Brannon Howse: March 2, 2015

Topic: Hear the audio of John MacArthur affirming the figure of 50 million killed by the Inquisition of The Church of Rome as stated by numerous credible historians including John Dowling. Brannon found this recording in his research over the weekend and it is very interesting since a man in the order fullfillment room at Grace to You and a professor at the Master’s Seminary have been trying to defend Todd Friel and his fallacious history. These men have been publicly critical on social media of those stating the historical fact that the Vatican killed 50 million Christians during the Inquisitions and not 3,000 as stated by Todd Friel. Will these two men ridicule Dr. MacArthur on social media, the man they work for, as using a flawed figure or as being ridiculous or of trumping up statistics by affirming the 50 million figure who were murdered? Topic: Truth is not based on the circles you run in, the degrees you hold, the experts you can dig up or the institution you work for. Truth stands alone and is true with us or without us. We must not let people use institutions or personalities as the sole source of what is true. Truth must stand on its own. Topic: Dr. David Plaisted joins us to talk about his report and book on the Inquisition and those attacking his work and report. Topic: Todd Friel’s expert professor friend quotes a sexologist as a source twice on social media to try and defend Todd Friel and his comment that the 600 year Inquisition only killed 3,000. This professor wrote a piece chiding those that offer so called trumped up statistics yet this gentleman seems to have offered a trumped up expert that he did not know anything about including that the man was a pro-abortion, pro-prostitution sexologist. Thankfully this man publicly retracted and apologized for his error of quoting a sexologist and not an Inquisition expert, but not before taking an apparent jab at anyone using the documented figure of 50 million. It seems Todd and his expert are accusing folks of bad scholarship while they use bad scholarship to try and preserve Todd’s credibility after he quoted Wikipedia and the historically inaccurate figure of 3,000 killed in the entire 600 years of the Inquisition. Topic: The professor that Todd tried to use to defend his fallacious 3,000 figure said the low figure might be accurate if you are speaking only of Spain and Portugal when you talk about the Inquisition. Well that is just plain unscholarly because no scholar would talk about the Inquisition and only discuss those killed by the Vatican in Spain and Portugal. That is like saying you want to discuss World War II but only what happened inside Germany. Topic: Todd praises modern scholars as perhaps being more reliable than old dead guys. Why is such a belief dangerous for Church history, Biblical theology and scholarship?