Wesley Huff
Appearances
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What's up, people? Today we are joined by the most bodaciously brolic Bible expert you've ever seen. A true man of God, Wesley Huff, or as Billy Carson calls him, White Devil, is here to break down the big questions. Which version of Christianity is the truth? Did Jesus make it to India? That explains how he walked on water because it's so polluted. Also, were there actual giants in the Bible?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Now the cost could be eternal salvation, which fucking sucks. But while you're here on earth and, It seems to have really helped him. Sure. You know, so I'm just curious how you reconcile that. Like, okay, there are these people out there that are leading these quote unquote Christian lives, but they're maybe not believing some of the things that you've said.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So maybe they're not leading a Christian life, but they're following. As a matter of fact, they might be leading better lives than some of these Christians who do believe all these things. Yeah. So which one does God value more? Does God value the Christian who's like, you know what? I'm a sinner. I am a piece of shit. I believe that God is my savior.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I'm going to keep on doing all this fuck shit, but I am a piece of shit. That's why I'm doing it. But God died for my sins, but I'm going to try. But he's a piece of shit his entire life and he hurts people. Or do you think God is more favorable to the person who goes...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, I don't know if I really believe it, but I really like being nice to people and kind and trying to help my neighbor and trying to help anybody I can and trying to be a positive force on the world.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, I would believe a lot of these people aren't trying to clean themselves with it. I think that they're doing it because they just feel like that's the right way to be. Right, and I would encourage them in that because ultimately I would want people— But don't you think God recognized that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
More or less. Yeah. I'm just trying to understand what's happening in society at the time that compels a guy like John the Baptist to even do that. Well, there's cultural expectations in the day that the Messiah is going to come. Right, because the Jews are saying, yo, Messiah's going to come. Yeah. Okay, so that's already been set. So they're looking. They're like, who's going to be the guy?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Like, don't you think God is smart enough to be like, hey, this person just found a way around the system. He just said, yo, I believe in that guy, and then he's just out here continuing to kill people.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Also, his own followers didn't believe in him until he came back. And now we got to believe with him, and we didn't even get to see him come back. So I can't... I can't believe if his own followers, the people who saw him do all the cool stuff, the second he dies, they're like, yeah, he was bullshitting. And then he comes back, and they're like, okay, we're on board. Yet we have to have...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
this undying faith that even his own closest followers couldn't have, and he has a higher expectation for us than them? It's a good point. Because if he did come back, I guarantee we'd be like, hey, I'm choosing up.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I guess my concern is God is all-knowing, all-powerful. If you feel that change or transition in you, You're feeling a transition?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
No, no, no.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yes. But you don't think God is aware that that's him? Like you think that that person on the island or the random person that grows up in Ohio or New York or Japan or anywhere that realizes that I'm going to live a better life and I'm going to be a better person and I'm going to do all these things, which now we know through scripture says, we'll give you eternal salvation.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And the one thing he doesn't say is, I know that Christ is reaching in me to do it. He feels like something is reaching in him to do it. Maybe he chalks it up to evolution. Maybe he chalks it up to... His God. His God, whatever it is. But you don't think God, the one God... Yes. ...is smart enough to go, I know who he's talking to.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You think he needs to say him by the one specific name, and then God goes, well, he said the name, okay. To me, it seems belittling to God to assume that he's not capable of understanding all the languages that we speak to the highest power in. Yeah, so I don't disagree with you.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Faith and works. So you explain one version, then what's the inverse of that? What are the person that don't claim to be Christians, yet everything in their works shows that they are? Sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Got it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. So Jesus comes around. Yeah. Really quick.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
See, this is where, like... I think that we're not giving God enough credit because I think God is looking at the atheist who lives a quote unquote Christian life. And the atheist goes, I don't believe in God. And I think God's up there like, gotcha. Yeah. But that's how high I view God. Sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I feel like God is so powerful, so intelligent that he's aware of our little intellectualizing of who he is and how we behave. I agree. And he's like, it's like when your kid first starts learning stuff in school and they're like 11, they start trying to tell you what the stars are. And you're like, yeah, yeah, sure. It's exactly what they are. And that's exactly how history is.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. you know what I mean? Like, so that's what I assume God is doing. And that's how I, I guess that's how I solved the problem for the person on the Island or the good person that was never given Christianity or the person that was given like this horrible bastardized version of it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They were molested by some priests and like they're, they're going to feel that disconnect to this beautiful source because of that horrible individual. And now they don't get eternal salvation because of what this horrible person did. Like I, Yet the rest of their life, they're being good and they're being pure and they're being true, you know, like despite them saying they don't.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I think God is looking at that like, listen, I know your heart and you're doing the right thing. And I think God is looking at those people who say they believe in God, but they're doing these horrible acts. And they're like, you're not going to trick me. I'm not because you're acting like I'm stupid. Right. Right. I mean, that's insulting to God.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yes, the heart is deceitful above all things that know it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I mean, that's never happened in religions before.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I think that's like... I think that's a great way, if you were someone who maybe wasn't religious, of understanding our evolutionary biology and why we're inclined to do certain things. Right. I think that's a really profound way of understanding human behavior.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Which is perfect. Yeah, that's what the evolution... Yeah. What would you call them? The evolutionarist? Evolutionist? Yeah, that's what the evolutionist would say.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Are you saying one guy with interesting ideas and then a really smart businessman comes around and like forms religion around it? I'm just saying this is an early blasphemy that I don't believe.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I would say evolution gets you part of the way. What I would say is that your evolutionary inclination to be moral only scratches the surface of the euphoria you can experience when you lean into the will of God or being a good person. In other words, just not killing doesn't make me feel good. I've not killed my whole life. helping my neighbor for no other reason than to just help him.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And in the moment, like feels annoying. I'm like, why am I going to go do this immediately afterwards? I'm like, man, I'm really glad that I did that. And like, I felt connected to that person and they felt really grateful and like, wow, I feel really that active altruism made me feel really good. Yeah. And this is what I would say would be walking closer to God.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And I think Christianity and other religions give this really compelling argument for, hey, hey, yes, you are doing these things, atheists. You're already doing these good things. You could even lean further into that and feel the fruit of that connectivity. I'm just saying, I think there are people who have realized this sometimes in spite of religion and sometimes without religion.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And they've continued to lean into it. And I think God is smart enough to realize that they're getting to the same place. And that might be what Hinduism is seeing. That's real. That might be. And I'm not trying to make an argument for it. Yeah, I get you. Obviously. You know what side I'm on. But I get it. But I...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I have three more.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I guess there is this objective beauty to it, and there is so much to glean from it. I just think that there is a potentially... I don't want to say this, but like belittling of God's ability to recognize his greatness within people. I tend to agree.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
God's going. Confessing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
God's going. Listen, you could call it that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I think that's 100% true right now with us. And I think, unfortunately, in this argument, and I don't want to speak for Mark or Akash because you guys are... Go ahead, speak for Mark. No, but you guys are far more aware of what your religions say and dictate, whereas I think Alex and I were a little bit removed. Not that much more aware. More than I am. You know more about Hinduism than I do.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
He just got back from India.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
He knows it all.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
If anybody's aware. But Alex and I don't know exactly what the scriptures are saying, so it's very easy for Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the point that we were trying to make here was, though. Gandhi was right. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, but it is tricky because you are so aware of exactly what the scripture and the religion is saying, the requirements are.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And we're here going, yeah, but isn't it kind of like this? And you're like, no, that's not what it says. We're hoping that there's a little extra room. And you're like, listen, there's a way. You're welcome. You're invited. Just come in the door. But these are the rules to be in there. So it is kind of like – Yeah, I wouldn't say that it's rules.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
No, no. This is so interesting. It's like – No, no. I get you. And I think it is possible. If you nod and agree to me saying rules, there's going to be a video. So I understand the pressure you're under.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So I am delicate with that, but I'm just throwing out the words that fit my narrow-minded version. It's very narrow-minded. Very. So narrow. So narrow. Though I accept everybody.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So some people don't choose up with Jesus.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
in their value nobody's worth more than anybody else agreed agreed to that now i know you have to get on a flight to go back to talking no i want you to be here for like two more hours and like talk but you you have to be a good parent that's the thing you're being my son has a soccer game that i gotta get to i love this i think this is great okay so we let you get out of here um last question and then you go and then we should order him in a car right now just so it's waiting downstairs um
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Jesus. Heard of him. Father. Read the book. Son. Holy Ghost. Yeah. He is God. Yes. I think that a lot of time there are people going, okay, isn't he the son of God? He is the son of God. He gave, God gave his one and only true son, but like he also gave himself. So why is the language different? His son. Why is he giving us his son? And why does that discrepancy kind of exist?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And at what point in time in like Christian historical record are they all synergized?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Got it. Got it. So the, yeah, yeah. So your form, three forms. That was really good. All right, get back to Canada. Dude, thank you so much for taking the time, Wes.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You guys are great. I appreciate this.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So glad it worked out.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. How much writings is there when he raises some dead? What do you mean? Like, do we have, like, is everybody going, this is insane? Are you saying, like, how many scrolls are there?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But do you have anything outside of that? Is there just, like, a newspaper clipping? Like, this guy's on it. No, but like Twitter clip. Yeah. It's on X. We hear a lot about the walking on the water and the wine.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What would have happened if you guys ended up in the same place? I don't know. I don't even know. Yeah. Have you guys spoken since? What's up with the lawsuit?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. Um, immediate fallout after running it back. Yeah. Who's seeing him?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. When he rides back in on the donkey, first of all, incredibly, I'm going to use the exact term, badass, right? Yeah. Like, super flexed. But super flexed. You come in on the donkey. I don't need some big, shiny horse. I'm going to come in on, like, the little—I'm trying to be very respectful of my language. Now we're talking about Jesus. A little bitch-ass fake horse, right? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And then, so immediately, is everybody, like, shook? Are people running? Are there people that are rejoicing? Like, what is that immediate reaction upon return?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
yeah but outside of that like i'm talking about that's a good point honestly y'all laughing but outside of that judas right there's a judas who betrays him that's fair and then there's a john the baptist he shows you the way yeah yeah yeah who like like makes the path straight that's right morpheus is john the baptist and there's he's like i'm not the one he's gonna be the one there's a mary magdalene yeah but what happens when all right
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What happens with him and Mary?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You don't think that Jesus was, I'm trying to be respectful, obviously, but you don't think Jesus was, you know, testing the profession? Nah. She was a pro, right? Allegedly. Isn't that what some say?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They did backtrack on that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I had no clue that's what the real heaven was.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Dude, I really should. I started on the Old Testament. It's dense. It's a lot of rules. Get to Leviticus. The rules were so much.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
No, I got to the part where it's like the temple needs to be six inches from the cubits. And I'm running on a treadmill, and I'm listening to the audio version, and they're constructing a temple out of certain materials, and the fabric needs to hang three inches from the thing. And I'm like, I'm not a GC.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I don't even know. What's going on here? I'm not building a temple. We're going to heaven, you know? Yeah. So I didn't even get to the fun stories. You start with the Gospels. I should have started with the Gospels. Why do you guys... I still want to get into... What do you mean, you guys? Yeah, you're right. I'm one of them.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
No, I wasn't baptized, so I don't get... But my parents were... How does that work? We can get that done for you. Really? Should I go to the... Baptized? Yeah. But should I go to, like... You should figure it out up here before you start jumping in the water.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Did Jesus make it out to India?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What are you exactly? I'm a historian. Yes, we know that, but then there's another thing. What is it? I don't know. I was looking up your exact title and I was like, there's no way I'm going to memorize it. But your specialty, your PhD is in? Biblical manuscripts.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So ancient scribal culture.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
