Alex Thomson, a former GCHQ employee and Bible translator, critiques British intelligence for alleged failures in the 2005 London bombings and Litvinenko's assassination, claiming MI5 and MI6 serve supranational conglomerates. He attacks modern translators like Christopher Sparks for promoting Unitarian views and conspiracy theories regarding Jesus, while defending canonical integrity against figures like Daniel Gregg. Thomson details how agencies utilize social engineering and sock puppets to infiltrate communities, referencing the Reigns List and speculating on compromised public figures. Ultimately, the discussion suggests a global lack of hope among current leaders, contrasting human political failure with the need for divine intervention as described in the Olivet Discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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James Dellingpole Introduces Sina Crisps00:02:09
James.
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Welcome back to the Delling Pod, Alex Thompson.
I, I mean, I know I always say this, but I actually, I'm so happy to see you.
Um, it's mutual, James.
Gary Lineker and the Good Crisp Ad00:15:25
Oh, is it really?
And that's, that's, that's really nice.
No, I think, and I think a lot of people will be seen the same way, feeling the same way.
We've, we've sort of, I mean, we've got to know each other quite well over the years.
Um, and you were probably, when we first met, you were probably pretty much where you are now.
Whereas I think I was just at the beginning of my journey.
Down the rabbit hole.
Well, you hadn't heard of the Septuagint back then, had you, for one?
I hadn't heard of the Septuagint.
Even now I can't pronounce it properly, but barely.
Yeah, that's true.
When we first met, I don't think I was even that obsessive about the Bible, was I?
No, you weren't.
You were getting there by degrees.
But, you know, in areas like that, not to boast, but just the truth of it, I had something of a head start on you in that when I was five, six, seven years old, my mother and Her father was saying to, to my father, for goodness sake, will you stop rabbiting on about the Septuagint?
So, and he would take me to Canon Roger Beckwith, uh, the late scholar of Oxford, one of the old style Anglican men who was the world expert on the New Testament use of the Septuagint.
And dad would have a ding dong with him over the finer points of it.
So we have different routes to, uh, to the Bible positions that we're now taking.
There is so much stuff that I want to ask you because you are a kind of guru on so many things.
Um, although perhaps guru isn't the quote.
Quite the right word, given that belongs to the Eastern, possibly dubious religions that Christianity is diametrically opposed to.
But you have another spring to your bow, because of course you've been well ahead of the game in discovering how the world really works, because you used to work at GCHQ, which means that in my book you were a spy.
I mean, is that technically accurate?
People who work at GCHQ are spies?
They are, yes.
They're the only one of the three major British intelligence agencies whose, uh, former and even current employees are usually allowed to say that's where they work.
Whereas MI5 and MI6, to give them their popular names, require lifelong, uh, dissimulation.
You say, I was in security or something general like that.
Right.
I was in foreign policy.
Why is that, why is there that distinction?
Because MI5 and MI6 work in human intelligence, like the FBI in the United States or the CIA, whereas GCHQ, like NSA, works with That's really interesting.
I've got a question I wanted to ask you.
I was never recruited, um, by the intelligence agencies because my, my Anglo-Saxon tutor, who was one of the, one of the talent spotters, clearly rumbled the fact that I was utterly un, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm indiscreet.
I'm, I'm open.
I'm, I'm not really, I'm not really, there's not much compromise on me, which I think they, they want a bit of, well, I don't know about you.
I mean, you, you, you don't seem to be very compromiseable.
Um, but, I was clearly not a good candidate, but I imagine that those who do join the security services do so initially because they've been sold the idea that they'll be serving their country and by extension serving the people of their country.
I think of a young man who was of my age, perhaps a little younger, who joined GCHQ around the same time as me and went very much the same line that I did.
He got there rather quicker in that he said, Blow this for a lark.
I'm off to China to be an unreached tribes Bible translator after I think five years in the donut.
Uh, and that's exactly the routes I went.
But both of us, you know, had this idea that as upstanding Christians, the best thing we could do outside direct gospel work was support the country with our language knowledge.
Uh, and yes, we quickly realized that other forces were driving foreign and security policy and our wars and that GCHQ normally didn't have much of a say.
Certainly rank and file people didn't in, in what went on.
And I mentioned him because it was a bit of a shower thought as I was preparing earlier today for what I would say to you.
I was thinking, goodness me, that young man was ahead of the curve.
And the security division, our division as it's called, made idle threats.
They were nice chaps, but in his case, they said, look, Sonny, for five years after you leave this place, uh, there's a gentleman's agreement that you don't go to these dodgy countries.
Uh, and he just chuckled in his account of what he'd said in the exit interview and said, what are you going to do?
Come to the tarmac at Heathrow and stop me getting on the big silver bird.
That's a good line.
That's a good line.
So, you were halfway to answering my question.
You mentioned the five years.
At what point, when you join these organisations, do you realise this is not.
I was told a false prospectus by the culture.
In fact, these organisations are toxic and they are working against the British people.
My potted history of that is now available on ukcolumn.org.
If you search for Cheltenham using the search facility on ukcolumn.org, You will find my talk, uh, make sure it's the one given in, what would it be, um, early April 2025 it was that month, April 2025.
So almost exactly a year ago when we had a roadshow on location, uh, there.
Uh, so I, I, I give the whole decade of my disillusionment there in service.
The one thing I left out would be the most direct answer, I think, to when were you disillusioned?
And that was the year 2005.
I was a 26 year old and it was, so I could generalize it and say after your first failed war.
Because that's when I was first pulled off my specialism, trained up in geolocation and whatnot, uh, and put on first the, um, well, it was what was the, would it be the third year of our occupation of parts of Afghanistan, supporting the SAS there, uh, and also later that same, uh, endless hot summer, 2005, put on the response until nearly the end of the calendar year to, uh, the 7-7 attacks, or in my case,
the 21-7 failed attacks that happened two weeks later.
And that, Really, for me, neatly encapsulated, perhaps because I was at that age when men at 26 often think, well, actually, I'm not immortal, uh, and they start realizing that their, their body and their mind are taking a knock and that they ought to get themselves, uh, sorted out.
That was part of it.
The sense, you lose the sense of invulnerability or invincibility, but also it happened to be the very year when we had these adventures, one in Afghanistan, allegedly stopping, stopping the drugs manufacturing, but actually it was going on right under the noses of our elite troops.
And, uh, later that same summer, uh, one being one of the few technically trained people who could go scouting through the email accounts and other technical, uh, trails, communication trails of the alleged, uh, would be suicide bombers of 21-7, part of the same operation as response to 7-7.
And realizing, like the other team, uh, you know, in the same room that was doing the 7-7 response, there is no communications trail here.
Uh, these are patsies.
I didn't use that, come to that, you know, imagination in one go, but the, the, the seeds of that idea were there already.
Yes, well, just very, very briefly on 7-7.
I used to believe the newspapers, and I thoroughly believe that these evil Islamists, this is the word that we all encourage to use, Islamists, the fanatical Islamists, had decided to blow themselves up on the tube and on the buses and stuff.
And obviously, now I'm awake, I know that that is not true.
But I was horrified when I looked into it to realize that these.
Guys, sort of ordinary Muslim blokes, were participating in what they thought was a training exercise.
Yes.
Worked out halfway through, oh my God, but this is not a training exercise.
We are the Patsys, tried to get out of it and then got bumped off.
I mean, it became very up close and personal.
I didn't see the footage of them being shot or anything like that because not even the MI5 people got that kind of real response.
I did see some of the camera footage from the tube.
Um, because I was directly, um, involved in the GCXQ side on, on a visit to Thames House once when I went up to London, they showed me that.
And I thought, how distinctly unimpressive this is and how, how stretching of credulity.
But no, uh, Muaddib, as he called himself, the Englishman living in Ireland, who suffered a lot for his documentaries, uh, found out, he, he wasn't the only one to point out that Peter Powers, on behalf of Elsevier, the Israeli Dutch, um, company that does everything, uh, you know, in, in this domain, had commissioned some, um, Some drills, but anyone can find on YouTube, Peter Powers chuckling and chortling, uh, on the lunchtime news on the 5th, 7th of July, 2005, saying, fancy that.
We had a drill wind up this morning that's exactly mirrored what went on, which goes on even today, 2026, with meningitis drills in Kent, you know, but there, that was all, that was all there.
And Muad'Dib was the one who pieced it together, didn't he?
And found out that these guys, uh, panicked and, you know, would, they didn't even know London or the greater London rail network.
So did they go towards Bedford, which is where I, you know, I grew up.
So it was very personal for me.
They were, Checking the footage of all the train stations between Luton and Bedford.
Uh, where did they end up?
Uh, and in the end, we found that they, they fled to Canary Wharf and got slotted as far as we can tell.
Exactly.
They got slotted.
So how, how do you think, how the people who remain, who continue working for MI5 and MI6 when a significant chunk of them must be aware Of the truth behind this.
How do they reconcile this with their moral consciences when they see the British state actually executing innocent people in order to, for whatever reason?
I mean, how do they justify this themselves?
You don't get to see this.
Even with compartmentalization, if you're not one of the louche few, and I always am careful to say in interviews like this, I'm not blackening MI6 vis a vis the other agencies in some ways.
Uh, the most intelligent, uh, and, and, and the most dutiful, but it tends to be a little happy clique in, um, happy few in, in MI6 who are really on the ball.
And even those within the compartments in GCHQ and MI5 who are supporting their operation that they're usually leading if it's abroad, um, you don't get the full, uh, lowdown.
The classic case would be I was very close to the Litvinenko issue, uh, you know, and, and, uh, who assassinated him?
Was it, was it the Italian?
And we know all of this, the question.
This was all swirling around.
The GCHQ desk officers who were directly dealing with Litvinenko and Berezovsky in the Chechen nest in London at that time of Litvinenko's death in 2006.
And yet we still didn't know.
And so likewise with MI5 taking the lead because this was in London on domestic soil, even the desk officers on the 7-7 investigation and response wouldn't have seen anything like in the movies where there's live body cam footage of the guy getting it in the neck.
No.
You just get a readout the next day which says, um, specialist cell X has decreed that this is what happened.
Right.
End of questions.
Well, it is if you know which side your bread's buttered.
And when I started having misgivings, some of the more morally integral older men in their fifties, because I was a single man in his twenties back then, uh, just, they didn't chortle at my increasing vocalization of a wish to leave or disillusionment.
They said, well, it's all right for you, mate, but we've got mortgages to pay.
There was nothing more idealistic in it than that.
Um, who did kill Litvinenko?
I really genuinely cannot tell.
Because at the level of the two or three main players in MI6 and the FSB, and there's three or four legs to this stool, you know, there's also the Chechen, uh, network in London and the, um, you know, the, um, uh, international sort of financial, financial node around Berezovsky.
Each of these camps, when you're very high up in that, you're really thinking about your loyalty to your clan and even your obligations to, to men in the other nodes more than you are about national loyalty.
So it's pretty meaningless to say that If someone with a Russian passport did it, the Russians did it.
If someone with a British passport or indefinite leave to remain did it, then the Brits did it.
Or even if it was a Chechen, it was MI6 wanted him dead.
No, it's, it's, it's a clique of some kind wanted him dead.
Right.
Yes.
I suppose the people who call the shots in the world are operated at a supranational level anyway.
That's what you get from all the really decent high level, uh, helicopter view whistleblowers, uh, that talk about Monetary systems and, you know, black ops and, and trillions, uh, and decades of, uh, of scope.
When, when anyone comes out who's got a real story to tell in that regard, like, uh, Bill Pawlek or Pavelek, if you, or Pawelic, Pawelic, if you want to pronounce it that way, P-A-W-E-L-E-C, you'll find him easily enough in a long testimony on YouTube in a posthumous testimony.
