Yes, I did assume that, partly as a charitable presumption in favor of his competence at studying the issue, and partly so that I wouldn’t have to spend my main argument time (including the rebuttal) simply on that topic.
My rebuttal regarding eonian naturally served somewhat to that purpose in passing, but was mainly aimed at demonstrating that having “eonian” mean superficially similar but also substantially different things, for the sheep and the goats, was for several reasons entirely feasible as an interpretative strategy: the term is demonstrably used that way, if rarely, in both the OT and the NT; and non-universalists themselves, as such, have to treat identical terms as though they mean something substantially different in close topical contexts elsewhere. (This is also something I don’t think TFan ever really acknowledged. I thought about pressing him on it during cross-exam, but I wanted to stick with the chosen texts and their local and citational contexts as much as possible, and didn’t want to turn the discussion into a debate about Rom 5 and Col 1.)
Agreed and agreed–although frankly, he had plenty of time to research how I was going to proceed from looking up my work here on the forum. While I didn’t spell out in correspondence before the debate what I was going to do, I did alert him two or three times that I was going to make a positive argument (not merely a defensive one) out of those four texts. That would have been so weird to me as a non-universalist, I would have thought I had to try looking up what that person had done before on the topic (if possible), or at least try to anticipate how someone might proceed who had stressed several times that he was going to include citational references in the local contexts (i.e. OT citations by the authors/speakers) for purposes of interpreting the intended meaning!
TFan has shown in other work that he is a good researcher; I was honestly curious to see how he might anticipate and counter my arguments by preliminary research. As it is, I think he saved most of his research until during the debate itself!
If so, he did about as well as anyone could expect. From a purely tactical standpoint (I could hardly call it strategic, but maybe I could call it operational…), and setting aside the question of whether the truth was best served by doing so, he did the ‘right’ thing by trying hard to nix any OT contexts-via-citations after the fact, as being irrelevant. He couldn’t exactly get rid of Synoptic contexts (and whatever the same principle would be for the parallels of Jude 6 to 2 Peter) by the same principle, but he ignored as much of them as possible; and he made some vigorous attempts to deal with them more directly, too (although on the other hand some of those attempts relied on ignoring other narrative and thematic contexts.)
To be fair, he mentioned (and tried to piece together) a lot more contextual information in Rom 9 itself than I did. But here’s one big difference in our approaches: I specifically said I could have gone (and wanted to go) into a ton more about Rom 9’s contexts, and I didn’t try to shut down his contextual reference attempts there. Whereas he not only virtually ignored my referential arguments to OT citations and their interpretative contexts there, he tried to substitute another OT citation instead (from Job) as being a superior probability reference. (And stuck to doing that when its topical connections to Rom 9 were clearly demonstrated to be only circumstantial at best.)
I can certainly say that, considering how much he handicapped himself, he did as well as he could. I’ll be complimenting him later on some things, when I get around to doing a post-debate commentary.