With all due respect, if you have magical powers from 13 to 30, and then at 30, I'm on my longevity shit right now. I'm 40, right? So I'm switching things up in my life. Obviously, lifespan was a little bit less back in the day. So 30 comes around, you're like, now I'll change the world forever for the better. But there's got to be a time where you pop down to the Nile, see what's good over there.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
He's a carpenter. He's doing his job.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They may or may not. Oh, that wasn't like, you know, people talk.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They're not broadcasting it. You don't think.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
These are clearly embellished. Let's stick on the first-hand accounts because these are the ones that are really exciting, right? Because you can verify these, kind of.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. Why was he in Egypt? Why did he pop over to Cairo? He went to Cairo. He did go to Egypt.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What's up with the book of Enoch? Are Christmas and Easter just some old pagan holidays? And can non-Christians still get into heaven? Indulge. Wesley, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm very excited for you to be here. We must state that I'm not taking any credit for your success, neither is Mark, neither is Alex, neither is Akash. Never. Okay? I'll give it to you. No, no.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But, like, oh, so the author could write 40 of them, and then we would deem that an original? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Got it. Got it. So yeah, it's either, what is it, empirical evidence or like what is one derivative away from that? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But is each started interrupt here. So is each one of the apostles teaching their version of Jesus's life and And do those differ slightly? And is Christianity kind of like fracturing a little bit in those first few hundred years?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, it's three different sports writers writing about the game. They might have different angles. But at the end of the day, this is the score. And these are how much these people played. And they're going to reference who the superstars were.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. I just have a question about this. Yeah. Okay. So it is possible that you could find an older version of the Bible. Mm-hmm. Or there could be a newer version of the Bible that is more accurate than an older version of the Bible because the older version had a copying mistake. Yeah. Right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Now, could you argue that there is credibility in the authenticity of the gospels? The gospitals? The gospitals. Those are my favorite. Me too. It's a serial. Because there are differing accounts? Like, if every count was identical, you don't need four counts. The fact that they differ slightly and they don't make the changes to make them match up offers more authenticity to me.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And on, on the societal utility or not even societal, but like how the power structure uses religion. Right. So, but I'm like, well, okay, well, that's not a really good one. If you're putting quote unquote mistakes or differences, you're like, unless they thought it was important to maintain the authenticity of these stories. So they left them in there despite the differences.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, maybe that was a really quick way of saying what I've babbled about for the last two minutes.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
It's good. It's good. Yeah, okay. So what are these circumstances that there are discrepancies that are causing you to have a lack of faith, you fucking fraud?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
He's like one of those guys that was like celebrating when Jesus came in on the donkey and then when he's up there on the cross. Oh, God. Don't do this to Mark.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Is this what you mean when you say the Bible is written... For you, but not to you. I like that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
A butt dial and a booty call. Completely different things. So there's versions of that in the ancient literature.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And then some guy is just guessing. At that point. And just making an inference. In terms of like today?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Here's why I use that illustration. Even the most formal equivalent. Okay. Well, okay. How would you say someone just got a long nose back in the day? How would they say that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Jesus had the golden hair. Yeah. Yeah, but they probably were describing the way his hair looked.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So, but long of nose, you think that they were just using a common... It's an idiom. It's an idiom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy's an idiom, dude.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
If a Chinese guy was described as small of eye, I don't think it would be like... No, I don't think it would be an idiom, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Like, one could say that, or you could be like, oh, this might have been a descriptor. I just picked up on why you guys are laughing. Yes!
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Wesley, you said something like that and we're like, we've got to put a stop to this. And then you were like, no, it's an idiom for the time. Abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What language was that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I twisted on you. Let's center ourselves.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I think he's right on this.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, we didn't have a word for that type. Gay bread. So we just called it croissant.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So we just go, okay, let's just call it their thing. Yeah, sure. We should just leave it in Latin. Why do you guys look at me like I'm dumb? It's the exact same thing that the English did. They didn't have a word for it, so they're like, alright, just leave it there. Cultural appropriation. Yes. Yeah. But in like the best version of it, we want you to appropriate Christianity.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
That is what Christians would hope that everybody appropriates it. Sure. But then we figure out what the word is and it's fine. And then it's fine. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm like, I'm jumbled up here. We still haven't figured out your discrepancies in the Bible. No, I think we kind of— That was the only one.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay, so from there we have this idea. Because why would he lie or mislead about this time if his argument is to prove that this is the limited amount of books that we have?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
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Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
All right, guys, let's take a break for a second. Speaking of Lazarus, sometimes you got to rise your dick from the dead.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
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Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
We'll see you soon. Guys, get back to the show. I don't even know why I'll see you soon. See you right now. Bye.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yes, we need... Are you mic'd?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. Okay. So what happens? What happens? Are you guys done with the gay stuff or? So, okay. So what do, what happens? So after Jesus comes back, what do his disciples go do? Do they go separate? They go around the world, right? And they're going to spread the gospel.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I mean, they would have, right? That's a bar that I've seen a bunch of pastors on TikTok use. It's fire. The tomb is empty?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. What is the earliest version of the Bible? How do we, what is the Bible?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And the idea is that they all have disciples as well. The religion continues to grow. Yeah. And you see a difference in the religion from certain areas. Right. When does when do we have like the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church separate? Well, that's in like the that's a thousand years after. Yeah, but it takes time for those beliefs to separate. And what is the true one?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Well, what do you mean by version? I think that's where I'm going with the question, which is like, what were people consuming at the time?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So here we go. And then Pope Leo. But how different are the religions at the time? And is there enough communication between the different factions to maintain one singularity of belief? Like there is a printed book at the time. There is one story. Yeah. Yeah. The Roman Catholics have a pope, and the Orthodox do not. Right. And so is—I mean, I would imagine there's infighting here.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I would imagine there's, like—I don't want to say, like, blasphemy thrown around, but I would imagine, like— Well, they excommunicate each other. They excommunicate—and in what year does that happen?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
1054.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So just so I can understand this, Orthodox have been holding it true this entire time. Then the Catholics kind of change it up a little bit. Well, no, it's trickier than that. And then the thing that the Catholics create gets changed up again. And then it gets changed up again and gets changed up again and gets changed up again. But them Orthodox have been holding it true this whole time.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I mean— It's kind of crazy how that—
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I just went to Turkey and I had a tour guide and he was breaking the whole thing down to me. I was like, oh, I've been lied to my whole life. Orthodox are really the real ones. What is that church called? In Hagia Sophia.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. How'd we let that one go? That was the first one, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, they got it. They got it. We had it for a while.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
We stopped them right there, though.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They didn't get into Europe, you know?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Oh, because... Because that's a crescent. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Don't do it, because you earned your success, okay? And, Jesus, look at that fucking thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You could be Billy Carson-ing us right now. And I would totally believe every single thing. We're not fact-checking anything, Joey. Okay. Oh, that's awesome. So you haven't really told me the difference between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yes. Right? So they have the Bishop of Rome— How does that come about?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Which do you think is most similar to the earliest forms of Christianity? Yeah. Because was there a pope in the earliest form of Christianity? So bishops are like the leaders of the church. One singular bishop? He was just the guy? Or is that kind of like an invention of like— Well, the bishops are like leaders within the church.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You keep going to the source. You're not going back to Rome, my boy. I know.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
If you had to make the argument, if you had to make the argument for the Orthodox Church being the closest church toward, for, could you do it? If you had to, if you had to do it to save humanity, what would you say? Sure, it's possible. What would you do to save humanity if you just had to save humanity?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Did that ever happen in the Orthodox Church? Do you know if they ever did anything like that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, I feel like you should look in more to that church because it feels like... I got some friends who are going to be really happy you're talking like that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
that's clearly like and that's what the martin luther's 95 pieces we're gonna get you over here man we're gonna get you over to the one true the one true religion yeah yeah no no i that makes sense with martin luther doing and do you think that there was there were catholics that at the time uh respected that idea and they thought that the church had or against uh
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
the reformation that they appreciate the reformation, despite not wanting to become Protestants, but they want a reformation for their own version of Christianity.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Well, I mean, you even hear it now, like with the selection of the pope, a lot of times Catholics will be like, this pope isn't progressive enough or this pope isn't conservative enough. And the hope, I would imagine, is that maybe a more conservative pope would reform the church in a way that met what they thought was most important about their values. Right. And... I don't know.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Maybe there's something really valuable to that, that the church can kind of sway according to what society needs at the time. But maybe there's also something very concerning about that, too. That if you don't have the rigidity, that the religion can be manipulated and used in the way that you were saying.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Now, in his effort to try to destroy them, does he just bolster the strength of the religion?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Oh, so it's all the same information.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Is it more poppin'? Is it more badass? Do more people want to go do it because of that? Badass. I'm just trying to— Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Is it... Historically speaking, is it easier to maintain the authenticity of a religion if it is not in power in an area? Is it—I don't understand the question. In other words, like, once the religion is tied with the power structure of the area— There might be bad actors that will abuse the religion to exert more power, to raise finances, et cetera.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
When if the religion is a minority group in the area, there's no real way to exert power outside of like maintaining its authenticity. And you have to do the most pure form if you want to get to heaven. Over here, you can bastardize it a little bit. That's maybe a strong word, but like you can morph it. Yeah, please don't use that word.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Sorry. Don't sin no more. Sorry, or whatever. But you can morph it, and the morphing of it can kind of deteriorate the authenticity of the religion. So what does history say about that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And the other thing.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So it's actually... It's interesting the way that this is taught. The way that it's taught, it was... To me, as like a kid, was that there was so much momentum for the growth of Christianity within the empire that they had no choice but to convert.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I guess, but I think it does a disservice to like the... the choice at the time. Like, it's a pretty brave choice in that regard for Constantine. Yeah, and it certainly would not have been popular. I thought he was succumbing to the will of the people. No. I thought it was a train. There was a runaway train. There's nothing he could do about it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
He's like, the only way that we can keep the Empire together is if we start following that. And then there's all this conversation... Conversation of them, like, including pagan rituals into this new version of Christianity, which I'd love you to speak on, so that the pagans would more easily adopt it. Yeah. But you're telling me that this is just, like, completely false.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
When do the, when do the true Christians celebrate it? January 6th. Damn it.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So you're saying there's no pagan influence on Christianity?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What about the accusations that even the Jesus story was taken from other myths and other religions? I think the Egyptian god Ra or something like that. What do you say about this? Is it just a common occurrence? Is it bullshit? Yes. Really?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Did Judas carry out the will of God by killing Jesus? Yes, because he was prophesied to do so. And was he aware of this? Did he do it begrudgingly?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They're probably eating them.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
it says then david sent messengers to ish bashef yeah saul's son saying give me my wife mccall michael mccall yeah okay whom i betrothed to myself for the price of a hundred philistine foreskins very very important passage for you Can you tell me what I just read? Because I was concentrating so much on getting the words out that sounded retarded that I didn't actually take in anything.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Oh, okay. Masculine name. Saul's daughter.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Give me my wife, McCall, Michelle, whom I betrothed to myself. I betrothed her to me for the price of 100 Philistine foreskins. So he had to go out and collect 100 Philistine foreskins. Yeah, to kill them, take the foreskins. We don't know if he killed them. Yeah, he killed them. 100% killed them?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