Anyone at that level says that there's several, uh, what shall we say, uh, business, uh, conglomerates or, or, um, uh, franchises.
And they overlap more or less with one major country's intelligence agency, but there are competing wings even within the CIA or the Chinese intelligence service or whatever.
And sometimes a wing of the CIA will be more closely related to one in a European country than it will be to others in the CIA.
I don't know about you, I'm getting this vibe at the moment that we're approaching endgame for these shadowy.
I mean, I think Trump has played a blinder on their behalf with this crazy, obviously planned attack on Iran.
And it's obvious that the Iranians are in cahoots with this.
This is all just kind of business.
Well, yes.
I mean, Iran's never been my specialism, but you want to look at the transfer of wealth between leading families at the top of the Iranian regime, as in any Western regime.
And if you see that the guy holding the reins of power in a particular domain in Iran these days actually still has access to Western funds, which many of them do, then that should tell you a thing or two.
Hmm.
Um.
I'm getting the further feeling that things are going to get so bad that really it is time to turn our attentions, well, not that they weren't already, towards God.
Greek Texts and Translation Errors00:15:36
So I can now smoothly and expertly segue into the next section of our chat.
Because I've done a couple of, I mean, I like to do occasional podcasts on the subject of scripture and God and what's it all about.
And I've done two recent ones.
One with a kind of lovable rogue, I think I might describe him, called Sir Eskinor.
Sir Eskinor is of Greek origin, now lives in Mexico, and is clearly very red stroke black pilled on the subject of the New World Order, etc., etc.
And he rather ambushed me the other day on my podcast by introducing me to this.
Well, it was extraordinary when I listened to it.
I mean, now I understand it's quite, it's been doing the rounds.
But with this novel and rather shocking take on the Gospels, where his line was, I read the Gospels in the original Greek and suddenly it changed my view of what they were like.
And his line was sort of, Jesus was really part of an Eleusinian mystery cult.
And he was this kind of older man with these sort of leading these younger men astray, or that it was all to do with, Possibly dodgy sexual relationship, or maybe not, but they were young, that the disciples were much younger, and that Mary Magdalene was some kind of what were they called temple prostitutes, that it was all bound up in the mystery religions and stuff.
And I was like, whoa, whoa.
I was wondering whether you have come across this theory before, and have you got any thoughts on it?
I'll answer the first.
Description that you gave of Sir Escanor.
You know, yes, he is a lovable rogue.
Yes, he clearly does not want to lead other people down his path of unbelief.
You had to drag his conclusions out of him reluctantly, almost like extracting blood from a stone.
Uh, but I'll, I have come across some versions of it before that Jesus was modeled on mystery cult figures, not specifically Eleusinian, but often you hear Mithraism mentioned, but there's an anachronism there.
Uh, archaeologically, uh, Christianity is earlier.
And more complete in its claims about its Messiah.
But to cut to the chase, since you are having me on in my capacity as a Bible translator and as a linguist, both Sir Eskinor and the other gentleman will be talking about Christopher Sparks.
You described them there accurately as having presented their claims to the world with the covering note I read the Bible in the original Greek or the New Testament in the original Greek.
Eskinor claims it's all in the original Greek, but never mind.
And neither of them did.
And I've got the mileage as a Bible translator to say to both of them lovingly and sincerely, gentlemen, neither of you read the Bible in the original Greek.
It's abundantly obvious to me from listening to the focus they have on vocabulary rather than on grammar, even though Christopher Sparks does major on grammar in what he says to you.
They have not read Greek as Greek and they have not assessed translations.
We'll get to the detail in a moment, but I'm one of the few who can say this robustly because As to give Christopher Sparks his due, he, he did say that Bible translation is what you come to at the end of a, of a long trajectory of experience.
You don't begin overnight.
But then he went and put his foot in it because, you know, he was comparing Greek with English rather than Greek with itself, uh, in a lot of his claims.
He even said at one moment that he had largely relied upon Green's interlinear, which gives literal mentions of the English between the lines of the Greek rather than work from the Greek.
And crucially, this is where I'm in a very small category of people who can say, until you've got my level of knowledge, you're entitled to my opinion, then you're entitled to your own.
Uh, neither of them came to translation in the way that 2000 years of Western, mainly elite, uh, men, uh, in secular and Christian terms came to translation, namely that from the, from their earliest years, certainly preteen years,
they were translating copious quantities of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, whatever else into their native languages and vice versa into Greek, which I was being given as a 12 year old with my that is a translator.
And I've had the decade we just alluded to of being a government interpreter, translating hundreds of thousands of words from Eastern European languages in that setting into English, then hundreds of thousands of words of legal, diplomatic, and then I've gone into five dimensional translation, which is simultaneous interpreting for international organizations.
So I know what translation is.
If you are looking at the original and the translation in two columns or in two texts side by sides, then that is a Translation, trans, across from one to the other.
If you are assessing a text on its own, you are, you maybe have great literary qualities and gifts, but you are not assessing a translation.
And, it's a long answer, so I'll cut it short here, but Saraskanor has fallen into the classic Greek and the Persians have this as well, trap of national arrogance.
This is what Paul calls the, the gospel being foolishness to the Greeks.
He says, we Greeks know our language.
You get this with, with, um, uh, apologists for rabbinic Judaism, or even messianic Judaism sometimes.
They say, we Jews know our Hebrew.
So they will not be told when a word has changed meaning from biblical times to now.
Uh, and with, with, uh, Christopher Sparks, it's lexicon Greek.
This word, this word, staring himself blind, as the Dutch say, on a word and neglecting the syntax.
Right.
So the syntax is very important in, in, in the understanding the, it's the context of a word.
Of course.
Syntax, context, logic, argument.
Um, I mean, I'm not going to put Christopher Sparks in the same league as Sir Escanor.
As we go on, we'll, we'll pick them apart.
But Christopher Sparks has given serious thought to this and he's, he's used some of the best tools available to, I don't mean it in any arrogant sense, but a layman who's coming to this without elite schooling.
And I must stress, he's quite right that the spirit of God is necessary to understand the word of God and that's, Uh, you know, uh, worldly figures who have had elite schooling but, uh, but are, are, uh, dismissive in their approaches are not to be preferred.
Yeah.
But Christopher Sparks has used the materials available to, in, with no sense of arrogance, the, the self-schooled man, uh, which are available almost uniquely in English, a full set of them from about 1900 onwards.
And if you want the whole background to how all the materials came about that Christopher Sparks, uh, used, uh, then that is in a three-part interview which I did with my father, which you'll find on ukcolumn.org. by searching for the term literacy and read the transcript, follow the links, the hyperlinks in that transcript.
You'll find all the resources and dad setting out the timeline of how it came to about that a, uh, a sincere Christian with no particular, uh, hyperlinguistic schooling is able to get the sense out of the biblical languages.
But that does not make you a translator.
It does not make you qualified to translate the word of God for the saints.
You've made me even more excited than I was before, Alex, to have you on.
Because, as you can imagine, I ended both those podcasts feeling slightly inadequate in that I hadn't been able to rebut these claims or even to know whether they deserved rebutting.
But I think my instinct was, I mean, you remember in the Christopher Sparks thing, I mentioned George Herbert as an example of the kind of school he was.
Typical of those, they were mostly young men, young men.
He went to Westminster and he would have been translating Greek and, and, and, and we could do English and, and English into Greek from a very early age.
Yes.
And this was standard.
Whether a man was destined for law, medicine, the church, that's what you got the lad on when he was young.
And it formed the mind.
Even if he was going to be monoglot as an English or French speaker or whatever his native language was in his later life, in the early modern period and for a long time before that, you had him translating the best authors.
Between the classic language and his native language in his preteen years, so that his mind thought in grammatical and logical categories.
Not just the words and the context they appear in, but also the syntax and even the, what we now call in linguistics, the discourse, the argument stretching over several paragraphs and how the discourse is turned this way and that by little particles.
Now, this is something that was routine in the early modern era.
And I've written about this, by the way.
You can find the article about Bible translation philosophy that mentions these details.
by going to tbsbibles.org, find the search function at the top bar of the website and simply search for the word philosophy.
And you will find my article on Bible translation philosophy that talks about this.
Uh, the churchman of the early modern era, whom I will say brother Sparks because he's, he's a very sincere man, right?
Brother Christopher Sparks, uh, castigates understandably in their conduct for being part of the Stuart crown persecution of dissenters.
This is completely irrelevant.
And beside the point with their translation abilities, because they all in that day were schooled in this.
The three stages were called translatio, emulatio, imitatio.
Translation, emulation, imitation.
First you translated slavishly like a schoolboy exercise, then you pastiched, and finally as a, as a 12 year old or so you were able in the style of Aeschylus or in the style of Cicero to appeal in your native or the learned language and you know how the language works.
As my father would put it in a nutshell, you know how Paul would have said it if he'd meant X.
Oh, I, this was standard stuff.
What have we lost?
For centuries.
We've lost oodles of it.
So much.
Yeah.
So, I'm going to be blunt in love to both of them.
Okay.
Um, so Espinel doesn't claim to be a Bible translator and has no interest in it, but Christopher Sparks would say, I have made a sincere attempt, in his words, uh, to be the best Bible translator I can, uh, I'm going to be as, as, as blunt as I would be if I was facing a candidate for postgraduate interpreter school, which I do on the continent, saying, uh, I wish to interpret into English.
I have to say with a lot of them, you're more intelligent and your English is better than your teachers, let alone anyone else who was at your school.
And you are not good enough at English to be an interpreter.
And with Christopher, because he came to the Bible translation in later life, in the classic sense of the word, and by the way, he is in the same category as most of the people who are so-called professional Bible translators now, working on 20th century versions into English.
Gentlemen, Your Greek and your translation skills aren't good enough because you started at the wrong phase of life and you don't have translation skills.
Putting it another way, and I'm in a very rare category here, so I'm not, I'm not trying to dismiss the many people in Bible translation who've come to it in midlife out of conviction.
Some of them are superb autodidacts, diamonds in the rough who've turned out to be better than the very highly schooled ones.
But, you know, you just can't develop that mileage and that sense of what translation is if you haven't If you've been a serious legal,
medical, literary translator between your language and a difficult other language or ideally two or three with different properties, then you've got a clear sense of what translation is and when a translation is good and when you stop fiddling with it.
Otherwise, you're really shooting in the dark.
There'll be endless controversies over what Paul really meant because you're only talking about a single word.
Right.
Yes.
Yes.
So, just very briefly, probably there isn't a simple answer to this, but when you're trying to find the most accurate early text to translate into your, because you've been translating the Bible into Dutch, haven't you?
No, I've been revising.
Although I'm not a native speaker of Dutch, I have been one of those who, on behalf of the conservative Dutch Reformed denominations, have been revising the existing classic Dutch translation, which is being done in-house by the GBS, the Gerifformeerde Bible Stichting, together with the TBS in Britain and the RBS, Russian Bible Society in North Carolina.
These are the three remaining extremely reliable classic Bible translation organizations that take the right approach to both text and method of translation.
So in that capacity, yes, revising, but I'm also A consultant, not a primary translator because native speakers need to do it, but a close colleague of the brilliant primary translators working into first Ukrainian and latterly Georgian and soon other Eastern European languages as well, God willing, straight from the Hebrew and Greek original of the Bible.
And can you settle for what, once and for all, which is better, the Hebrew version or the Greek version?
We could go to the Westminster Standards of the mid 17th century, which, uh, explicitly confess in a way that not even wrote the Roman Catholic Church had historically in a very brilliant way that the, uh, Masoretic text of the Hebrew Old Testament is the Word of God and the, uh, uh, Textus Receptus of the New Testament.
Okay.
