-joshua-judges-COM_0305020101#.

[9] For the real state of affairs, see https://www.cjconroy.net/bib/judg-text.htm#two.

[10] See the preface to the translation of Judges, here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ioscs/editions.html.

[11] Phillip Satterthewait, “Judges,” in The T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint, ed. James Aitken (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 103: “Whereas scholarship in the decades before Rahlfs usually argued for the independence of the traditions represented by A and B, it is now accepted that the A and B traditions probably derive from a single archetype.”

https://www.google.com/books/edition/T_T_Clark_Companion_to_the_Septuagint/LAx0BgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=translation+greek+lxx+judges&pg=PA109&printsec=frontcover

[12] For the real state of multiple published Septuagints that Dr. White and TF claim are critical, see:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ioscs/editions.html. As this detailed examination mentions (easily accessible), Ralfs is merely “semi-critical.” Per Dr. White’s and TF’s clumsy comments, they also seem unaware of a 2^nd edition of the LXX that improves Ralfs. You will see that Judges, for example, has no critical edition available or recommended. For other books that are part of a complete Septuagint, there are greater or lesser degrees of progress in print.

[13] Scholars refer to them as “A-group” and “B-group” unlike Dr. White and TF who provide tons of Greek (unlike our popular book) in a specious attempt to make their article look like a scientific study.

[14] See for yourself the English below and ask yourself, are these two different translations, or are they two differently interpolated and corrupted texts of the same original that we cannot yet (if ever) reconstruct? http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/07-judges-nets.pdf. However, we need to be cautious because there is growing evidence that A + B might go back to two separate translations (contra two recensions, pace Ralfs). See Nathan Montagne, “Reconsidering the Relationship of A and B in LXX Judges,” in XV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies: Munich, 2013 (SBLSCS 64), eds. W. Kraus, M. N. van der Meer, M. Meiser (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2016), 49-59.

[15] Compare for yourself here:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/07-judges-nets.pdf.

[16] Dr. White holds himself to be a biblical scholar, so to mistake this basic point by itself could be another lapsus (innocent error), but given the concatenation of confusion, this is simply another sloppy piece leading to the profile of someone not serious about biblical scholarship.

[17] To show Dr. White’s and TF’s ignorance of the situation, so that the LXX is a reliable translation that (especially in chapter 11) follows the Masoretic text, see: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/07-judges-nets.pdf.

[18] “Broadcaster” White versus “Dr.” White, who on the Firing Line, already admitted that Luke (in Acts of the Apostles) quoted in the mouth of St. Paul (= Septuagint) is itself “Scripture”! “Paul in Antioch is preaching in Greek (minute 46.45)…They [Paul & co] see both [Masoretic and LXX] as the word of God […] but at times they [Masoretic and Greek] are different.” See minute 44.30 ff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9PTEvJ8uso. Then Dr. White claims that he owns “two critical editions(!)” (48.00ff) of Isaiah that are not versified in the same way (excluding [uselessly] owning two different copies of Ziegler below). Whereas the working group of scholars on the LXX can only recommend one editor and publication of Isaiah that qualifies as “critical” here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ioscs/editions.html (viz., Isaiah [Isaias] 1939, 19672, J. Ziegler).

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