wow this is old this is old testament though this is old it's old testament yeah samuel so it's king david king david wild boy right with philistine is those the palestinians are the same people no no oh still fucking them up yeah yeah okay so who are the philistines the philistines are the bad guys they are living in canaan and they're so like uh goliath is a philistine
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
How did he get them off himself? Did he get them off himself? Of course he did. He's got a sword. But the old, oh, a sword. Got it. Oh, not the biting. Yeah. Choppy, choppy. I mean, that sword gets dull. That's so modern. Guys, we've got to put a little bit of a pause on this brilliant Bible breakdown because people need their picks. That was great. Brilliant Bible breakdown. That was fire.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Inspired by someone out there. Shout out him. Even though it might be illegal. Is it illegal in Christianity? It's frowned upon.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
What do the Orthodox Christians say?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I don't. Because I don't engage in any of that. Let's see. Christianity... Nah, shout out y'all.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I do go to Mecca low key. Yeah. As much as I possibly can. The hardwood is your church. Headline two shows at the Mecca. There you go.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Came a prodigal son returned. Yo, real talk. It actually happened. You can't say I didn't do that. Yeah, you did.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Take me even earlier than like what's happening immediately after the, you know, the big day. The big day.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, game four is the one. No, Nick's got it. I believe 100% Nick's got it. We got in five. Absolutely. We definitely getting that W tonight recording this on a Tuesday. I mean, Monday. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay, listen. This playoffs, the question that we have right now is can... Jimmy Butler win a game on his own for the Warriors. If he can win a game on his own, then they can get to game five at 2-2. He should be able to.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yes.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
The Warriors are a little... Draymond just doesn't have it anymore offensively. And then defensively, you don't even really have it. Randall was cooking Draymond's ass. Yeah, I heard that. So if you're scoring two points a game and you can't defend...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But right now, they need something else. They need somebody else who's going to create the shot. Like, Buddy can splash, but you've got to run him around picks. Steph can go, give me the ball, I'll bring it up, and I'll score. Jimmy can go, I'll bring the ball up, and I'll score. And then no one else really can do that. Yeah. On the team. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
It's like you don't even want to run the offense through anybody else. I would literally have him bring the ball up. Yeah. I'm not mad at it. It's just crazy. Yeah. Anyway, listen, a lot of great playoff games coming, a lot of great series. You know, Stake is the leader in global betting and U.S. Social Casino has been on top sports and political events.
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Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Use the promo code FLAGRANT for your welcome bonus. Now let's get back to the show. What can you tell us about the Gospel of Thomas?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Modern rabbinical Judaism. Hold on. Go back to this right here.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But is it legit? What did they say? Was he— No, it's second century, like—
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
After peace. Go, go. Okay. And then is that what the—what is it? The Book of Enoch or something like that? That's pre-Jesus. Oh, that's before.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. Because they kind of are, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I was just about to ask that. Like, is it possible that it's like Harry Potter? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I don't know what you mean by it. I mean, I'll tell you what I believe in. I would love to believe that there's giants.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Like, Game of Thrones giants, dudes who are just a little bit taller. I mean, you go down to Sudan, you see guys that are seven feet. They look like giants.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And I would imagine in a time... It was kind of small back then. Yeah, but you don't have food readily available. And if there is a tribe that has tons of food, they grow big and then they look like giants. Is that...
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Is there ever a time where, or like, maybe the question I want to ask is like, how do you feel about the people who don't take these stories literally, they take them metaphorically, but they arrive at a similar conclusion that somebody who takes them literally does?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Can you give me a good example of both?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So there are, there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be interpreted as metaphor and they're, I'm so, I'm being like protective of you whenever I ask these questions. Cause I know like if you agree to something, somebody on the internet is going to crucify. Do they do that?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Has anybody ever done that to you? Yeah, no, never. Yeah, okay, so maybe that's not the wording. What would you find? There are parts of the Bible that are, would you say prescriptive? Yeah, prescriptive.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You're like, okay, we both believe in these different gods. You have different names for them. That's fine. But we're both part of the same belief system. The emperor is a god.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Everybody's a god.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Does other hyperbole exist in the religious texts when it doesn't have to do with these type of severe situations? Like, are they hyperbolic about how fruit tastes like? It's a good question. I don't know if I know the answer to that. Because if that hyperbole exists in these other areas that aren't as high stakes, then it would make a lot of sense that it would exist when the stakes are high.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But if it only exists when talking about genocide, it seems like people are trying to skirt accountability.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
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Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Their brand DNA is built on being highly intentional in everything they do, from creating high-quality essentials to delivering amazing customer service to giving back to the communities they believe in. Every detail is done with
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
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Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I think I look engorged. I think I look medium swole. I think I put on them Drew Classics. I look medium swole. My wife is like, are you ready to get popping? I'm like, no, this is just what I am. This is who I am, and this is what I carry around on a daily basis. I'm weaponized. Forget overpriced designer nonsense. Skip the cheap throwaways.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
True Classic delivers premium essentials built for life. Grab yours at Target or Costco or head to trueclassic.com slash flagrant to get hooked up today. Now let's get back to the show. All right, guys, let's take a break for a second. I need to make sure that you all are aware of Black Rifle Energy.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yes, you know the coffee, the delicious beans that have been sourced by the Black Rifle Coffee brethren. We would call them nerds. They're obsessive about this stuff. So just as obsessed as they are about freedom, just as obsessed as they are about military-grade rifles, they are obsessed with beer.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
beans okay and um there's an easy joke i'm not gonna make at all because we probably made it in past weeks point i'm trying to say is they don't just want to put those beans in cages they want to put them in espresso machines and coffee makers all around the world But not just coffee, they also got energy, okay?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Black Rifle Energy comes in four different flavors, over 200 milligrams of naturally sourced caffeine, zero sugar. I'm telling you right now, Black Rifle Coffee, absolutely amazing. Black Rifle Energy, phenomenal. Freedom. There's no freedom of speech if you don't have the energy to say something. Fire. You know what I'm saying? I like that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, there's no right to bear arms if you don't have the energy to get up out of bed, take your assault rifle, point it at somebody you disagree with. Not that? No. Okay. Or defend your home. You disagree with the person trying to rob your home. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, you stand on your ground as a disagreement. Freedom to defend your home. Freedom to defend your home. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Against the migrants. Oh, yeah. Against the migrants moving into your state. Yeah. Your home is your state. In a lot of ways, what is a home? There is a gray area.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
There is a gray area. The point that I'm trying to make is BlackRifleCoffee.com. You go there right now. You use the promo code FLAGGER. You're going to get 30% off today and America your energy. The call. The call.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Now, did you watch the whole episode when we were like, we're not fact-checking any of this. This is just for fun. Yeah. Yeah. And you were like, I'm going to fact-check this. I'm going to fact-check this. Because people kept sending me these clips. I know. The thing about Billy is, like, I know he's full of shit, but he doesn't know he's full of shit.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Got it. So there's tons of persecution early. I actually want to go back even before crucifixion. I want to go to John the Baptist. I'm really interested in this John the Baptist guy. And I don't feel like he gets enough shine. Doesn't get the press he deserves.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay, so he's offering forgiveness through baptism, right? Is this happening in the woods? Okay, well, maybe you clarify so I don't misrepresent.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So it's up to us to get some Christianity out to that island in Papua New Guinea. Yeah. And is that why these people are compelled to, you know, take it?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I get that. It's supposed to alleviate it. But in order for it to alleviate it, you first have to accept that you're a piece of shit. And... What if you don't feel like you're a piece of shit? Right. So now I have to stop feeling good about myself, and I have to convince myself that I am a piece of shit. Just as much as a murder or child molestation.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Just so somebody else can get me back to—not somebody else. God can get me back to feeling good about myself. And I think that that really works for people who feel like they're a piece of shit all the time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can see how that's like a heavy weight for people to take on. I would say there's this dichotomy.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Keep in mind, I'm framing this as someone who was not raised religiously and does feel like a good person. And I think there's been this part of me... I think there's probably this part of me that's quite naive, definitely based on your description, which is that, you know what? Because I do believe in something. I'm like, yeah, God knows my heart.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And, you know, I try to live—what is Pascal's wager? And I try to live as if there is a God, and I try to do the things that—
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
are good in the world and those are probably prescribed to me through religion in some way shape or form but it would be tough for me to accept this and i don't think that i'm perfect in any way i do actually accept the fact that there is like sin in me and there are these and i'm fighting those natural instincts so i think the only way i can be good is if i'm just like right that guy like so it's not that that's the only way you can be good and it's not simply that you're a
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You see people do this all the time.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
They decide what God cares about the most and then they care their life according to that. I guess in the circumstance with the person who lives on the island has never heard about Christianity. Yeah. But what if he lives his life? as a Christian without, because God is omnipresent, right? Like God maybe has given him the gospel, uh, in a different way than he gave it to you.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
The covenant's written on the heart. Yeah. So it's like, what if that person is living a devoutly Christian life and the, the God that he's praying to might not be named Jesus Christ, but isn't it possible that God is up there? Like I, I know who he's praying. He's praying to me. Cause I put it on his heart. His heart. Is it, is it possible that he's accepted in heaven?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I, I, again, I don't want to, I don't want man to decide what God is capable of. And I sometimes think that like we do that and I'm not trying to skirt out the responsibility of just going, Hey, I got to get baptized.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
I'm going to put it on you. No, but like sometimes it's possible a man is going like, hey, God doesn't know unless you do this exact thing. And then God's up there like, listen, I get the point what you're trying to do. But like the guy on the island who's living this perfectly devoutly Christian religious life, he gets in too because I put it on his heart.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
But aren't John and Jesus like homies or cousins?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So like they kind of grew up together, no?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. And John knows this this entire time that Jesus is going to be the Messiah or one day he realizes it? I don't know.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Humans are very— I also think we want heaven without—
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
subscribing to also the alternative of the religion i think there's part of it that's there it's like hey i'm a good person yeah maybe i don't go to church and maybe i haven't accepted jesus as my lord and savior but i'm a good person so i still get in right it's like we still want in we still want to we want the eternity right it's still begging the question but the alternative is hell that's the issue i have sure if there was a first class a business class and a coach i'm with it right
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, I feel like Dante's Inferno defined hell for us and not Scripture. Sure, sure.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
This is why forgiveness is an accomplishable goal, even for the most heinous act, because God has already taken on the punishment for that heinous act that that person committed. Well, forgiveness is costly, right? There's always a cost to forgiveness somewhere. I'm just saying in general, that perceived lack of justice doesn't exist. Yes, this person killed somebody. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Jesus died on the cross for that very thing that that person did. It's not this person killed somebody. All right, how are we going to reconcile this? Do we give him 20 lashes? What is the thing for this act? And who gets to decide that? It's already been decided. So now we can go with give.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So the thing that John is doing that is novel, you would say, is saying that they should repent. Sort of. Like what is he doing that is dissimilar from everyone else at the time?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So couldn't you extrapolate that to the guy on the island?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Not like an Orthodox Christian bishop or anything like that that we would really trust. Name Andrew Schultz?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, why doesn't he get the same forgiveness? Yeah. Yeah, to accomplish God's will. So the thing is— Well, I guess at that point in time, Jesus hadn't died already. Yeah, it was Old Testament.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
And that's why, at least, I didn't think he was a con artist. I was like, he really believes it, and this is kind of fun. So we're like, listen, we're going to have some fun today. But then when things get clipped out and put on the internet, people believe it 100%. When he's so confident.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Wowza. Karma. No.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
No, no. You know this idea, like, I think that we have a skewed understanding.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, sure. I think we have a skewed understanding of karma, and Akash can speak to it more, but this idea, like, it's transactional. I do a bad thing, and then something bad happens to me later. But it might be a little bit something more like... You live within your karma. Doing bad things makes you feel bad about yourself. And then you exist within this badness, right?