They didn't have quite such a focus on textual variants of the New Testament then, but that's, that was formulated at that point.
We don't need to get into those weeds.
We just need to look at Paul's own arguments.
And Paul says in several points in his letters and Peter that they know they're writing scripture.
I know this is not a popular argument these days.
It's claimed that they didn't realize until decades after the New Testament that they were writing something as canonical and as inspired as the Old Testament, but the clues are all there in the letters.
And both of them say, while asserting, affirming that they are writing the words of God, and Paul said this in the beginning of Romans chapter three, that the chief advantage the Jews had was that to them were committed the living oracles, the lively oracles in the AV of God.
You know, so what the Jews say the text is, and that was the only text available until very recently, And the same with what the Greek speaking churches said the text was, and that was the Textus Receptus.
And people shouldn't get hang up on this if they don't know the difference, but for some people this is a very lively debate.
The historic Jewish Masoretic texts of the Old Testament and the historic Greek texts of the New Testament, that has been accepted by all churches, West, East, North, South, Jewish, Gentile, for the whole time since the biblical era till now as the only Word of God.
A plethora of alternative texts has now come along.
The first thing you're going to say, if you overturn that, by saying, the Septuagint is primal, or, as Sir Escanor does, the Greek was written first and the Hebrew was a copy of it, etc.
The first thing you're saying is that the New Testament authors were talking nonsense, uh, when they said that the Jews had the text of the Old Testament.
The Epistle of James and Church Deception00:14:23
The second thing you are, uh, necessarily saying, uh, implying by, by saying this, is that the whole, uh, church of Old and New Covenants was deceived, that God allowed them to read the wrong text and get the wrong doctrine out of it.
These are just some of the priors that you are saying if you do not accept that the Masoretic text is the text to translate from.
I do accept, unlike Christopher Sparks, I do accept that the Septuagint was there well before Christ.
The archaeological, linguistic, and textual evidence is overwhelming that it was.
It wasn't written by Origen.
You're probably going to disagree with me on this, but, but God did allow the book of Esther in, which, which I, I just, obviously bogus.
You can't say it's obviously bogus, can you?
It doesn't mention the name of God, but it does say that, um, help will come from another place if Esther doesn't help the Jews or the people of God, which is a veiled reference to God.
People are fixated on it now, aren't they?
Because they say Purim is this horrible bloodletting festivity.
It was going to be done to the Jews, you know?
It was kill or be killed.
And as with the whole of the Old Testament, you know, the commands to slaughter without mercy when you enter the promised land, people are being fatuous and disingenuous if they say, oh, this is a dangerous morality for Jews or Christians to have.
Certainly Christians, you know, let alone people who claim the name of Jew in the modern world, some of them do kill on this basis.
But where is there a Christian in the world who says, there was a historic command to Joshua and his generation to slay the Canaanites, therefore, I'm worried that you Christians are going to do the same?
Nobody.
Is saying that, right?
So a historical record of two Oriental nations being at each other's throats is something to learn from.
It's not to the Christian something that should be expunged or uhemerized from the sorry, sorry, yeah, balderized from the Bible because people might act upon it.
Because it's obvious that you don't believe it.
These are not arguments that I really care about.
It's not my objection to Esther, it's a bit like I don't know.
And Enid Blyton's story shoved into the Canterbury Tales.
It just, it just doesn't, there's no, stylistically, I mean, obviously they're all very different.
The books, you know, Ecclesiastes is very different from, from Exodus.
And so it's not that.
It just, yeah, right.
Scripture contains many genres, doesn't it?
I mean, the, the earliest part of the Old Testament, the books of the law, and if you extend it a bit into the Octatuque, the, um, the, the historic, early historical books as well, they have a little novella.
Named the Book of Ruth, which for the simple, the children, whoever else you may wish to put into that category, the newcomer to the faith, tell in the scope of a few chapters in a readable story this is what faith in God is.
The prophetic middle chunk of the Old Testament has that in the form of the novella or the little book of Jonah.
And the latter part of the Old Testament has that with the figure of Esther.
And inside any community that takes the Old Testament as God's word, whether Jewish or Christian, West or East, you will get people who produce children's versions orally or in a little Publication of the story of Ruth or the story of Esther, and that way a child or a newcomer to the faith or a simpleton can understand this is the heart of believing in God.
Yeah.
Obviously, you're not going to swim around on that one, Alex, but I was, you're probably going to, I hope, tell me that Christopher Sparks' contention that the Song of Solomon has no place in the Bible because it's ungodly.
I mean, I quite like the Song of Solomon.
It's weird and quite.
Again, unlike anything else, but it's this sort of, well, it's sort of love poetry, isn't it?
Tell me about that.
It's an allegory.
It's interesting because we mustn't forget Sir Escanor, and he completely wrongheadedly claimed that the Jews don't have a word for, he said two, didn't he?
They have no word for a riddle, and they have no word for euphemism.
Remember when he said those two?
Well, I was too busy going.
Well, Sir Escanor, the Jewish term for a riddle is Chidar, and okay, the Greeks can be proud that they had this term euphemismos, which was quite a sophisticated word for the ancient world.
True enough.
But when he said that the Jews have no word, sorry, Hidai is euphemism.
But when he said that Jews have no word for riddle, that really got my goat because the Jewish word for a riddle or parable is Mashal.
And Solomon, the same gentleman that you were just asking about, the king who wrote so much, including the Song of Solomon, he wrote, as scripture itself records, 3,000 of these Mashalim, 3,000 proverbs.
So it's very much a biblical word.
Now, the Song of Songs, okay, some of the rabbis who were not original Jews, as you well know in their doctrine, but they, in the Middle Ages, Told their students, until you are, I think it was 40 years old andor married, or preferably both, you won't read this because then you will be too lusty and take it as a sexual poem.
But from the earliest days of the church, it's been accepted as describing the love between Christ and his church.
Global warming is a massive con.
There is no evidence whatsoever that man made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition, my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in, well, 2011 actually.
The first edition came out, and it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So, I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from.
Jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that.
Just go to my website and look for it Jamesdellingpole.co.uk, and I hope it helps, keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gaia.
No, we don't, it's a scam.
And Solomon, the same gentleman that you were just asking about, the, the king who wrote, um, so much, including Song Of Solomon, he wrote, as scripture itself records, 3,000 of these meshalim, 3,000 proverbs.
So it's very much a biblical word.
No, the Song of Songs, okay, some of the rabbis who were not original Jews, as you well know in their doctrine, but they, they, in the Middle Ages told their students, until you are, I think it was 40 years old and or married, or probably preferably both, you won't read this because then you will be too lusty and take it as a sexual poem.
But from the earliest days of the church, it's been accepted as describing the love between Christ and his church.
Right.
You know, it's, it's a very intimate spiritual book.
And, and, which book should be taken out of the canon?
That's the thing, because, uh, someone quite comparable in many ways to Christopher Sparks, an earnest chap who in middle age, I think in the States rather than Britain, if I'm not mistaken, uh, who said, I'm going to do a one-man translation.
Some of these are, you know, are quite successful, but there was a chap called Daniel Gregg who did something like that.
And, uh, okay, Daniel Gregg's book is, uh, translation is called The Good News of Messiah, just as, uh, Christopher Sparks was called, what was it, Keys to the Kingdom translation.
And Daniel Gregg decided to expunge Hebrews and relegate that to an appendix and put all kinds of footnotes over it in a preface to it that said, this isn't God's word, you know, the author made mistakes.
What, Hebrews as in the, the, and yeah, Christopher Sparks, just to show the inconsistency of this, Christopher Sparks is there jumping up and down, making points about Hebrews 8, quoting, um, the covenant from Jeremiah 31.
So to him, Hebrews is crucial to the canon.
You know, so it's a case of, but neither yet did their testimony agree.
And the New Testament addresses this too.
It says in, uh, the epistles of Peter that, uh, no scripture is by private interpretation.
You can't just say, um, I have worked out, and Christopher Sparks seems quite categorical about it, that if you have the spirit of Jesus, as he says often, you, you will be a spiritual man and you'll work this out.
So I've worked out, says Christopher Sparks, that, um, these books are the ones that don't fit.
Daniel Gregg says it, says that these other books don't fit.
On that note, Alex.
I don't want to be rude to evangelical Christians because I've encountered some amazing evangelicals who are filled with the Holy Spirit in a way that you feel like you're living out Acts, the book of Acts, that moment where they all speak in tongues and there's a rushing mighty wind and stuff.
And it's great.
And I love that.
I do find there's something.
Almost arrogant in this idea they seem to have that God, Jesus came into my life on this day that I can name, and I can tell you exactly how it happened, and I am filled with the Spirit, and if that hasn't happened to you, you're not really in the game.
This is at least as old as Protestantism.
It's not just a fault that people have detected in evangelicalism, which in the strict sense is an 18th century movement.
It's even as far back as Luther being the first identifiable.
Protestant in organizational terms.
Uh, he got stick for, uh, saying that the, perhaps justifiably for saying that the Epistle of James was a straw epistle, an epistle of straw, as in he, you know, he went almost as far as Daniel Gregor Christopher Sparks in saying this book doesn't belong in the New Testament.
And the one he didn't like was the Epistle of James because the Epistle of James says don't go around yelling, I've got faith, I've got faith, but prove that you're a faithful Christian by your works.
Otherwise you're a fraud, you know, and Luther. had such a, to use the technical term, forensic or legal view of justification, and a correct one, by the way, but that was his big contribution to Christian theology, that he could not make that rhyme with the epistle of James saying, quote, faith without works is dead.
So he didn't, being a 16th century man, he didn't quite as far as to say, I am unilaterally going to remove this book from the 27 canonical New Testament books.
Yeah.
There was an agreement back then in Christendom that you couldn't do that, but now Christendom has fallen apart, not Christianity, but Christendom.
Including some very earnest ones, like Christopher Sparks and Daniel Gregg, are saying, I'm going to take the knife of Neriah, as it's called from the reference in Jeremiah, and I'm going to scrap this bit out of the canon.
It doesn't suit me.
This is obviously, I'm just asking for a personal opinion here, because you're not the Pope, or you're not whoever.
Not that I'd trust the Pope's take more than I would yours, actually.
Much less.
But reassure me here.
I mean, I cannot.
Give you the time and date when Jesus came into my life, and I felt, I mean, does that make me a bad Christian?
Does it mean I'm not?
No.
And in the scene I have come into, where I until recently was an elder until I resigned that office so I could go and see my father more, he.
Where were we with that?
Uh, what was it you were just saying about, uh, Jesus coming into my life?
Yes.
In the, in the Dutch Reformed scene, a lot of people who, in the minds of others in the congregation, are sincere Christians, are actually asked to abstain from taking part in the Lord's Supper.
Because afterwards, when the elders come and say the Reformed version of the evangelical question, when did Jesus come into your life?
The Reformed have a very different, more respectful way of asking that.
How do you know you're truly repentant?
And so on and so on.
They cannot say, on date X, I had experience Y.
And in a lot of cases, Dutch Reformed elders, and they're not the only Protestant tradition to do this, say, We're not convinced that's a genuine repentance and new birth.
Right.
It's understandable, but I quibble it.
No, because those who can give a testimony of who the Lord is to them, how they have become one with Christ, how their sin has been taken by Christ, and the righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ is in them, even if it is by degrees as it was in my life, uh, they are genuine believers.
Yes.
Well, this is exactly it.
That, that, um, I mean, I don't, I don't want to come over like a Gnostic.
Or anything.
But isn't, isn't one's faith kind of a personal thing?
I mean, doesn't, doesn't one's relationship with God, it varies from person to person, doesn't it?
Personal Faith Versus Biblical Doctrine00:05:02
Let's answer biblically again.
The Epistle of James is the one that addresses this squarely because it sets up a straw man, not a straw epistle, but a straw man.