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
You just feel horrible because of these bad things that you've done. And you could maybe say the same is true about Christianity. living this Christ-like life makes you feel good, makes you—I'm not saying having heaven on earth, but that following this way not only gives you eternal salvation, but also makes your life better while you are here.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Would you say that that would be true for most Christians, that aspiring to live a Christ-like life will actually make you feel better than a life of sin? Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Okay. So there's a pragmatism to it, I think, that only gets you so far.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, just being the child of Abraham is nothing special. You have to do the acts. Yeah, he's also speaking out against the political system.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
want to do the good thing i'm not suggesting the good thing i'm not suggesting that we like establish these rules and that's how society should function what what i am suggesting is what you're saying is that like by living this life you will feel better and ultimately have a more fulfilling life right and while you a devout christian might say yeah that might be the case like while you're here but you're not going to get that eternal salvation but to those people who are
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
maybe they're not believers subscribing to the behavioral mechanisms, not for eternal salvation for happiness while on earth, but, They do get to attain some of that.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
So he's the first person recognizing that there's something that he deems corrupt happening in society at the time. I mean, there were other people doing stuff like that. I don't want to say first, but he is one of these people that is recognizing there is corruption. And the only way that we can thwart this corruption is through repentance. And hopefully there will be forgiveness. Yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. So that's the Lord's prayer. Well, you get it now. I think that the people who take the Bible for metaphor... who you would call retards, not retards. Sorry. You would call idiots. Sorry. You would call idiots, but those people who take it as find a Canadian, more Canadian way of saying that. What's a good one. Fools. Fools. Hockey pucks.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah. But those that take it as metaphor, but still see like immense value in it. Yeah. And living this quote unquote, I wouldn't say Christian life, but Christian inspired life. Yeah. They, they, Like, many people, for example, who grow up, like, Catholic. You know, like, my dad grew up Catholic, right? Not religious. But... Is he proud of you now that you're Orthodox? He's very proud, yeah.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
No, no, no. But not religious as he, you know, he had some kind of, like, kind of falling out with the church. Not on, like, some, like, you know, pedophile shit. But just, like, he just didn't... As far as you can take any assumptions.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Everybody put something in their mouth.
Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like... Especially when there's God. But, like, I don't know a person that is... I don't know somebody that doesn't lead a more Christian life. You, if you asked him, he's like, yeah, I'm not, I'm just being a nice guy. You know, I'm trying to help people when I can't like he is. So he still finds this immense value in this belief system without the belief.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, he held on to the podcast for over a month.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, we did the podcast and then it was very clear that Billy did not want the podcast to air.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I don't see it on his channel anymore. No. So what transpired was that Mark released it in November. And he released it and it was up for less than 24 hours. In fact, I don't even think it was up for more than six hours because Billy showed up to Mark's house with a cease and desist letter at 2.30 in the morning.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, yeah. So if people are interested in this, I would recommend two sources. Anton put out a video where he chronologically lays out some of the things that led up to it. And then Mark himself, just a couple of weeks ago, put out a video where he, from his side, put out, you know, here's my side of the story of the things that happened because...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Billy went to Mark's house with a handwritten cease and desist letter. A handwritten? At 2.30 in the morning? Yeah.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So Mark took the video down. It was less, I think, in regards to Billy, more that this was just turning into something that was because of the complexity of Mark's situation. You know, he lives in the same neighborhood. Billy's wife is friends with Mark's wife. Their boys play basketball together. Like, this is messy. This is messy for Mark on a different level than it's messy for me.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, so I had the file. One of the things that I did do when Mark said, hey, you know, I'm just going to hold on to this. Billy's asked me to, and so I'm going to do this for the moment, is I said, you know, two things. I'm going to put out a video. I'm going to say that this happened. And I would like you to send me a copy of it.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So Mark actually did send me a copy of it, which I said, I will not put out without your permission. Now, certain things transpired where, you know, it kind of came to light that Mark, because of the complexities of his situation, wasn't going to repost the video. But I decided to repost the video on my end in early December.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I said, I'm going to go live with it. And what was his reaction when he said that? He was fine with it. Mark has been pretty behind the scenes, I think, on purpose and for good reasons. He's gotten a lot of flack because of some of the way that the conversation transpired with Billy. But if you ask Mark, he will say, and I think he says in his video, he was so surprised during the interaction.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
He's in the room with Billy, and he's just – he's very surprised that –
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
billy who is mr confidence mr you know ancient evidence uh is is completely collapsing so for billy who usually always has the monologue to say well okay well that's fair let's move on to the next topic i think mark was not to speak for him but i think he was genuinely a little bit confused and so felt like he to a certain degree needed to come to billy's aid
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
in the course of this conversation because he just felt the kind of secondhand embarrassment that was going on in the room because Billy was really not acting in the way that Billy usually does.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And if you watch the interaction I had with them, it's on my YouTube channel. There was no rebuttal.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, I think you can strategically put yourself in positions where you're not going to be put on the defense. The thing is with the internet, and I'm sure you know this as well as anybody, Patrick, that like people love sensationalism. And we live in a world where we know a little about a lot, but we don't know a lot about a little. And so we live in this Wikipedia world, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
You can just hop online. You don't really need to know information. You can kind of – you can – shed that out to someone else, right? And someone else being basically the supercomputer in your pocket. And people love sensationalism. People like to hear the crazy story, the conspiracy theory.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
for you know sometimes i think genuine reasons some conspiracy theories are true sometimes um but i think when you have people who are saying pretty outrageous things people like to be entertained and people like the more sensationalistic theory than the mundane one so i mean
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
We can do a follow-up. I really appreciate it, Billy. Thanks so much for interacting.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
In one sense, it is sensationalistic that you have this first century itinerant Jewish preacher in the backwaters of Roman-occupied Judea who predicts his own death and resurrection and then pulls it off. But... I think people are so used to the biblical narrative about the historical Jesus that they want something else.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's the same reason the Da Vinci Code got so popular, even though there really wasn't anything historical behind the Da Vinci Code. But people like these kind of under-the-table conversations that are sensationalistic and make you feel like you know something special now.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Or I mean, every Christmas and Easter, it seems that there's some news article about this lost or missing gospel that has this story about Jesus.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Has he reached out to you directly? No. No, not to me, other than his lawyer sending me a cease and desist letter. Was that handwritten or was that typed out? No, that was an actual one.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I know, I guess so.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, I think he eventually did send actual cease and desist letters to Mark. So that's fair.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I would be open to it. I mean, that was the original plan was that this interaction that we had online would be kind of a precursor to ideally – an in-person thing with Billy.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I actually said when Billy sent me the cease and desist letter, I made a video where I said, I will actually adhere to all of the terms and conditions of this letter if you decide to run it back with me and we do it in person. Because I think Billy has a lot of claims about the Bible.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I hope that our conversation kind of made him think twice about a lot of the claims he's made about the Bible, especially the ones that are patently false and can be verified even with just a quick Google search. But I think there are still things that Billy has said about
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
the history of Christianity, about biblical languages that do need to be corrected, not because I have some sort of vendetta against Billy, but because I want people to know what is true.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And as someone who has studied this stuff formally and does read Hebrew and Greek, and I want people to actually know what the reality of what these things concerning the historical reliability and the truthfulness and the verisimilitude of the Bible actually are.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I'm actually scheduled to do an online event with a guy named Aaron Abkay, who is a growing individual within. I think Aaron has more kind of his repertoire is a little bit more than Billy's. But my friend Stephen Boyce, who has a PhD and is brilliant, brilliant on church history. And I think his PhD research was actually on Gnostic gospels.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Him and I are going to do an interaction with Aaron and another individual as well. But I mean, off the top of my head, no one necessarily comes to mind. But there are, I mean, the internet is kind of a wild, wild west with this stuff and just claims that are made. I mean, I think it's emblematic in this conversation
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
We live in this world, but we live in a world where social media has kind of designed it where we're so used to claims being thrown out, but claims are not actual evidence. And so you can make a claim where you say something and because it's in 140 characters and we're so used to that, we think that that's actually rationale, but that's not rationale. That's an assertion.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
An assertion is kind of like the roof of the building. You don't start building the building by the roof. That's the last thing to go on top. the foundation, the walls, everything internal. That's the rationale and the evidence. And then you put the assertion on top. But we live in this world where everybody's throwing out assertions. And we've actually forgotten how to articulate what
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
evidence and reasons and rationale actually are. So that's what we see online.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
100%. I don't think that the accusations that Billy was making, they're not unusual in the sense of... I'm not really sure where Billy got a lot of... the arguments that he actually articulates from. Because like I said, Wikipedia articles could debunk him. Like you look on, he uses something like the Gospel of the Holy 12 for his evidence.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, the Gospel of the Holy 12 on the Wikipedia article will tell you this is a 20th century forgery. Like we don't have any evidence before the 20th century. It was designed by a group that was trying to prove that Jesus was a vegetarian. but it's not a historical document.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so if we're going off of something like the Gospel of the Holy Twelve or the Gospel of Barnabas, which is the one he uses for the denial of the crucifixion.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So the Gospel of the Holy Twelve. Yeah, so there you go. So the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, first serialized in the Lindsay and Lincolnshire Star newspaper between July 30th, 1898 and March 10th, 1901, presents vegetarian versions of traditional teachings and events described in the canonical New Testament. So this isn't something that has historical provenance.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So it's not something that has kind of a paper trail going back into the ancient world. There are ancient apocryphal documents that you could capitalize on, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, but this is not one of them. So to choose this as your document to prove something I'm just not entirely sure why you would go about that particular route.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Or the other one is the Gospel of Barnabas, which is the one that Billy brought up with me, which is a clear middle-aged forgery. It's not... And that's not a contested fact. It paraphrases Dante's Inferno. It has glaring historical inaccuracies. It... has geographical mistakes.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It says that Jesus is the Messiah, but he's not the Christ, indicating that the author had no idea what those two words meant and that they were the same words in different languages.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I think it's a both-and situation. I think Billy's unusual in that he has brought forward arguments that I've never seen before. So usually you get kind of the typical... arguments that are repeated, and sometimes it's repeated ad nauseam. Accusations of the Council of Nicaea in 325 inventing the books of the Bible as the canon of Scripture. That's the sort of Da Vinci Code-esque argument.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And you can trace where the paper trail of that goes to, because you can see that Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code got it from a previous book called Holy Blood and Holy Grail, and Holy Blood and Holy Grail appears to have got it from Voltaire, who used a document called the Synodicon Vedis.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So there's actual links to where, okay, this is a false statement, but where's the false statement coming from? And you can see the dots and connect them. With something like using the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, or the accusation that Billy uses for the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaticus, denying the crucifixion,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think I can come up with a theory as to how he developed that, which is based on a misunderstanding of a textual variant at the end of the Gospel of Mark that is in Codex Vaticanus. Or sorry, not Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaticus. But to then repeat this constantly and say that the crucifixion isn't in the Codex Sinaticus entirely...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I'm not sure why he would go about that or where kind of the reasoning came from. As far as I can tell, a lot of these are original to Billy, and they sound sensationalistic, and a lot of people don't have the repertoire or the background to know what something like Codex Sinaticus is.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so when he's throwing that out to you, or he's throwing that out to Andrew Schultz, or he's throwing that out to Joe Rogan, it's not in your, like... categories of information that you just kind of have off the top of your head. So you just kind of take it at face value, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But if you take a seminary Greek class, it wouldn't be unusual to even open up Codex Sinaiticus because it's all digitized. You can go to codexsinaiticus.org and see the document and actually practice translating some Greek from Codex Sinaiticus because it is a prominent Greek manuscript. So, um,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's a combination of a few things where you have certain arguments that are repeated often enough and loud enough online that they kind of – people in their minds, it becomes true. And then you have other arguments that are more novel. And I find Billy's arguments are more novel than they're not.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
He does kind of throw in the Vatican is behind everything and the Council of Nicaea and the books of the Bible and Constantine is another one that kind of gets – everything gets pegged on Constantine for some reason. But there are other things like – a lot of what he talked about with you that I think are, as far as I can tell, Billy originals.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think so. Meaning nobody else talked about it?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Or the way that they're formulated. So I think Muslims have capitalized on the Gospel of Barnabas because the Gospel of Barnabas appears to actually have been influenced by Islam in the Middle Ages and uses some sort of typical later Islamic arguments from the Middle Ages and does deny the crucifixion. So it has been capitalized on that way.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But the way that it's been used by someone like Billy, I think at minimum it's novel because I haven't seen it in the same way that Billy has articulated it.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, not necessarily.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
How was that for you when you heard that? I mean, that's a non-falsifiable claim. You can't prove or disprove that Jesus was an alien. I can prove a lot of things I think about the historical Jesus, but claims about aliens are claims that have no falsification. So they're kind of...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
perfect for conspiratorial arguments because they have no ability to be debunked or to be proven or disproven so we i mean in terms of what do i think of that i mean i don't know jesus wasn't an alien so i mean i of what we know about what Jesus was.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think this gets to the heart of the issue in terms of, I can't speak to trying to get into Billy's head or psychologizing why he does something. But at the end of the day, I am two things, right? I am an aspiring biblical scholar and historian, and I am a Christian. And so I'm very concerned with a good history and articulating and using proper methodologies to derive good history.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I believe that Jesus was who he actually claimed to be. That when he predicted his own death and resurrection and then pulled it off, that people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead. And so I think that should be taken seriously. And I think the claims that Billy articulates...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
They lead people astray to doubt that in a way that I don't think is credible philosophically or historically and are easily debunked. And so my first priority is, okay, I want people, when I make a video, any video, you know, a response video, or, you know, when I'm talking about manuscripts on my Instagram page or whatever it is, different levels of kind of nerdy on that scale.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's because I want people to, A, get interested in doing good history and how that's actually performed, and B, I want to show them that the truth claims of Christianity are actually not just defensible, but are backed up by evidence in what we can look at in the timeframe of history.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, I don't know the hours, years. I mean, there's the whole thousand hours thing, right? The 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, at minimum, I've definitely done that in terms of my original motivation. And I work for an organization called Apologetics Canada, which is a national not-for-profit organization in Canada.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And our goal is that we want to pursue and communicate a biblically sound and intellectually robust and a culturally engaged faith. We want to come alongside Christians and help them know what it is they believe and why they should believe it. And so alongside that, I put in the time, not just because I'm interested in becoming an expert,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
not because I want to kind of gain some sort of credibility intellectually, although I do want to derive a level of expertise where I can speak knowledgeably on a topic, but ultimately because I think these topics are important.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think that they have ramifications that go beyond simply historical inferences, that Jesus is no less than a historical character, but he's also so much more than a historical character. And so my motivation and my interest is ultimately because I think that these things are true.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I adhere to a scripture, a set of scriptures that calls me to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. And part of that is loving God with my mind. And so I'm going to try to do to the best of my ability, dive into that in order to be able to communicate what I believe is ultimately the truthfulness of the Christian worldview.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, definitely. I mean, there have been lots of people who have been mentors in my life.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good way of putting it. I mean, so when I was young, just before my 11th birthday, I was diagnosed with, or my 12th birthday, I was 11, just before my 12th birthday, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down. So it's called acute transverse myelitis.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And what basically happened was that I had the flu in my body's immune system. Instead of attacking the flu, attack the nerve endings of the base of my spinal cord, the myelin sheath causing inflammation and cutting off the communication between my brain and my legs.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so that was a condition which the prognosis was that I was almost certainly most likely going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life. And I experienced what I believe is a supernatural healing in that one month from the day, January 8th, when I woke up and I couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on February 8th, woke up, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And that it was the doctors who first used the word miracle because they couldn't explain ultimately the factors that were going on in terms of there being no evidence of the swelling on the base of my spinal cord. And also the fact that there was just no muscle atrophy in those 90 days. And so that marked a powerful supernatural experience in my life in that something happened that was...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
non-explainable, unexplainable from a natural materialistic sense of kind of looking at the world. And so although that marked that powerful supernatural experience later in my teen years, I still really and maybe this is what you're referring to in terms of hitting a wall is I was really wrestling with other questions in that, OK, something happened when I was a kid.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I'm not sure really how to get around that, but I have these intellectual questions. questions about whether what I believe or what I've been taught to believe is actually true. And so that started a period of time.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, yeah, where I investigated. And, you know, I lived in a home where we had the Quran on the shelf. And so I pulled it off and I read it at that point in time. Now, I've read it multiple times since then, but the first time reading it through and thinking, okay, could this actually answer the ultimate question that I have? How old were you the first time you read it? I was 16. Okay.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, at that point, I probably read the Bible about two or three times. Okay. So I read the Quran cover to cover. I've read it multiple times since. But I also read the Bhagavad Gita. I think at the time it was a shorter version. It wasn't the entire Bhagavad Gita. And I read the Book of Mormon. And digging into some of these...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
pieces of worldview literature to try to figure out, okay, I know what my parents raised me to believe, but is believing it because they raised me to it the best reason to believe it? It's not a bad reason. I don't think it is. But is it the best reason?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so exploring some of these questions as much as I could at that age in looking at these sources, going online, trying to interact with people who held these worldview perspectives. And that was really the process that I think God used that set the foundation for what I do now in terms of actually wrestling with, because I think there are good objections to the Christian worldview.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I don't think they're true, but that doesn't mean that there aren't good ones. And so I think we have a duty if we are pursuing the truth, and ultimately I think that Jesus is the truth, with a capital T, that we have a duty to pursue what is true even above, say, an allegiance to Jesus.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Now, I don't think that that is in competition to each other because I think that Jesus is the truth, but we should ultimately be asking the question, what if this could be false? And looking at the objections from the other side and saying, well, are there any actual reasonable objections that invalidate what I believe to the point that I need to rethink this?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, I don't think so. I was a bit of a slacker.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think... Yeah, most likely.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean, we would read every evening. We would read the Bible together as a family. We would pray for the people in our church. So there were kind of those disciplines that were put in place, but I don't think that they were like militaristic in the sense that I had to read my devotions. My parents were checking up on me on how much I was actually getting through or anything like that.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think that it was much more of an organic kind of just attitude. There's three siblings of yours.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
In some ways, but maybe not in... overt ways in other areas. I was very invested in athletics as a kid because of that, because I felt like I had experienced something where God had given me this exposure to understanding what it was like to take advantage of walking in and out of a room.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Athlete wannabe? Athlete wannabe. Yeah, that's what you got. So I was really involved in track and field as a kid. And then I ended up competing all throughout high school and went to university and competed varsity track and field.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I felt very passionately that that was, and probably to what you're saying, there being a conviction, like this is something that I need to take seriously because A, it gives me a structure for my life, but also I needed to constantly be reminded that, I had been in a situation where this was just a complete impossibility.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, have you ever read the Quran? I've never read the book. Okay, so the Quran is interesting in that when you come to it, especially if you're a Christian and you're expecting things to be chronological and when you open up a Bible, Genesis- Structured. Right, Genesis says in the beginning and that's in the beginning. And by the time you get to the end, Revelation is the end, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
The Quran is structured differently in that the biggest chapters are at the beginning and the smallest chapters are at the end. So there's 114 surahs or chapters in the Quran. And the way that it's been put together and structured is very, very different than something like the Bible in that it's not in a narrative theme or a chronological theme, but it's on the basis of the chapters.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And there are various reasons for that in terms of the overall structure way that the Quran eventually got codified. Because during Muhammad's lifetime, the Quran was oral. And actually there was a hesitancy after Muhammad died in 632, I believe it was. Muhammad dies. I could be wrong on that date. I'm just going off the top of my head.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Muhammad dies and actually the Muslims who are following him have a hesitancy to write it down because Muhammad never told them to write it down. But there's this process that eventually gets put into place because Muhammad's successors in the caliphs realized that people have memorized the Quran differently.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, so you had these individuals who were following Muhammad around and they were memorizing everything he was saying. And so part of this process is that people were remembering things slightly differently. And I believe it was when, so Abu Bakr, who I think is the second rightly guided caliph,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