An objection is anticipated by the epistle, apostle James.
And he says, someone will say, I've got this kind of faith.
No, I have faith without works.
Or show me your faith without works and so on.
The core error that James addresses here is this idea that there is a nebulous substance that drifted into you called faith.
But even, you know, even Greeks should have shown them there is no such thing distinct from believing or trusting in the person of Jesus Christ, trusting in God, right?
Faith, it's perhaps unfortunate in English, but it's a fact of the English language.
We have this noun that allows people, certainly in our postmodern era, to say, what kind of faith do you feel?
No, it's always faith in or trust in or believing in.
So it's always personalized to Jesus Christ or God the Father has spoken the truth and I know he is both able and willing, uh, only to tell me the truth and to lead me into all truth by his spirit.
Yes.
Well, it would sort of also make intuitive sense, wouldn't it?
I mean, although we're all made in the image of God, at the same time, we're not all the same.
And so, I mean, God's relationship with, say, a Russian peasant is going to be different from his relationship with you or me.
And there are people to whom God will most intimately speak from the Song of Solomon.
And there will be some.
Perhaps it would skew more towards, uh, young ladies.
Who would say, I can be just like Esther and I can be a princess for God if I trust him.
So that's why these books are in the Bible alongside the high level discourse.
A Jewish princess.
Well, a princess in faith.
Oh, I see, right.
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.
I was also, I have to say, I was very disappointed with old Sparksy, as I'm going to call him. Lovely chap.
It was great meeting him.
I would very sincerely love to descend to particulars with him and have get the books out and talk about verses.
I would do it with love and with gentlemanly robustness, as I'm sure you would appreciate from me.
So, I would, he's the kind of chap that I would like to spend time with and, you know, actually, you know, have some drinks with.
You know, he passes the good bloke test.
It's just that he's sadly mistaken on certain things.
Perhaps this will happen one day.
I think it'd be a good spectator event.
Do your homework though, James.
If you're going to referee that, then you actually mug up on things.
This is kind of where I'm not interested because I think I probably find it quite hard to be unbiased.
And anyway, I'm not a moderator.
When you get to a certain age, Alex, you just realise the stuff you don't want.
Like just recently, the Oxford Union invited me to be in a debate.
And I'm thinking, do I want to get shot on by an audience of undergraduates who've been so heavily brainwashed in a particular view of the world and they think they're original?
Why would I put myself through that?
It's just not.
You do realise, James, that the current crop of undergraduates, at least the first years, freshmen as the Americans would still call them, they were born after the Blair Premiership ended.
Or very close to the end, anyway.
I'm forgetting.
No, it was 2007 was not the end of the Blair Premiership, was it?
It was 2009, actually.
So, no, that's not quite right.
But, you know, we're getting on to those whose active memories, earliest memories of prime ministers are Cameron.
Yes.
That's it.
I started to despair when I realised that it wasn't just one wasn't just exposed to the dumbed down generation.
One was now encountering The educate, the generation that have been taught by the dumbed down teachers.
That's, that's how bad things work.
And, and we've had several generations of this in Bible translation.
This is why my father in the three part series that you must read the transcript of on literacy on ukcolumn.org, uh, consistently goes over this, that we've had dumb teachers taught by dumb teachers teaching dumb students, uh, at that postgraduate level of, uh, English and other major languages, Bible translation.
So they're just copying each other's errors.
Uh, Christopher Sparks is quite right that there are errors in almost all Uh, classically accepted Bible translations.
Trinity Mysteries and Unitarian Claims00:15:49
There's, there's no KJV only position held by the pinnacle organization, the Trinitarian Bible Society, or the Dutch GBS, or the American RBS.
You know, they don't say that the King James, as, as some fools do, uh, the Ruckmanites, they're called, who, that, that they say that this is the word of God even more than the original, yes, what are they called?
The, the, well, the one term for them is Ruckmanites because of a certain gentleman called Ruckman who pushed this view, but also extreme brethren and Pentecostals of certain tendencies in Australia and New Zealand have hijacked.
This idea as well, even though they're not followers of Ruckman.
And they call the 1911 edition of the King James Bible produced in Cambridge, they call that the pure Cambridge text.
And some of them say, until this came along and the relevant prophet from our little coterie to interpret it, there was no perfect Bible.
Yes, they are that foolish.
And you've come across those things on the internet, haven't you, where you get people explain to you they run it through a computer and the symmetry is so perfect it could not have been created except by God.
Oh, this numerology.
I mean, you alluded to this in your Christopher Sparks interview, didn't you?
There are people like Gail Ripplinger who, you know, are so focused on finding, you know, letters and words that make numerological sense in the King James Bible that they dispense with the original.
Yes, absolutely.
That, that, that's a folly.
But the Jews in the biblical era did not go in for numerology.
And there's nothing inherently sacred about the Hebrew script.
It's, it's, in fact, the script we use for Hebrew is the Aramaic script.
The Jews dispensed with the script that the earlier prophets used halfway through the Old Testament period and took on a similar but not identical alphabet from a neighboring nation.
So there's nothing inherently mystical or magical about the letters or, or them standing for numbers in scripture.
That's far, far later.
Well, so the, the obsession with Kabbalah and stuff, the numerology, was that, was that all sort of, um.
There's Babylon-Persian obsessions with that at the time of the Old Testament, but it didn't spread in documented form to any form of Judaism until well after the New Testament.
When did, so when did that stuff, was, was this adopted from the Babylonian mystery religions?
Yes.
I mean, there's enough apologists on YouTube who point out this, this problem now.
Rabbinic Judaism is a response to Christianity and it imports numerology, Kabbalism and a lot of other things from Eastern mystery religion.
Ultimately from India, but via Babylon and Persia, uh, in the, in the early centuries AD.
And this is when Judaism gets so wacky that some streams of it say, we're cleverer than God, uh, God's not involved in salvation, we are, we are masters on earth.
And many other such perversions to the nth degree.
Um, no, the, the sages of that era, at least one of the places in Babylonia where they collected, uh, and, and, and stroked their beards and, and formed the Talmud, uh, was the city of Pumbedita.
And the sages, as they're called there, were known as the sharp men of Pumbedita.
Because they came up with sharp formulations that, as they claim in the text of the Babylonian Talmud, aha, God's got no answer to that.
Now we've upended God.
We've pulled the rug from under his feet.
So if one of the devout, yeah, say one of the priests, I suppose would they be Levites from the children of Israel?
If they got a time machine and went forward to see Judaism as it's called now, they'd be going, whoa.
Well, the dominant strand of rabbis who came up with this response to Christianity called Rabbinic Judaism, which now claims to be the only Judaism, those rabbis actually said in their Talmud, in hell there will be the priests because they didn't accept the rabbis taking their place.
Right.
The Levites, the Kohanim.
The rabbis have no time for them.
Yeah.
So when you've got, when you've got, um, Benjamin Netanyahu, God rest his soul, because of course he's, he's dead now, according to the latest conspiracy theory that I don't believe.
It's a sort of normie conspiracy theory rather than a kind of real one.
Um, they might have faked it, mightn't they?
They might, they might be, he might be living in the same street as Jeffrey Epstein and, um, David Bowie even.
Um, but, but when he, when he invokes Amalek, He's really invoking a text which has got nothing to do with him ancestrally.
And the Netanyahu family had nothing to do with Judaism, no religious commitment until pretty recently.
Bibi, until his middle age, couldn't be bothered to attend synagogue or ask for blessings of rabbis.
And his father was secretary to, was it Jabotinsky, a big secular Zionist who spent his final years in New York and died in 1940.
So the tradition that he comes from is complete secularism.
Well, what was his name, Leshnyahu, anywhere?
Was it something else?
Oh, they all have, I forget what his was, but two generations back they have Yiddish names from Central Eastern Europe.
Yeah.
And they Hebrae us them when they come to the land.
He's a Khazarian, basically.
He may be.
I don't know the definitive answer on the Khazarian theory.
But the New Testament addresses it most concisely at the end of Galatians.
Down legalism and Judaizing tendencies.
And then finally, Paul says, Peace be upon the Israel of God, which he's described in the previous verse as those who follow Christ, whether Jew or Gentile.
I was disappointed that.
Christopher Sparks tried to de Luciferize, de Satanize the Bible, saying, I mean, saying that no, the demons and the fallen angels, that's just a kind of bad translation.
The evil isn't in the heart of man and there are no.
He's a Unitarian, not a universalist Unitarian, the guys who say that Jesus is a nice example to follow.
But he would, I think, call himself, or people would call him accurately, at least, A biblical Unitarian, a man who denies the doctrine of the Trinity and denies the immortality of the soul, uh, but who does so by taking the Bible seriously and studying it.
And another of those is my own father, uh, who's only three years older than Christopher Sparks, and they share many of the same formative experiences and educational tools that they've used, right?
So I, I see a lot of, I have a lot of understanding of the, the position, uh, he's coming from there.
Uh, but no, just remind me how we got, we got under this track and we'll, we'll pursue it.
Well, I, I said I was disappointed because I, I don't share it at all.
Yes.
The devil.
Yes, yes, sorry.
Um, um, here's the thing.
My father, um, much to the chagrin of people around me, would argue hammer and tongue, uh, against the classic doctrine of the Trinity, uh, et cetera.
And he would be on the same line as Christopher Sparks there and many other things.
But, uh, my father was booted out of one of the largest Unitarian movements, the Christadelphians on this point.
Um, he ca, you know, for those who don't know the, the, the, the, these environments, these are 19th century movements of Self taught men who, just like Christopher Sparks and ultimately my father, say, Well, now we've got all these tools, we can be as good as the scholars of old without the priesthood and work out what the Bible really is saying in accurate detail.
And some of these people concluded there's no Trinity, there's no immortal soul, there's no devil.
And that movement, or one of these movements, was the Christadelphians.
So my dad went to them when he was about 60 odd, after decades of wondering where he should attend, and he said, I don't believe there's a Trinity.
Oh, good, welcome in, brother.
And I don't believe that the soul is immortal.
Good, welcome in, brother.
And I don't believe there's a devil.
Be excommunicated, heretic!
So he actually got booted out of a Unitarian movement, my father, for saying actually the devil really personally exists.
So your dad does believe the devil exists or doesn't?
Yes!
Oh, right.
Yeah.
And he would subscribe to a form of Trinitarianism.
He just says, can somebody tell me what the doctrine of the Trinity is that isn't modalism, sabellianism, tritheism?
That's a philosophical position.
A theological one.
Uh, but the point I'm making is, you know, that people get very intolerant about this.
Not Christopher Sparks, I can see he's quite a gentleman.
But, you know, that there are people in otherwise very accepting sects, you know, sects that are so accepting that people regard them as total heretics, um, because they're Unitarians, you know.
But even for them, it's beyond the pale to say that the devil exists personally because they're so hung up on the idea that it's all in the mind and evil is a kind of, you know, it's only a kind of a networked intent to work against God and that there's no real personification of it.
Yes.
I have real problems with that.
It just seems like.
Well, I mean, the angels themselves, the non-fallen angels, they're mentioned deliberately, sparingly.
I mean, they're not in the creation account in Genesis 1.
There's more detail about them in Job and in other more mystical and poetic Old Testament books such as Ezekiel, Isaiah.
You know, that's where we get the, uh, the detail of their fall and in Christ's own words.
And we find out far more about them in Revelation, for example, than we do in the Old Testament.
That's to avoid distracting people into unduly worrying about them or being, uh, tempted even to worship them and to serve them.
Yes.
Well, so, so you're saying that although the information is, is sketchy, one should not take this to mean that.
Well, yes.
I mean, the, the, the Bible deliberately, and, and this is, this has been a dilemma for generations of apologists, you know, people defending the Christian faith.