in the succession after Muhammad, he's the person who starts the process of kind of bringing together all of these recitations of the Quran. And then that's finalized under a later caliph by the name of Uthman. And Uthman, I... I think when they come to Abu Bakr, the statement literally that they say is, save us before we differ like the Christians and the Jews before us.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And that they saw that there were some things that the Christians and the Jews were disagreeing on between their written texts, and they didn't want that to happen with the Quran. And so there's a period of time under Uthman where it's called the Uthmanic revision, where he gathers all of these...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
documents together, all of these different recitations, and he codifies it into one document, and he destroys all of the differing ones. So in that sense, you do have a standardized version. But in terms of the history of how texts are produced and disseminated, it's what's called a controlled transmission. And it's essentially a government oversight of it, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So the great thing about having only one version is that you don't have any disagreements, but if you only have one version, you have to trust that the guy who compiled that one version got it right.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And there were actually companions of Muhammad within the oral or within the traditional sources of Islamic literature called the Hadith that talk about the fact that there were particular individuals who were very close to Muhammad during his lifetime who did not want to give their...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
He worked for the Iranian Bible Society.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Quran kind of versions to Uthman because they knew that theirs was going to differ with Uthman's and he would probably destroy it. And so you have these, these are not, I mean, controversial in the sense that these are part of the traditional Islamic sources in the Hadith.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But I think within the history of how the Quran gets put together, you see something very different than what you see in the Bible.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so when you're reading it, especially if what I did, you know, open up the front and then read all the way through, there are parts of the Quran that are confusing because they don't necessarily follow what would be considered a like overly rational order in terms of the flow of the text, right? So I open it up. I read it.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Some things sound familiar in some ways in that it's talking about Moses and Noah and even, you know, Jesus, Mary are in there. But there are components of it that just they're so far from what the biblical narrative is that it just seems off.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
That's off? Well, the stories are very different a lot of the time. So what I think we can derive from the historical record is basically that if you take the traditional Islamic narrative, Muhammad was illiterate. So he's not said to have been a learned individual. And so he is, if we take the traditional narrative once again, he's a caravaner in 7th century Arabia.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so he is going around Arabia in the Arabian Peninsula. He's going up in the countries like what are today modern-day Jordan. What is this, Rob?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, this was just Google.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, I was born in Pakistan.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah. Yeah, so if we go by that traditional narrative, he's a caravaner, he's going around, he's being exposed to Christians and Jews because they're all over the place in Syria and in Jordan and in Iraq. Like these were Christian countries a lot of the time.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And he's hearing these stories about who the Christians and the Jews believe are their prophets and individuals within that are part of the religion. But he's not able to discern between the difference between an actual historical source like, say, the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and, say, apocryphal Christian tales that are floating around the Arabian Peninsula.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, we left during the Gulf War. My parents were accused of the crime of proselytizing, giving a Bible to a Muslim. And then we came back from overseas to Toronto, where my parents... And then a year after that went out and for a very short stint of my childhood, we were in Jordan in the Middle East. How long was that? Between, like in the 90s for a few years. You're young.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so because there is this inability to actually discern between those sources, some of those things get incorporated into the Qur'an. And we can trace this. A friend of mine, Andy Bannister, did his PhD dissertation, and then he published a book on this.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's called The Oral Formulaic Construction of the Quran, where we can actually tie certain stories in the Quran to apocryphal sources that were floating around in the subsequent centuries after Jesus. So there's a document called The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas, which is very different.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas has a story where Jesus, the childhood Jesus, is making clay birds beside a riverbank. And the Jewish officials get mad at him because he's doing this on the Sabbath. He's breaking the Sabbath. They go off to get his parents to get him into trouble. And Jesus breathes on the birds. They turn into real birds and they fly away. So this is an apocryphal story.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It comes centuries after the actual historical Jesus. It has no historical ties to the historical Jesus, but it's a popular story that's being incorporated into this infancy narrative. In the Quran. So the Quran adopts it. So we can trace it to the infancy gospel of Thomas and then later Arab infancy gospel of Thomas.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
The Quran borrows it and incorporates it, but we know that it's not an actual historical story of Jesus. So when I say that there were stories that like they're familiar.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
That there are stories that are familiar and that you're seeing the name Jesus. You're seeing the name John the Baptist. You're seeing the name Mary. But when you're reading these stories about them in the Quran, they're not stories that... They're not echoing biblical stories as much as they're
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
talking about these characters in very different ways that if you don't know about, say, where these sources are coming from, if you're not looking into the infancy narratives, then you're like, well, what is this? Like, this is confusing. Is this more information? Is this right information? And so...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Now, later in life, in my formal education, digging into some of those things and figuring out, okay, well, here's how we trace those sources. Here's the paper trail. Here's how we can connect those dots between where potentially the author of the Quran was actually getting them from. That's when I did a lot of that legwork.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But originally, I was reading the Quran, and I found it unusual, but I also found it did not accurately reflect things that I was looking for to answer the ultimate questions. Questions of like meaning and purpose and morality.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I would routinely meet with Muslims, especially in like my university years. There were times where every Ramadan, my Muslim friends were reading the Quran. And so I would read the Quran alongside them. So we would read the entirety of the Quran during the time of Ramadan. And I would use that as an opportunity both to learn, but also to kind of, I wanted to be an example to them.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So when you were talking about my attitude in the way that I approached my conversation with Billy, That's been my attitude all along in that I'm part of an organization that does Christian apologetics.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, so it's in Canada, Apologetics Canada. But apologetics is just a word that means to give it a reason or to give a defense. And it comes from a passage in 1 Peter 3.15, which says, but in your hearts, revere Christ as Lord, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But then it's the last part in that verse that I think is just as important.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Not just be prepared to give an answer, but Peter says, but in your hearts, revere Christ as Lord, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks for the reason that you have, but do so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ will be ashamed of their slander.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think when we approach these conversations, whether we're talking to you know, agnostics, atheists, Mormons, Muslims, for someone like myself who claims to be a Christian, if I'm only giving answers,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
but I'm not revering Christ as Lord in my heart, and those answers aren't done so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, then I'm not actually obeying that command in Scripture to give an answer. Because it needs to be sandwiched in between those two things.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So how old were you at that time? Oh, I was quite young. We came back when I was like six or seven. Do you have any memories? Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I went back after I graduated high school. I went back and worked more rurally. I worked with Bedouin, whereas when I was really young, we were in Amman, which was much more of the city.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Why do you think it's grown so big? I mean, I don't know if I have an exact prognosis. I mean, Islam is a very different religion than something like Christianity in that it has a sociopolitical component to it that Christianity doesn't, in that it is a political religious system.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And it was designed that way from its beginning in that Muhammad, if once again, we're assuming that the traditional Islamic sources are correct, he was a warlord. And so if from its inception, there's been a different attitude, Jesus was the crucified Messiah. in that he said, I've come to not be served, but to serve.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so when we see the beginnings of Christianity, we see an attitude where people are motivated by love your neighbor. you know, pray for those who persecute you, love those who hate you. You know, if a Roman soldier asks for your tunic, you give him, you know, your undercoat also.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so there's a different attitude when we look at the substance of something like Christianity in that Christians were willing to be persecuted and die because they believe that Jesus had already won, that he was sitting at the right hand of the Father. And so their battle cries were pray, and pray, evangelize, and be willing to lose your life for this message.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Whereas with Islam, there was much more of a system where it was designed to subjugate the entire world under Islam. So you have the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, and then you have the rest of the world. And so... I think there's a political component to Islam that is very different than Christianity. I think there's also, especially in the West, we're basically being outbred in that
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
traditional Muslim homes have more kids. I mean, there's also the component of having more wives within majority Muslim countries that's allowed, but having more kids. And so you have more kids and you have a system that allows for certain things.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But when I went back after I graduated high school, I did some work with a Bedouin in an area just north of Aqaba.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so that's going to grow faster than a society which is dissuading families from growing, is maybe even demonizing the growth of a household for various reasons, whether that be, you know, political or environmental or otherwise. And so you just have very different worldview foundations for something like Christianity than you do for something like Islam.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Why do you think this is happening? So I think we do need to be careful with the statistics because we used to live in a culture that was much more culturally Christian than it is today. And sometimes I look at these numbers and I often wonder, OK, yes, you see this kind of downward trajectory.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
But I wonder, I mean, in Canada, not that long ago, only a few decades ago, you had something like the Lord's Day Act, where you were not allowed to have a business open on Sunday because it was the Lord's Day. And there was just more of a cultural zeitgeist that was not necessarily, I think, Christian in, it was Christian out of convenience, not Christian out of conviction.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so I think a lot of people used to go to church because maybe they were just following along in the society and that that's just part of what you did. And the culture shifted. And now the culture is not saying that going to church is necessarily something that you should do or need to do. And so I'm always curious as to how many of these people who used to
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
you know, fill out the little tick box and say, I'm a Christian, I go to church on Sunday. How many of them were doing so because it was just par for the course for their culture and the culture shifted and they weren't really necessarily convictionally Christian then And they were following the stream of the flow of the culture and the stream of the flow shifted.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so now it's just more culturally accepted to not go to church. And so I wonder whether the people who are going to church now are actually those that choose to go to church convictionally and are what you would refer to as the actual Christians that feel that conviction now. that Jesus is their Lord and Savior.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, so my dad is a pastor. He was a missionary, was a pastor, he's retired now. Not a long lineage necessarily of pastors, but my middle name is Livingston, and my dad's name is Livingston, and that's the family name going back to a guy named David Livingston. who was a missionary, who was the first, I believe, European to go into Central Africa. And we're related to him.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean, I think what we see globally is that we're seeing a shift in the demographics in that for a long time, the Western world was Christianized. Maybe it wasn't necessarily Christian, but it was Christianized. And I actually think we're seeing a shift statistically in that's moving to the global south.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So since there was like the – because I believe it was his niece married outside of the family. The firstborn male since then has been named Livingston. So my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather. But it's my middle name and it's my son's middle name as well.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
that if you look at the continents of Africa and Asia, that the church is growing at a rapid rate in those countries. And I think there are various reasons for that, but I think we are genuinely seeing that. Can I give a rebuttal to that? Sure.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I'm going to back up. I'm going to answer that question, but I'm going to back up and say that to the kind of rebuttal of, well, we're introducing Christianity into those places. I would actually say that Christianity was there long before it was ever in the West, in that North Africa was where a lot of the major church historians come from.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Apart from the Apostle Paul, you have individuals like Athanasius of Alexandria. These are people who are Augustine. St. Augustine was a North African. Some of the most prominent individuals within early church history were from the Middle East, were from Africa. And Christianity was in Asia and Africa long before it was anywhere else.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
remotely close to places like north america and so i think what we're seeing actually is not an introduction but the revival of a lot of those countries i think that's that's a fair and i think it would be both right because some places it is a revival hey let's revive right let's get the
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah. So there's a lineage going back into like the heritage of Christian ministry and missionaries going back that far. And then, yeah. Did you go on a mission ever yourself or no? No.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah. I think there have been a number of things that have happened in the West in the last few decades. I think we want to hold on to the fruit of our Judeo-Christian values, but we want to ignore the roots that actually grew that fruit. And so I think you can look at individuals like there's a historian named Tom Holland. He's not the Spider-Man actor. That guy is also named Tom Holland.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Not this Tom Holland. He wrote a book called Dominion. He's out in the UK. Now he's agnostic, but he, this giant like brick of a book, Dominion, and talks about the fact that
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
a lot of the things that we assume within our society that we consider good, even things like just the idea that humans have intrinsic worth by nature of being human, that that is fundamentally a Christian value because it comes from the biblical testimony of humans being created in the image of God.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Now, a friend of mine, Glenn Scrivener out in the UK, he runs an organization called Speak Life, wrote an excellent book that you, Patrick, need to make sure that you get your hands on called The Air We Breathe. And in The Air We Breathe, he takes a lot of this stuff that Tom Holland kind of encapsulates, and he synthesizes it into a more bite-size film. kind of portion.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
um by myself yeah yeah i did a i've done some trips when i was in jordan i was working um doing that kind of stuff uh i've done some short-term mission trips to as an adult yeah yeah just just after after i graduated high school like between high school and going to university i had a couple yeah a couple trips was in rwanda um i was in mexico and i was quite a bit younger but
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And in the air we breathe, he goes through these qualities that we look at in the West in particular. Things like if you, yeah, so the subheading is how we all came to believe in freedom, kindness, progress, and equality. And that he traces those roots directly back to Christianity.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think one thing that's happened in the West in particular is we want to hold onto these values that are inherent to building the West. that are fundamentally Christian values, but we want to then also strip God from them. And what we're seeing, I think, in a lot of the confusion in the West is that that doesn't work.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
in that the ability to stripping the actual foundations of where those things came from. So you can say, okay, humans have value, and we should take care of people who are weaker than. But where does that come from?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Because if all you are is matter in motion, if you're just the product of time plus matter plus chance, then survival of the fittest actually should mandate that, no, not all people have intrinsic value. In fact, some people have extrinsic value in that what they can contribute to society is actually how we should ascribe their worth.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so say if they're – and we're seeing this in Canada with maid medical assistance in dying – if they're elderly and they can no longer contribute, if they're sick, then – the best option for them is actually to be eliminated.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Because although we're going to dress this up in language like care and dignity, ultimately what it's saying is that this person no longer has enough to contribute to society, so we should remove them from society. And so I think our world wants to hold two things at the exact same time, which are fundamentally contradictory, in that it wants to say values, freedom,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
You know, unity, purpose, kindness, progress, equality. These are things that built the West. But we also want to say, well, no, all that God stuff, we want to get rid of that. And once you start to do that, you run into issues with foundation. Where are you getting your actual reasoning to say?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So Glenn Scrivener, my friend who I mentioned who wrote the book The Air We Breathe, he always says... I just ordered a book. Great. I'll make sure I let him know. You got him a sale. You did. I might even get him to sign it for you. The... One of the things he says is, you know, when people say that morality, like, where do you get your morality from?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I've done this with, you know, atheists who want to ascribe, say that rape is wrong. Now, rape is wrong. Rape is objectively wrong. And I say, okay, why is rape wrong? Where do you get the objective morality to say that something like rape is wrong? And they say, how dare you say I don't have any... Morality. I'm saying, no, no, no. I'm not saying you don't have morality.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I'm saying, where do you get that from? And Glenn has this analogy where he says, it's like saying, where did you get your pants from? Where did you buy them? And you say, how dare you say I don't have any pants on? Like, no, no, I'm not saying you don't have any pants. Where's the source that your pants came from, Patrick? Where did you purchase them from?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so I think when we look at something like equality or morality or freedom and we say, okay, where is the standard by which we can actually ground these things in order to use them as the objective goods that they are for our society? Where's that coming from? Now, I can ground that as a Christian in the objectivity of scripture and in a God who does not change.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And that's where a lot of the founders of Western civilization got it from. Even if they weren't necessarily sold on Christianity wholesale, they're borrowing that from Christianity. It's the infrastructure that builds these things.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Why isn't it growing? Why has it flatlined? What has caused that? I think that should be a conviction to us who are Christians to say, well, maybe we have done a complacent job in our faith actually communicating to people why they should be submitting their lives to Jesus as their Lord and Savior. I think a number of things are going on at the same time. I think I agree with you 100%.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Right.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
People need to be convictionally motivated to be examples, right? I've said in a number of my presentations that there are five gospels. We've talked about the first four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But the fifth is actually the life of the believer in that if you are a Christian, you are claiming your identity in Christ, and that is good news, euangelion. It's the gospel.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And if people are seeing you, they should be encouraged to then go back and read the other four gospels because that's where that source is going to come from. And so I think that we as Christians need to be doing a better job. And so many people are. And I'm optimistic about the church in the West. I'm optimistic about the churches I see that are... doing good things.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Now, that's aside from maybe the mainstream church or like larger denominational churches that are capitulating on certain issues that have been true within historical Christianity. But at the exact same time, Patrick, I think one of the other factors that needs to be incorporated in this conversation is that a worldview can be true even if all of its adherents are terrible examples of it.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
in that I don't think they should be terrible examples, but if you brought in a cello into this room and told me to play Beethoven and I start squeaking away on it, Your conclusion shouldn't be, wow, Beethoven, man, that music is terrible. I understand what you're saying.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, if they're a good church, I think they should follow up with you, they should pursue you. But will anything happen to me? Am I in trouble?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I'm terrible at numbers. I'm a history guy, not a math guy.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
340 million people. In America. How many do you think have converted? From Christianity. To Muslim. To Islam. Yeah, Islam.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm trying to figure out how to not make a fool out of myself. Two million.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, no, I don't think Islam is necessarily a religion where we're seeing converts. I think Islam is a religion where we're seeing importation in that we're seeing a lot of people come from other countries and we're seeing families grow. And so I think that, I mean, when you mentioned the Mormon church, I think the back door of the Mormon church is a lot bigger than the front door.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah. So Mark invited me. He sent me a DM on Instagram the day before. So as far as I understand it, the plan was actually for Mark and Billy to interact. Mark's a Christian, so he has a Christian faith and conviction and had talked to Billy because they had been friends, you know,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think a lot more people are leaving the Mormon church than are actually... I don't disagree.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, well, we need to have a debate on that. That's the real debate. Stop it. Napoleon Dynamite is one of the best pieces of film of all time.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
talked a lot about business together and different things like that and so they were setting up which had sort of been in the ether for a while to have a conversation about some of the disagreements that they had about what Billy said about Christianity how Mark feels about Christianity and Anton who is Mark's media manager had compiled a bunch of different sources that Mark
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, and I agree with you. And I think we're already starting to see that with the Iron Hersey Ali's and others where we're seeing a resurgence. Oh, I'm talking bigger. Yeah.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, I think you're right. And I think we're in a particularly interesting age where you had the new atheism with the Richard Dawkins and the Daniel Dennetts and the Sam Harris's. And I think we saw those seeds planted and they grew into dead trees.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And people realize that if you tell individuals that they're just a product of time plus matter plus chance, that they have no ultimate meaning, then they're going to struggle in finding purpose and drive. What do you think happened with Sam Harris? Do you think that's what it is?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, I think the new atheism, as it was articulated in the early 2000s, was a movement that was largely motivated in print and was theoretical, but actually the practical implications were dangerous. And that people, even people like Sam Harris, have realized that they are inefficient to actually be applied in real life.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
People like Billy are very confident in the way that they say things, but that confidence isn't always backed up with the reality of the evidence. The sources you use were not primary. We're still talking over and over again. There's so much more we can talk about here. We're wasting a lot of time. Confidence and competence are not the same thing.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so that's why you see, I think, people becoming the quote-unquote spiritual but not religious atheists. and the new age becoming far more popular, then I don't run into atheists in the like Richard Dawkins types anymore, I don't.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I run into a lot of people who are into manifestation and meditation and Christ consciousness and all of this kind of esoteric, very vague, I want the things I like about religion, but I don't actually wanna be held accountable to anyone or anything. I'm finding that more and more, and that's also empty.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so I think you're 100% right in that we live in a particular age where the clarity that's going to be spoken into the confusion, I think, is the truth of the gospel message and Christianity. Because ultimately, in what you were saying before, when you're looking at this meta-analysis in terms of, okay, well, where are the leaks?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Where are the problems that we're seeing in terms of why, say, something like Islam is outgrowing us? Well, I think if you look at the Christian worldview, it...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's different than religions like Islam in that Islam spread largely by occupation where Christianity was a grassroots movement because it looked at Jesus, the crucified Messiah, the Lord of eternity, who stepped out of his throne into humanity in the second person of the Trinity in Jesus, and then died the death that we deserve.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And then said that your goal is to stand before the father and hear good and faith, well done, good and faithful servant. Faithful. Not influential, not world shifting, not everybody wants to have a presence online. No, you just need to be faithful and you need to be a servant in that faithfulness. And God is going to do great things with that.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