There's no section of the Bible where the Bible says, right, you lot, now we're going to prove that God exists in the way that a philosopher would.
You know, because again, the biblical answer is in the book of Hebrews.
He that comes to God must believe that he is in the sense of exists and that he's a rewarder of them that diligently Taking trouble, seek him.
So the Bible, you know, starts from the premise of those who take seriously the existence of God and the problem of human sin, read further.
And for the same reason, because conscience is in all times and places, if normally working and not darkened by wickedness, say there must be a God and we are so far from him and we've sinned against him, the same conscience is going to say, it's going to conclude because the evidence is palpable, there is a personal evil force attacking those who serve God and those who do the right.
So, the Bible does not, it takes even fewer pains to prove the existence of the devil.
And there is a passage again in James, which is unto so many of these things, where James says, you know, nodding, intellectually assenting to the existence of God is not faith, because the devil himself, James says, believes that God exists and he trembles.
Yes, yes.
So, uh, there are no textual grounds for making the case that's, that Christopher Sparks makes that, that.
Oh, about the hot diabolos being the adversary.
Well, this, this comes back to, we could take hours going for it.
And I'm really up for it if we want to talk hammer and tongs about texts with them in front of us with or without him.
Yes.
But in, in essence, uh, yes, you can do all the etymologizing you want about diabolos meaning the accuser first throwing a, Stone and then later throwing an accusation, being a prosecutor in a, in court.
You can talk about Satan being literally with the adversary, one who blocks your path, whatever.
But then you have to look at the meaning of the word as it's used in the passage.
And to give him his due, Christopher Sparks is, is, is no, is no fool about this.
He, he, he enunciates in his interview with you that there are laws for making sense in translation, internal harmony, logic and research.
He, he, he mentioned.
Yes, that, that's absolutely right.
But then that requires, if you, if you commit to that proper view, that you look at The texts that mention the devil in some detail, Job and Matthew's account of the temptation of Christ, Matthew 4, and many other crucial texts.
And is there any sense in which people in any language reading a good translation that says what the text said would come to the view that this is all a figment of the imagination?
No, of course, because you've got a concrete noun, even a proper noun, if you say that Satan is a proper noun in some cases, comes along and does certain things in a passage as a person, sometimes with a body, but, well, that's figurative, but at least comes along In some, in some palpable way and says, I propose you do this or even argues with God.
Now, if you say this is all symbolic, then you're writing off the whole Bible as hogwash.
You know, you can't, you can't take any position based on that if you want to argue about the Bible.
Or you are saying there's some mystic sense in which this noun to the initiates who've read the right etymology means actually just an idea, not a person.
If you can't make sense of that translationally, syntactically, logically, Then it's not, you're not dealing with a translation anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm trying to pluck things out of a whole bunch of experience and different fields, but this is how translators work.
Yeah.
In my work, and I'm working with the best of the best of the best, and they're not elites like me.
They're actually former Soviet Union equivalents of me who started humbly and got the very best state university grammatical education up to postgrad level in grammar and translation.
So they really think translationally like me.
When I'm doing a Georgian-Ukrainian revision with them, I'm constantly shuttling between, okay, we know what this word means lexically, the definition of the word, the vocabulary level.
We know what the grammatically, grammatical form is, the morphology.
But then we look at the syntax and the context, and then we turn off our Georgian or our Greek or Hebrew mind and say, oh, Georgian or Ukrainian reading this translation, just, or I should say the text that we produce, the target text, what connotations will they have?
All of these layers are involved in a translation.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's not enough to have said, I have read the best 19th and 20th century study aids to get to the root of this word.
How is the word linked in the passage?
What's the rest of the book saying about this concept?
And Christopher Sparks is by far not the worst of them.
He's very conscious of all these things.
And I don't want to be thought of as knocking things that he does understand as if he didn't understand them.
Yes.
Now, this is a very big question.
But I think you're capable of answering it.
Which is, are we supposed to assume that divine revelation stopped with scripture?
Or do you think we can reasonably infer that, that people who followed God since the scriptures have been able to imbibe truths that add to our understanding of, of, of, God and our relationship with Him.
The latter is a definite no.
The text of Scripture itself says, before you get onto any very early church positions on this, the text of Scripture says, the canon's finished.
Divine Revelation Beyond Scripture00:13:44
You're cursed if you add to this.
You're cursed if you take away from it.
So many passages in both Testaments say, this is God's will revealed to you.
You've got enough here to work out how to be saved and how to serve God.
So there are many ways in which the Bible itself says, you won't come to any new insights.
There is a position that certain prophetic gifts continue, and there's a whole genre on YouTube now of people, mainly in the States, who take the latest clip of people running to excess with pseudo prophecy and criticize it biblically.
So there's a whole movement of, well, there's two positions those who claim that the gods continuing with prophetic gifts, and those who oppose that are called cessationists, as in God ceased to give these gifts.
The latter is far more proven biblically.
So.
Does that mean then that any traditions.
Okay, let me give you an example.
The Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which is celebrated by the Orthodox and the Catholic churches.
Is there a bit in the Bible where.
It is so far from that being the case, James, that the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and also the Immaculate Conception, i.e., sinless birth of the Virgin Mary, were folk doctrines that were popular, particularly in the Western Church, later the Roman Catholic Church area, and they didn't even get ratified by the Pope as doctrine until the 19th century.
Although the Assumption of the Virgin Mary goes back many centuries earlier, as you know, in West and East, as a church feasting.
It's about the 5th century, is it, or something?
I think that's about the earliest we see.
You know, together with flights of fancy, such as when the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross commanded John to take his mother home and look after her, that they lived in a house which got whisked away to Ephesus by some magic wind and so on.
I mean, I don't really like upsetting people on these matters, but we're doing these in my local parish.
It's not my parish, it's the parish in which I live.
We're having some sort of Lenten talks, and one of the Lenten talks was on the rosary and how to pray the rosary because one of the chaps leading it is Anglo Catholic and would secretly kind of like to be Catholic.
And there's stuff about the assumption.
And I said, I don't want to be a party pooper, but I can't help noticing that there seems to be more.
Focus on Jesus's mum here than there is acting on Jesus.
And Mary gets some really good, good lines.
My soul does magnify the Lord.
Um, I guess she gets this nice passage and we love Mary because she's Jesus' mother and stuff.
But is she the Queen of Heaven?
And the Queen of Heaven is referred to in that book of Ezekiel.
And I know it quite well because I've translated a magnum opus on Ezekiel that thick by Peter de Vries, the leading Dutch Reformed authority on the Hebrew sect of Ezekiel.
You know, that's where it's first mentioned that people are worshipping the Queen of Heaven.
It's a Babylonian cult.
Of course, that's rather what I thought.
So, I mean, the Hizlop, which you mentioned in the Christopher Sparks podcast, Hizlop traces this in the two Babylons, but many others have as well.
It's Semiramis in disguise.
You know, it's the Isis cult, and that the women of antiquity in the Near East would offer cakes to her.
It's all mentioned in the text, in the Old Testament, as something not to do, some accursed idolatry.
So, could we be accused here of.
Taking an aggressively Protestant line on this.
I mean, because I asked you the question can the 2,000 years since Jesus, can we learn anything new that wasn't already in the scripture?
Your line would be absolutely not, and the Bible makes this clear.
But presumably, the Orthodox and Catholic priests would.
Disagree quite violently on this.
They'd say that there was a sort of tradition of.
They would have two different lines, and these are vast traditions.
An Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox cleric would major on the argument the church has always known what the truth is.
And if you try to interpret it privately, and this is in the Bible, it's in Peter's epistles, then you'll come a cropper.
You need the.
They wouldn't use this term in the East, but what we call the magisterium, the authority, the weight of the clerics to understand things.
The Roman Catholic apologist would take a slightly different tack and would say that.
We add to scripture tradition and we add to tradition the use of reason.
In fact, the Anglican jurisprudentialist Thomas Hooker, judicious Hooker, as he's known, took the same position.
But he took a more Aristotelian line.
Uh, where revelation doesn't help, then you add your reason and where, uh, sorry, tradition.
And when you, uh, tradition doesn't help, then you use a reason in a, in a piece of casuistry.
So this, it's a question of how much weight each has.
And in spiritual matters, uh, the spiritual man needs to discern things spiritually, as Christopher Sparks completely correctly said.
It's just that he was completely wrong.
When he then applied that to grammar and translation.
When he said categorically that King James wouldn't have authorized, uh, the Bible with what he calls errors in them.
That's just not how translation works.
You know, there's a political level to it.
And when he said that if the King James translators were up to their job, they'd have got the books in the right order.
When, as I've proven to you today, uh, those like Christopher Sparks who want a different canon can't agree with among themselves.
Right.
So that's just a misapplied category, which in its, in its own Uh, correct domain is a completely correct one.
The spiritual man must discern things spiritually.
So you, you do, you go to a spiritful man and exclusively him for preaching, ex, exposition, exegesis of the word of God.
But the most godless, uh, scoundrel that exists, if he is a good translator, could be used, uh, to translate a wonderfully faithful, uh, version of the word of God that is used to bring many to glory.
Just as with the classic argument about the, um, The roue and the degenerate who produces great art.
Well, that's most of them, isn't it?
Of course it is.
Oh, I don't know whether you've.
Jesse Sabota might be a bit too much for you.
You know, the mother of darkness, former mother of darkness.
I heard you mention her in the Christopher Sparks interview, and of course I've read the claims by, goodness me, the name eludes me right now, but the gentleman in the States who wrote about the 13 Stenic bloodlines.
Oh, Springmire?
Of course, Springmire goes into some detail about them.
And I haven't been foolhardy enough to poke around on my many trips to Belgium in those chateaus, but I am.
Clued up enough to know that, and they're mostly atheist campaigners who say this, atheist campaigners against Satanist ritual abuse.
They can point to these chateaus and say that's where the really wicked stuff happens.
Well known.
Yeah.
She mentioned, she was full of little sort of truth bomblets.
She mentioned that Wagner was a complete wrong end.
Would that surprise you?
Not at all.
I would say Wagner is worse than Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is often misunderstood because he makes his character say, God is dead, and you know what's so awful about it?
We, sophisticated, arrogant 19th century man, we have killed him.
You know, he, he's not vaunting in, as an ubermensch himself, uh, that it, you know, hooray, we finally killed that nasty old God in the way that certain rabbis do in the Talmud.
He's saying, live up to the consequences, chum.
You know, you are now the arbiter of your own morality.
You are now going to have to play God with issues of euthanasia, uh, and medical ethics and everything else, as we now see.
So, Alex, how do I reconcile my love for the trad Catholics and my infatuation with so much of orthodoxy?
Well, Paul had this problem with his own fellow Jews, didn't he?
And in the famous passage, Romans chapters 9 to 11, where he addresses this and answers the question, why haven't they come to faith in Christ?
Why haven't they accepted Jesus as Messiah?
He starts by saying, I testified that they have a zeal, but not according to knowledge, or in King James language, not after knowledge.
Greek kata.
And the same is true with the, um, what you call the trad Catholics, the, uh, society of St. Pius X and, and, and many other such, uh, movements.
You know, even the Sede Vacantists who say there's not been a worthy Pope for so long.
Likewise, Eastern Orthodox, of course.
Yeah.
Even, even in internal Roman Catholic logical terms, that's, that's the case, you know.
Of course, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people.
In so many countries, there's going to be, you know, large numbers of exceptionally worthy devout people among them who come up with fantastic insights.
But not just that, but I think to whom God speaks.
God does speak to people in wrong traditions.
He speaks to people in atheism, in the worst oriental religions, in death cults, and he brings them out.
Or, you know, and this is covered too in Nehemiah.
From memory, it's 2 Kings, chapters 5 to 7, the Syrian who serves the king.
The general, and, and he actually.
Is he a leper?
Yes, that's right.
He's, he's cleansed of his leprosy, and the, the leprosy sticks on Gehazi instead, because Gehazi becomes greedy for the, for the silver in the chariots.
Uh, but in this, the denouement of this passage, when Naaman has become a worshipper of Jehovah, uh, he says, my lord prophet, what am I to do?
I'm going back to Damascus, and I'm going to have to at least play along with worshipping Rimmon, uh, the idol whom my king worships.
And there is, in the answer that he gets, it's, you know, go in peace.
There is understanding here that there will be such things as secret believers.
Right.
Yeah.
Like the.
Have you read Everyday Saints?
Whose book is that?
By Metropolitan or Archimandrite Tichon.
No, but I know both the title, general terms, and the author's name.
So a lot of people recommend Tichon, actually.
He's fantastic.
It's a really, really good book, and it really kind of strengthens one in one's faith.
But there's some just great anecdotes about God working.
Through people.
And there's a great story about the nuns who vanished into the woodwork, as it were, during the communist persecution and carried on secretly being nuns through all that time when it could have cost them their lives and then sort of emerging late in life and these.
Yeah.
Keeping their faiths secret from the.
It's really good.
It's a really good book.
The darkest stuff of all, if you want to be well read on all that's happened in Eastern Orthodoxy under communism, is Romania.
The clerics who, very shortly after the communist victory in the late 1940s, were sent to an experimental jail, Pitești, P I T E S T I, the I at the end is silent, where they were, well, I won't even say what they were made to do, but it's unspeakable.
No, I don't.
And they had.
Agonies for the rest of their life on have I committed an unpardonable sin by denying God in horrid ways?
You know, they each had their own private agonies over that.
That's what, that's the origins, the original confessors.
Yes.
Were Christians.
Did you tell me this?
No, it was someone else, but you know, it's a confessor originally was, you know, to console somebody who thought that by denying Christ, he'd lost his any hope of salvation, that it was irreversible.
That's, this is the root of Augustine and the Donatist controversy as well in the early church.
The idea of, you know, churches split, and this goes right through to the, the Soviet Union as well, with the same split between evangelical Baptists over the same question.
If people have gone along with persecution or under persecution have denied Christ or gone to a compromised, officially tolerated church, do you ever have them back when they're repentant?
And the confessors, as I understand it, were people who had been Christians who had been tortured and hadn't renounced the faith.
So they were considered the only people in a position to judge on behalf of God.
Russian Language Learning Challenges00:05:28
That's it.
But even before the New Testament, which gives so many promises to those who undergo such persecution, the Old Testament in the book of Daniel, the response of the three, we call them classically the Hebrew children, we should say the.
The Jewish young men, really, that the response they give to Nebuchadnezzar is that God is not only able to deliver us out of or from the furnace you have prepared for us, but if you throw us in, he will deliver us in the trial.
So he's mightily able to save those who go through the horrors of Pitish or any other place in time.
Yes.
Although I think most of us wouldn't want to be put to that particular test.
I don't know.
No, indeed.
No.
I mean, do you think you'd be up to it?
I don't think anyone should ever claim that they think they would be up to it.
None of my prior experience, intelligence, reading church history, travel, any of the rest of it, interpreting for persecuted saints in the Netherlands.
I do quite a lot of that now when they are freed and they come to the West to warn and to edify.
None of these strands of my experience induces me to make any such claim that if I were in their place, I would have stood firm.
By the way, apropos of nothing we've discussed so far, I really envy you your.
What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the substantive of polyglot?
The, your polyglotism is the term.
Your polyglottism.
Um, or multilingualism.
In as much as I've just, the second time started trying to teach myself Russian and because I wanted to do Italian would be a more fun thing to do and more useful, but I quite like the hardness of it.
Yes.
And the first time around, I couldn't even.
Even the word for hello is so complicated.
Because the v before the st is silent.
It's written zdravstvichy.
Zdravstvichy.
No, the stress is very important in Russian and it varies.
It's often the first syllable in that word.
It's zdravstvichy.
But I'm pronouncing it very carefully there with the vst, but that v falls out as any Russian translator will tell you.
Casual speech, you will say, even though you spell it, I can't, I can't hear the difference there.
The, the v before the st. That's it with consonant clusters.
And, you know, don't get me started on George's way.
Say, say how I'm going to do it.
Yeah, they're pretty close there.
But the big, as, as with Celtic languages, the big issue here is that palatalized, that is sort of, uh, uh, eye flavored consonants like tch, are distinct.
They are a different phoneme.
They're a different meaning, unit of meaning than the standard ones.
So tch.
At the end has to be pronounced with the tongue behind the teeth, not to, yeah, it's all in one sound, yeah.
You see, this is exactly what put me off last time, so I can't even say hello.
But, well, I mean, I think you're a lost case if it comes to perseverance and hard work, but I'll say this in case others are wanting to learn a hard language like Russian or indeed any language to a decent standard as an adult.
It can be done.
We do see wonders in the really sharp end, which is training people to be simultaneous interpreters. into a language that they learn in adulthood.
It can be done if you do the extremely hard work of what we call shadowing, which is listening to thousands of hours.
Don't fry your brain by doing too much in the early stages, but doggedly listening to little chunks of extremely carefully chosen, well enunciated, educated speech in the target language, the language you're wanting to learn and repeating exactly what you hear, even though your brain turns to mush and it's nonsense.
And if you stick at that for months, shadowing is what it's called.
If you've got the gift and the application, you will.
By some mysterious process after months of it, almost overnight your brain will click and you will have a muscle memory to produce those things in Russian.
But you have to have those exposure hours first, the months beforehand, so that the sounds of Russian or your other target language are actually noticed by the brain, which for a child is literal child's play, but for an adult learner is extremely difficult.
That's because it's a bit like, I remember when I learned German at school, it's the, it's these alien, alien sounds.
I mean, I think if you, if, if you speak French, you can, you can get on with Spanish and Italian to a degree, but German is quite different and Russian is totally different.
These, these, these noises that you are required to make and, and these shapes you have to form your.
Mouth and palate and et cetera.
Come to Georgia with me someday and you'll find that Georgian is, it makes Russian look like a walk in the park.
Does it really?
Yes.
Clusters of six consonants.
No wonder you loved it.
No wonder you became a Georgian specialist, Alec.
That's it.
But even, you know, let's mention an error of one letter, even where you make a big thing about being a native speaker of a language.
Georgian Sounds and Cultural Insights00:15:15
Uh, that's Sir Escanor, who's, who vaunts, don't you know I'm a native speaker of Greek, as if he could effortlessly understand the Greek of the New Testament or of classical antiquity.
Um, he made an error of one letter.
Uh, his, one of his, his big claims is, uh, Christ really means, do you remember what he said about Christ?
See if you can remember what you, your own guest said.
He talked about Galen talking about chrio, the verb to, to salve or to rub oil.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
But the word is chist.
Dos, the letter tau or taf in the middle of that word, the Greek letter t, and unlike Russian or Greek, there's only, Russian or Georgian, there's only one letter t.
That letter makes the word passive.
So he's, even the native speaker is doing this trick of ignoring grammar, in this case, morphology, uh, in his attempt to prove something about what the word really means if you look at the dictionary and the lexicon.
No, Christos means the anointed, it's passive.
So even before he goes to, and he wouldn't want to do so because he hates, um, Hebrew, but even before you go to passages in the New Testament where it says, Christos means Moshiach.
It means him who's been anointed, which is an obvious indication for the meaning of this word looked at the Old Testament, not to Greek of the time of Christ.
Even without that, the grammar of Christos, the letter t in the middle means him who has been anointed.
So it's definitely not, it's impossible to mean a man who acts as an oil or an unguent upon others.
You should have been there on my shoulder.
I don't think Sir Eskinor would want to have much debate with me.
No, no, no.
Unlike Christopher Sparks, with whom I would, as I say, genuinely want to have a workshop with the Greek in front of us.
I wanted to ask you another thing.
I was.
I came upon an article recently about.
Which explains something which I hadn't really properly understood before, which is, um, take Twitter, for example.
I might put a post up on Twitter.
I'm, I'm, I'm so heavily censored these days that whatever it's called when they, when they limit your, limit your traffic.
Shadow banned.
Yeah.
I'm shadow banned.
Certainly, certainly that de-boosted, et cetera, et cetera.
I, for some reason, I don't know why.
Why am I considered such an enemy?
Is it because, I mean, particularly me, is it because I come from an establishment background?
Yes.
Yeah.
That's it.
If you were a nobody by background, they wouldn't be so interested.
But because, however long ago and however much to your own chagrin, you rubbed shoulders with and were socially of the crowd that runs the country, you're not allowed to have come to the insights and to broadcast the insights that you now have reached.
So I'm considered a traitor.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not.
Like the esteemed Charles Mallet, there are not many of his background and previous service who turn to the good.
Well, especially not people who've served in the military like Charles Mallet, because he means that their indoctrination has failed.
Well, I mean, he got further than that.
It's a matter of intrigue within the Trufa movement now, isn't it?
And how did a bloke who was one of the equerries to the Queen get permitted to turn to UK column?
Something ain't right there.
Yes.
There's not a total control net.
You've explained why I'm so heavily targeted.
Um, what I hadn't understood was the, A, the mechanisms they use, the techniques they use, and B, the extent to which the awake, I mean, I don't know how you would describe our world, the awake world.
What is, is there a better term?
I think the truth movement is the broadest word.
Are we a movement?
I suppose we are.
Well, we aren't.
Well, in a sense.
We could be a leaderless movement.
We're not a movement as in a bowel movement.
We're not a movement as in an Andante either.
No, we're not.
I suppose we are in the sense that our primary goal is or ought to be a quest for the truth.
We believe the truth is attainable and we're on a mission to find out what it is, yeah?
Yeah.
Okay, so the truth movement.
If you told me this five years ago, I'd have gone, yeah, you're a bit paranoid.
There's no way that they're going to bother with the likes of us.
We're just a bunch of tinfoil hat crazies.
We're no threat to them.
They're not that petty.
They haven't got that much time.
But actually, they have got that much time.
And they really do like to micromanage the truth movement, just as they like to micromanage everything, every other part of the world.
And so when I'm on Twitter, I've always noticed if I come up with a particularly Popular tweet that gets a lot of traffic.
Fairly soon, there will be commenters who say things like, I used to be a big fan of yours, but blah, blah, blah.
You know, you've completely lost it.
Or whatever happened to you, James Dellingpole, you were so great, or blah, blah.
And they come from accounts that don't feel like real accounts because you can often tell that these things have been.
That they haven't got many followers and they haven't got much of a record of tweeting and stuff.
So you think they're probably.
But I hadn't understood the context of this until I came upon.
Hang on, I'll just try and find if I can find the article.
Um, Apparently a while back, um, uh, what's it called?
Glenn, Glenn Green thingy?
Greenwald.
Greenwald.
Um, apparently unearthed some research from some, sorry, a, a, a sort of, uh, discussion document or sort of, uh, game plan thing from something called JTrig.
I was going to say JTrig sock pocket puppets a moment ago, but I didn't want to interrupt you again.
Yes.
I mean, that's part of GCHQ.
I popped into JTrig quite often in my years there.
So, JTrig, yes, that's right.
JTrig produced this threat research internet group, is what it stands for.
They produced these training slides called The Art of Deception on the 10 principles of influence, which GCHQ staff and others, presumably 77th Brigade, and.
It was retrospectively pseudo legalized.
Because at the time that the JTrig was set up in the mid 2000s, 2006-ish, it was acknowledged even inside GCHQ to be not yet legal, but they were doing it.
Right.
I mean, A, I'm sort of gobsmacked by how petty the powers of the are.
Well, they take ambitious, empty-headed 20-somethings who are keen to get promoted quick.
There are, as usual, some good people in the mix, but that is the profile that I saw sticking around in JTrig most.
But can you imagine, you've joined the GCHQ.
Thinking you're going to be sort of a kind of James Bond, saving your country from the Russians or whoever the notional threat is you've been.
And instead, you find your job is to look at James Dellingpole's tweets and undermine them by sowing doubt in the minds of his followers that he might be.
Some people are disappointed, but by no means all who join the intelligence agencies do so from high, noble moral.
Ideals.
Why not?
At the outset, many of them think it's a well-paid job in it or the petty stuff that you see when a country is under foreign occupation that only takes a week to emerge.
Now I can get my own back and thumb my nose at my neighbours.
Now I can be a little dictator.
And now we have grades of pseudo police, many of them corporate security, but also ranks of non-sworn police officers who are the same kind of personality type.
I'm not looking forward to the new, um, when it, when it all finally the curtain comes down on this country and we're, we're run by these people, but just going back to the, so this list, um, I got it from somebody on some, it's part of the best known of the Snowden leaks.
Is it?
Okay.
So it came out in 2013 originally, right?
So, and what was interesting about, okay.
So 2013, this was before long before COVID or any of that nonsense.
So even then.
They were training state apparatchiks.
Yeah, it started with, at least for internal presentation to the idealists or whatever in GCHQ, more particularly JTRIG, it started off circa 2006 as being presented as there are these hot headed Islamists and we need to get in among them and put the cat among the pigeons so that they are peaceful Muslims.
Right, right.
By the time I was leaving 2009, it was already slightly tending in the direction of there are people who are concerned about mass immigration and we're going to call them white extremists and we need to.
Disrupt them.
And then as the 2010s wore on and we saw the ramp up for, well, let's give him credit for it.
The likes of James Corbett saw very quickly with the ramping up to medical martial law.
He saw that well before 2020.
By that point, the intelligence agencies were telling their own people and also the, the spin offs, the local councils and others who use these techniques and set up shock puppets.
They were telling their people, what you're going to do is disrupt the narrative of not trusting the jab.
Yes, exactly.
Because yes, people, anti vaxxers are.
A danger to public health and therefore we should infiltrate their group.
So it lists the, the, the techniques they use.
And what, and the first one is flattery.
Compliment the target first, build a sense of connection before introducing doubt.
And this is exactly what goes on.
So what's classic tradecraft?
That's, that's how MI6 or any other country's equivalent agency would butter up, uh, lush up is one of the words they use for that, uh, somebody who they think might become a good source for them.
Right.
Okay.
Of course, there are variations.
You're such a misunderstood, tortured soul.
There's nobody in your country's Ministry of Snot Production who is as noble as you.
So, of course, you're misunderstood by your colleagues and passed over for promotion.
Right.
But this is it being used in a different way.
So, the commenter is saying, I used to be a fan of yours.
So, they're establishing they've been with you for a long time.
They're not just some Johnny come lately who's just giving their random view.
They're actually somebody who used to like and admire you.
Therefore, their opinion is to be valued, not just by you, but also by the audience of followers who are reading this.
And the purpose of these comments is not to swing people around completely, but just to sow a seed of doubt.
Here is a person who seems to be tweeting in good faith, responding in good faith, and they've got doubts.
They're disappointed by the way James Stanley Paul's gone.
But.
I was going to broaden, I was going to write about this, and I've been slightly distracted recently by the fact that the world's going to complete shit.
As we discussed in the beginning, I think we've got bigger things to worry about than spies in our midst and stuff.
But I really have been shocked, actually, because I'm quite naive in this way.
The number of people that.
I used to think they were trustworthy and on my side, who've in some way or another stabbed me in the back or sought to undermine me.
I thought they were my friends and they were my allies.
You want to ask Brian Gerrish about that?
I don't know how much he would want to say, but he's had decades of this.
And it's often people who you really have helped materially in very considerable ways who turn.
There's a podcaster I'm thinking of.
I'm not going to mention his name, but in his early days, I mean, he's not a natural.
Podcaster, but I sort of had him on my podcast and, you know, and he wasn't that, you know, I had a, had a story to tell, but he wasn't that interesting.
And, and, and I didn't have him back, but, and we've, we've had, we've had friendly communications and then he just sort of like stabbed me in the back.
And I'm thinking, as you do in these situations, is he just a dick or is he actually part of some, Cause it, it, it, I would have dismissed this as paranoia five years ago.
I would have thought it's just like.
Most of them, it's just vainglory.
Right.
And not having the cojones to say, I disagree with you in person in the way that you did with David Icke on stage before you had any further, you know, disagreement with him in private.
Yeah.
Uh, sometimes it's exploited.
Sometimes it is a case of, uh, no, I want you to get right in there, infiltrate them and then, and then slap them in the face.
Yeah.
It's, I mean, I'll give you another example.
So.
If I were, you come to decide which people you probably think are trustworthy and decent eggs.
I mean, like you, I mean, I'm thinking, well, he could still be a spy, but generally, Mike's, I kind of like Alex.
I think he's probably a stand up guy.
If somebody came up with some insinuating stuff about you, I wouldn't.
I wouldn't be rushing to retweet it, or I wouldn't be rushing to give it a like, or I, you know what I mean?
I wouldn't be sharing it.
And I've noticed that some people who I thought were my allies, they're like, they're joining in the pylon, like as if someone just pressed a button saying swarm mode.
And what I've noticed is that it's a bit like terrorist cells, that these terrorist cells, you don't know who's in the terrorist cell.
Nazi Propaganda Tactics Explained00:02:09
But there comes a time when they have to break cover and do their thing, and that's when they show themselves.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
This is pioneered really by the totalitarian regimes in the mid 20th century.
Both Nazi and communist came up with this.
The most refined version was the Stasi's one, which they called Tserzetsu.
How was I going to get this cat out?
It's scratching my legs.
Go.
Bloody cats, they've got no patience.
Right, sorry, you're saying?
So, Tserzetzung is the mature version of this that the Stasi had.
Undermining somebody.
With a Z, Z-E-R.
Tserzetzung.
Destabilizing.
Tserzetzung.
And it takes the form of, it's a little comparable to what's known now in the West as, what's the word for it?
When people get mobbed by gang stalking, that's what it's called.
You know, shit where people are victims of and complain about, but the authorities never take seriously.
Right.
Yeah.
Sending people almost randomly, at least randomly in the perception of the target, the victim.
Tell me that word again.
Zerzetzung.
Z E R S E T Z U N G. Zerzetzung.
What does it break it down?
Well, read Anna Funder's book, Stasi Land, for classic examples.
It would be hauling a guy in for questioning by the Stasi, who until that morning knew he was very happily married, and waving a piece of paper in front of his nose, which By hook or by crook, had his wife's real signature or chemically forged signature on it saying, I wish to divorce my horrible husband.
And okay, this is German, so you have to culturally target it, but at least for Germans it works that they would say, Look, your wife does not want you anymore.
And then they would say, Okay, I am now a broken man and I will work with you.
And then when Anna Funder, 30 years later, said, But why on earth did you believe the Stasi?
I had it on paper.
Oh, the Germans are very sweet.
Stasi Confessions and Broken Men00:12:19
I know I shouldn't, but I've been.
You never watch the Telly Box, do you?
No, no, I don't.
No, very good.
I've got better rip-asters than that.
If you did, I would commend to you this series I'm watching.
It was made in about 2019.
A three-season German series called Dark.
I imagine it was called Dunkel in the original.
And it is very.
It's always raining, and it's set in around a nuclear power plant.
But it's.
In my defense, Alex, it is improving my German.
I'm sort of remembering the words that I'd forgotten.
But it's quite interesting watching it from our perspective of somebody who's in the truth movement.
For example, this event happens every 33 years.
Number 33 is always appearing a lot.
So, I think we've sort of covered the stuff that.
I'm not going to do the thing that you suggested that we do because I need a lawyer.
I mean, I think it's a great idea.
We're talking about your idea about the Reigns List.
Yes.
Get yourself a defamation lawyer.
And we'll talk about the Reigns List.
I mean, I know some of the people on the Reigns List.
And did you think they were wrong uns?
No.
Some of them are awfully sweet in their public presentation.
Well, one of them I used to work for.
I mean, in a grunt role.
Yes.
I mean, that's the thing about things like the Reigns List, isn't it?
I mean, I think those of us in the conspiracy world, we are.
No matter how inured we get to concepts like adrenochrome and satanic ritual abuse, and you name it, we encounter enough sources, independent sources, confirming that this stuff exists for us not to doubt that it does exist.
But at the same time, it's always a shock.
Of course, it is.
That, that he really goes on.
We're constantly.
When it comes close to you, yes.
And, and the, the, when you realize that, well, as Miri AF puts it, if you know the name, they're in the game that, that, that the very people that we've most been encouraged to, to admire to, because they're part of our culture and our cultural reference are, are these names that one or two of them, I don't worry, I shan't name names today, but one or two of them clearly, uh,
were compromised first and then were told, you are going to be a star entertainer for the plebs.
Now that we've got you.
Ah.
Well, one we can mention because he's dead, but he's obviously an absolute David Frost.
Well, I was thinking of Max Bygraves.
Well, yes, actually, sing along a Max.
I mean, Max Bygraves was the sort of definition of kind of home counties golf club innocuousness, wasn't he?
Well, that's the point, isn't it?
Do you think he was.
You think he was one of the ones that was compromised first and then given the job of becoming an entertainer?
I would lean that way because you remember his shtick was My dad was a Methodist minister.
I don't believe the Bible.
It's bunk, but it's good for the masses and it's a jolly kind of pep talk.
And it gives me a kind of gravitas.
And ministers' sons who've lost the faith or never acquired it, I should say, have always been sought out by the dark side because they have certain skills, even if it's just at the level of pastiching their father's.
Pulpiteering that gives them a gravitas that makes them very useful to the dark side.
I can think of two other examples we can't name because they're still alive.
And I can't even remember on the reigns list, but one of them is a well known pop singer of long standing with a reputation for being kind of almost sexless and.
And Christian.
A bachelor boy, yes.
Bachelor boy, you might say, yes.
And he, one, one here's sort of rumors that he was a really, a kind of like a ganglang thug.
I mean, a terrifying, people really, really scared of him.
Um, and the other one is a character on sitcoms.
Again, somebody that you just could not imagine doing.
But remember that the roles, if you look at the original range list, uh, you will see where it was mentioned by the unrelated victims who named the name.
It was mentioned what role they took.
Some got their jollies from watching.
Some were hired muscle called enforcers.
Some actively participated.
Some were blackmailed into actively participating, as were sadly some of the child victims in all of these rings.
Right.
So some of the cuddly ones, or those who present that way and maybe had a natural persona that way, may not, even after they were turned, have been obliged to stick the knife in quite literally.
But even being an enforcer, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near it, would you?
But people's consciences can be seared and threatened to such an extent that they will go along with some hideous stuff.
What do you reckon we would?
The biblical answer again let him that thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.
Don't go around boasting that you would be any different.
I certainly wouldn't be doing that.
No, I suppose I do.
On some level, I feel.
Sorry for these people because, well, not least because of the jeopardy to their souls, but also I can't imagine that this stuff is fun to do on any level for all but the most.
I mean, apparently I heard that Hillary Clinton is the most evil person that this mother of darkness ever, ever, ever met.
And her trainer, who trained her to be a mother of darkness, said that Hillary was unusual in that she really did enjoy doing these.
Awful, awful thing.
It's a bit like the Duke of Wellington approach, isn't it?
I don't know what they do to the enemy, but they jolly well terrify me.
Yeah, yeah.
But these people are the absolute out and out psychopath sadists, they are very much the exception.
That people have to.
It seems.
From what I gather, most of these people have to be, as you say, coerced into doing it, and then I suppose they feel they can't get out.
That's it.
And this is what.
In the long, sad history of mankind, even since the New Testament, this is what has wracked the consciences of many who've been in horrible situations.
I went along with something, you know, mercifully in most cases, not sacrificing children, but sacrificing a pinch of snuff to Caesar or whatever else in the early church or, uh, or saying, hail Stalin.
Uh, can I ever be saved again?
And more particularly, will the people, will the Lord's people ever accept me sitting next to them in worship again?
You've just made me think this is quite contentious, and I wonder whether you believe this or not.
Somebody put on Twitter this story that was posted by a Russian, possibly a Russian priest, who during the war had been ordered by the Germans to.
Dig a burial pit for some Jews who were going to be killed.
And the Russians who were asked to do this went like, This is just no way.
It's just too horrible.
We're not going to do this.
And then the Germans said, Right.
And they said to the Jews who were about to be.
Buried, you know, killed and buried.
They said, right, in that case, you can dig the pit for these Russians who've refused to obey our orders.
And the Russians were being buried alive almost to the point where they were at the cupboard.
And then the Germans pulled them out and said, now do you see why these people that you were going to, they're perfectly happy to kill you.
And you, Do you believe that story?
Have you come across this story?
I have come across so many stories from the time of the Second World War with various permutations and combinations of Ktokamu, as Lenin said, who's doing what to whom.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I think you're right.
Just going back to that Russian thing a moment, I've noticed, even on my most rudimentary level, Of just grappling with complications like the business of animate nouns and requiring different verb endings and different agreements with adjectives and things like this.
I feel I understand Russia and the Russians better than I did before I had no Russian at all.
Well, Peter Hitchens makes a very sensible point in this regard, quite repeatedly, but I think it bears repeating in his case with the calling he has, which is that the Russian word for security is a negatively formulated noun.
Beerzepersonist, the absence of danger.
And okay, you can make too much of this, but he has enough linguistic and historical understanding not to.
Others maybe would with this argument.
It's, it is a clue to how a people thinks, how they formulate their language.
So the point he makes is that far more than Western countries, uh, such as Britain on an island or, uh, Italy on a peninsula, the Russians are thinking, when are the Germans or Chinese or French going to roll across our indefensible plains again?
Yes.
Yes.
By way of conclusion, because we've had a good chat and we can have another good one some other time.
Do you share my view that ultimately they're all in on it?
I mean, that there are no white hats, that basically Iran is in cahoots with the US right now, and on some level, Putin or the people who control Putin are kind of as much responsible for this grisly meat grinder war as people like the neocons in America and Victoria Newland and stuff, and that Xi Jinping is in on it.
Global Geopolitics and Hidden Agendas00:10:34
They're all kind of, this is all part of the new world order.
They're closing in on us and there's nothing we can do, nowhere we can go.
There's no hope.
Well, I mean, in the most general sense, there is no identifiable leader or strongman in the world who has a territory and an authority, um, which attracts us like a beacon.
For if there were such a place, we would have found out about it.
And we'd be there like a shot.
Well, exactly.
And people have said it's Russia, it's Hungary.
It's Iran.
And then they go there and they're sadly disappointed in some way.
And then the debate is how much of that sad disappointment was from within themselves and how much was because they had kidded themselves about the nature of the country and the society they were going to.
And do you think that God is going to intervene?
Not till the end of the end.
Jesus says in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, after warning us not to be distracted by certain signs, he says the end is not yet.
But he was saying that a while back.
Maybe it doesn't mean.
Well, he answers two questions in one in the Olivet Discourse.
And the big one is when will the end of the end be?
When are you coming again in final judgment?
And he says that's for the Father.
Yeah.
So the father could theoretically have decided that this is the end of the end.
Of course he could.
Or he could have decided that happened in a million years.
And it would be prudent for us to act in the sharpest sense, you know, as if either of those could be true.
Get your life in order to meet God tonight, if you have to, but also work as if he's going to delay the final parousia for another million years.
That's what the orthodox. Monks think as well.
In Luther's formulation, plant that tree, even if you know or think you are certain that the Lord's coming back tomorrow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Or in my case, do Bible translations.
You know, I'm one of the few who can perhaps pass on the whole insight or a part of the whole insight of what we've gained in the classic West in Bible translation knowledge.
There's very few who want to hear it, but I'm going to pass it on.
Um, Alex, it's been absolutely fantastic having you on.
And it's been perfect, particularly in the wake of those two podcasts, which I think annoyed, really annoyed, well, especially the Sir Eskinal, annoyed a lot of the Christian, although I don't think anyone had their faith shaken particularly by it, but it was kind of.
I didn't even answer that, the issue about the disciples age, but just the nouns used for the callings that the apostles had, uh, and the internal textual evidence of what they did.
Such as run large multi employee operations taking tax off fishermen, you know, in the case of Levi or Matthew or Peter being the senior partner in a fishing vessel.
This is not something teenagers do.
Just briefly on that note.
So, in the course of that, when he made that point, I went tap, and looked it up.
And sure enough, the search engines showed like the disciples being aged between about. 15 and 20.
No, no, the question you'd asked was, what was the typical age?
You didn't quite ask it this sharply, but you were getting at, in the relevant period, which is Second Temple Judaism, what was the typical age at which a disciple started learning from a rabbi?
That's very different from concrete personality Jesus finding men occupied in their profitable businesses with dependents already, wives and children, certainly wives, and saying, stop that and follow me.
That's something you say to an established man in his 30s.
I was trying to lead us down a more conspiracy path, which is that I think that possibly the enemies of the Lord are promoting false information on the internet.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, a Sir Escanor is easier to diddle in this regard than a Christopher Sparks because Christopher Sparks will look at his sources carefully, even if he comes to radically wrong conclusions on the extent of application of some of his conclusions.
But a Sir Escanor, and it was evident from his whole demeanor and what he was exuding in his podcast, will say, oh man, it's the black pill of black.
Pills.
It's all nonsense.
I've determined that because this noun can also mean a temple prostitute, only Hebrew, not in Greek, therefore Jesus must have been going around with prostitutes, even though the classic, or the passage itself in any language you read it in, if it's properly translated, makes it perfectly clear that they're repentant prostitutes.
Yeah.
So once you get into that frame of mind, of course, defeatism, you won't listen to anything else.
Yeah.
It's a shame because obviously it had made him unhappy and left a sort of hole in his life.
And I don't think we need spiritual holes in our life right now.
I think on the contrary, we need to be spiritually.
We need hope.
On that very closing note, can I say to any listeners who are serious lovers of the Lord and who may be within reach of Rochdale that a very laudable Englishman With a lot of Dutch Reformed help, he has reopened a closed Baptist chapel in Rochdale.
You'll find the details on rochdalehopechapel.org.uk.
And it's not an established congregation yet, but he's doing pioneer work to restore the classic Reformed vision of faith, education, and worship in pretty much the darkest place in Northern Europe, Rochdale.
So anyone that can offer serious, mature Christian practical help.
He runs with a Dutch assistant.
He has a place open two days a week as a heritage center.
And there are other things such as leafleting and personal conversation going on.
Anyone who can help seriously with that, you'll be much appreciative of that.
I'll bet you anything, Alex, that somebody will be brought to him by this podcast.
Because even though I think of myself as kind of quite rubbish, I mean, you know, not a top notch Christian, God does seem to like using stuff that I do to do.
Good things, which is really nice.
And I think I'll bet you something happens that will.
Could be wrong.
I expect so.
That's the way that the Lord works.
He does, doesn't he?
He does.
He's called that way, which is another argument for believing in him.
Like God winks, God treats, whatever you want to call them.
Alex, I've so enjoyed talking to you and I could talk to you for hours and hours more.
Thank you for correcting my, my production of, pronunciation of, hang on.
Zdrasvucje.
Very well done.
You were going to say that again.
Zdrasvucje.
Yes.
Um, all right.
Now I've already got, got, you know, another 10,000 words to go.
Um, and I do hope for a proper encounter with Christopher Sparks digitally or in person.
It's going to happen.
It will happen.
I'm not going to mind.
I will concede many points where he is telling the truth.
He's sincere, you know what I mean?
Well, he's reached the right conclusion in my view.
I'm just not going to be there to attack him for everything.
Good.
I am right about Psalm 64 being translated better by Coverdale.
Coverdale was a better, again, the key thing is who's gifted in translation.
You know, it's not that the KJV men were being obscure.
It's just that Coverdale was a far more poetically gifted man, as Christopher Sparks is quite right to recommend Adam Nicholson's work on this.
He was the poetic genius.
And we Bible translators always fear translating the Psalms because it's so dear to the Lord's people and it's so scarce in its grammar and syntax.
And the words are so, even the etymology of the words is sometimes obscure.
On top of all that, you could be a brilliant prose translator and get all of that right.
But with the Psalms, you have to even get the meter right if you're doing a metric Psalm, or at the very least make the poetry sing.
That is exceptionally rare as a gift.
Which gives me an idea, and you're the perfect man to do this.
My Psalm series, shall we do an episode on different translations of the Psalms?
I mean, okay, so obviously we might have to do one like.
Psalm 23.
I think we shouldn't just do KJV versus Coverdale versus.
No, let's do half a dozen.
Because it would be nice to get the really early Anglo Saxon translation, for example.
Yes.
That would be good, wouldn't it?
How is your Anglo Saxon?
I haven't done much with it since my degree, which was Anglo Saxon, Norse, and Celtic.
But it has to be.
I could in my day do all the philology.
Oh, I can do the pronunciation and read it.
Because I like.
You've seen that other thing on the internet of that.
That girl speaking Anglo Saxon.
Some people have wryly observed this is by far the most popular clip that the CFE has put out in ages because it's actually our own Christian heritage produced and presented unironically.
It's a beautiful thing.
And people have lapped it up compared with the woke nonsense and, well, it's worse than nonsense, deliberate Zersetzung that the CFE authorities have put out.
Can you remember her name?
I'm afraid I can't.
Was she an ASMAC?
I think she was one of my graduates, not my graduates, but a graduate of my course.
Anglo Saxon, Northern Celtic, Cambridge.
Pretty sure she was.
Gosh.
Because that's the only place you learn Anglo Saxon, really.
Well, and Oxford, of course.
But Oxford doesn't have a dedicated Anglo Saxon course in that way.
Oh, I see.
No, no, we just did it as part of the English club.
Part.
Were they called mods?
They were called mods, weren't they?
They were, yes.
We have tripods and you have mods.
So tell us where we can find.
I can't imagine anyone doesn't know where to find you, but Alex, but tell us anyway.
Currently, the only really, really productive thing I'm doing is my Telegram channel, which is Eastern Approaches or t.meslash east app.
Or just go to Eaton Approaches on Telegram.
I am still with UK Column, but since losing my mother just over a year ago and having more care for my father, I have done very little, uh, output with UK Column because the focus has been on Bible translation, mentoring Bible translators, uh, getting that work done and also looking after dad.
Finding Alex on Eastern Approaches00:01:04
Uh, but I certainly am.
But I certainly am.
Oh, thank you.
But I'm the only son, so I have the pleasant duty of always nipping back to Scotland to look in on him.
This year, God willing, I will come back to podcasting.
Not presenting the news, but podcasting with UK Colin.
Excellent.
Which is ubcolumn.org.
Send your dad my, much love from me when you next see him.
I did, I did enjoy meeting him.
He's a, he's a fine fellow.
Um, and, um, thank you again for, yeah, I was about to say illuminating us, but I think that's probably not enlightening us or something.