God's gonna produce the Martin Luthers and the Billy Grahams and these individuals who change the world fundamentally through faithfulness, not through occupation. not through militaristic movements, but if we're faithful to the gospel message, that's really going to... You think Billy Graham was faithful? Oh, Billy Graham is definitely faithful. Yeah, yeah.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
When we see these people, and I mean, I have slight disagreements with some of the things that Billy Graham believed, but ultimately you see a testimony of someone. Like what? I mean... Specifics? Is it like... No, it's very minor theological issues, I think.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, I think later in his life, he became a lot more soft to things like universalism and where he kind of was more open to people not confessing Jesus Christ, but there being an aspect of they could be saved. And I ultimately, I don't think that's compatible with biblical Christianity. But I mean, talk about a guy who was... faithful in his Christian witness, in his proclamation, was zealous.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
could look at and kind of review and plan for this. And I'd done, in some of my social media videos, just some short response videos to some things that Billy had said on your podcast when you had him in, when Andrew Schultz had him on, when Joe Rogan had him on. Just quick two-minute things, just kind of correcting some of those errors.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think, you know, just because I'm saying you need to be a faithful servant doesn't mean you don't need to be bold. I mean, Paul was bold. Paul was, his life was threatened. He was beaten. He was shipwrecked. He ultimately died for his profession of faith. So we don't need to be wallflowers. We need to be bold.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
We just need to make sure that we're doing, as I quoted before, that doing so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, I think the time period that we live in is much more emblematic of the early church in those first few centuries of its existence. in that you have a culture that was very much accepting of, say, promiscuous sexual ethics and idolatry and was open to things and misrepresented and misunderstood Christianity fundamentally.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
in that there was a common practice within ancient Rome called exposure, where if you had a baby and you didn't want it, you would put it outside the city gates. You would put it in the garbage dumps. And Christians were notorious for going and saving these babies. And so the Christian movement actually grew in part because they were against this form of abortion in the ancient world.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so they would collect these babies and they would raise them. And a lot of these babies were girls, which actually meant that the early Christian movements became a statistically predominantly women because a lot of these women, these little girls were exposed in this.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Now the society around them heard about these strange Christians who were talking about, you know, with the Lord's supper, drinking blood and eating flesh. And then they knew that they were going out and they were, taking these babies from the garbage dumps. And so they started to develop rumors that Christians were cannibals.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And yet, despite what is a pretty heinous accusation, complete misunderstanding of what's going on, Christianity still grew. And some of the earliest critics of Christianity referred to Christianity as the religion of slaves and women. because it gave agency to these groups that were marginalized within society. So funny.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
The mob's been around always, and it confuses and gaslights people all the time. Definitely. And Christians were accused of being atheists, A, being the negative participle, and then theos, meaning God, because they denied that the gods existed, and antisocial, because they wouldn't participate in the goings-on within society that were inherently religious. And so...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so Anton put together a Google Doc of some of this stuff. Me, a few other people, and... How I understand it is that Marc just kind of said to Anton right before, What happens if we just reach out to Wes? What happens if we just see if he can come and interact? So he reached out to me the day before.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's in this context that Christianity grassroots from the bottom up eventually goes from 11 scared disciples hiding in an upper room when Jesus is crucified to fundamentally taking over the Roman world within half a millennium.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And it's because of the faithful witness of the Christians who were being persecuted and yet were still proclaiming Jesus as Lord and were fundamentally speaking into the society that they lived in with a message that overturned the norms because it gave people purpose. And ultimately it gave them truth that the idea of God stepping out of eternity changes the paradigm.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mentioned Glenn Scrivener. He has this really good illustration where he talks about all worldviews are some version of survival of the fittest. I'm paraphrasing him here, but what he says is all worldviews are some version of survival of the fittest in that you need to do right, you need to think right, or you need to feel right.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And Christianity is different in that the fittest steps down and sacrifices himself for the survival of the weakest. And that message, you know, we're just over the Christmas season, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
The Christmas message of God becoming a baby and becoming vulnerable is both an example to us of humility and how we should live, but ultimately in worlds where might and power in a very abusive way are often seen as the way to go, Christianity subverts that.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
in that Jesus could have taken cues from all the rulers of his day, of Caesar and of Herod, and later on during his earthly ministry of Pilate, right? He doesn't do that. He comes down, he humbles himself, he lives a life of a servant, and he gets murdered. And that changes the narrative. And then he rises from the dead and conquers sin and death.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so, because of that, those 11 scared disciples are now willing to go out into the world and suffer persecution and beating and death for the sake of this message that ultimately spreads out through all the ancient world and gets us to where we are today, where we're talking about things like freedom. And that's because of the Christian revolution.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I was out at a lunch meeting with a friend and saw the message and couldn't get down to Florida to actually do it in person, but said, I'll jump on a call. And I'm more than willing to do that and interact with Billy and kind of go back and forth with some of the claims that he's made about Christianity.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, I mean, I think sin has always been heinous and terrible. And, you know, we're worse than we assume we are. I mean, the biblical message is that we're always going to overestimate how good we are. and undervalue how truly heinous and terrible sin is. And that sin is always a cosmic rebellion against our creator. So that doesn't mean that some sins aren't worse than others.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Of course, murder is worse than lying. And Jesus even says this, when he gets handed over to Pilate, he says, you know, the one who handed you over to me has committed the greater sin. So all sin is sin in that is a rebellion against our creator. And it's that cosmic treason. But some sins are worse than others.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, I don't know if I can stratify, okay, this is a period of time when it seems worse than others. I mean, at the end of the day, I think, We're always worried with the evil out there and we forget about the evil in here. And the Christian message is that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so I think it goes, it starts with you and me, Patrick, submitting our lives to Christ and realizing that our hearts are sinful. John Calvin described our hearts as a factory of idols. We're always going to look for a way, because we're stuck in this world that's beautiful yet broken, to find the loophole. And this is why rules aren't going to save us.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And this is what I think is interesting about... I've talked to atheists and Muslims in the same room about this, like, how do we create a good society? And... my Muslim friends and my atheist friends and my agnostic friends, a lot of the time, basically, it devolves down to, well, we need to make better rules. Like we need to make sure people are obeying the rules, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
That's what Islam is all about. And I think what Christianity says is that doesn't work because everybody's always going to try to find the loophole. They're either going to obey out of fear and obligation, or they're going to try to find the loopholes. And so the Christian message is not obey the rules. It's that you can't obey the rules.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
You need to submit to Christ because he can do what you can't. And it's not about how much you can do. It's about what Christ has done. And so we don't need to come up with better rules. We need to change people's hearts. And that's ultimately what God can do. So was there an ancient version of OnlyFans? Well, yeah.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I mean, there was this concept within the ancient world that you had 25 different ways to say prostitute in Latin. But male virgin... You can't really, in classical Latin, write male virgin.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's an awkward phrase because it was assumed that if you were a male, and particularly a Roman male, you would not be a virgin because you would have had access to sex with anyone at any time, whenever you wanted, with whoever you wanted.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so when Paul in particular, but Jesus also kind of hinted this when he talks about marriage as well, but when Paul says that husbands need to submit to their wives and wives need to submit to their husbands, in that society, that would have been holding the male in the relationship to the standard that the female was expected to, but the male was never expected to.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And that was counter-cultural. And that was seen as foolish. in that sexual promiscuity was the norm and was expected. I mean, brothels... were everywhere in ancient Rome. And they weren't considered seedy. You could find brothels in, archeologically, in relatively high Roman neighborhoods. And it's because that was what you were owed.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so when Jesus says, one man, one woman for all time, that's it. And if you don't like that, well, there isn't another option. You can become a eunuch for the kingdom. You can submit yourself to celibacy. Those are the options. That's counter-cultural in the day, in a world that is prolifically sexual and doesn't see sex as something that is sacred.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Whereas Christianity says sex is sacred because bodies are sacred. And image bearers are sacred. And there's a respect and an accountability. And so these concepts that we have in modern society about sex, I think they're confused because in one sense, we want to say like, you know, OnlyFans, you can give your body to whoever you want. It doesn't matter.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think people like Billy are very confident in the way that they say things, but that confidence isn't always backed up with the reality of the evidence. And so confidence and competence are not the same thing. And I thought what was surprising to me about my interaction with Billy was that I was expecting some sort of rebuttal.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It's just, you know, bodies rubbing together. And at the exact same time, we also realize that rape is a terrible violation. Well, which is it? Is sex just something you can give away at any time? Or do you realize that this is something that holds a pretty significant intrinsic value, that when it's violated, it goes beyond the physical?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think that's where our society is confused, and that's where we need to speak into these situations and show that some of these things are actually sacred.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So when we were overseas, I was raised in the British school system when I was really young. That's why Canadians think I have an accent because a lot of people here assume this is a Canadian accent. It's not. It's the leftovers from being like a few years in the British school system overseas. And then I was in the public school in Canada and then, yeah, public all the way along.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, I think fortunately... I'm not your typical guy in that that is not my struggle and proclivity. And I think I'm very blessed. I have other vices that I need to submit to the cross of Christ. But that one in particular isn't the one that I struggle with, but it is prolific. in our world today. Yeah.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean, I think there are multiple layers to that in that the scientific data on porn changing your brain is hugely problematic in that it changes your dopamine receptors and that it's very easy to become addicted.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I think especially in our day and age, I think it was a little bit different when you were growing up, Patrick, and then when I was younger, where before the onslaught of the internet, Porn was something that you kind of had to pursue in a way that was a little bit shameful. You know, the magazines or the video shops.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And if you watch the interaction I had with him, it's on my YouTube channel. There was no rebuttal. So we get into the topics. He claims that Jesus wasn't crucified. He kind of has these sources that he uses. He brought those up predictably, as I thought he might. And I addressed why those sources don't work for his claim. And then he collapsed.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, and I think the difference between that and what we're dealing with now is that there's just so much now. It's so accessible. And... It's designed in a way where it's quick. So it's designed to, you know, I once heard porn described as, it's like the highlight reel on ESPN.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
You know, you see soccer, for example, and the crazy moves and the kicks and you just watch that and you go, wow, soccer, soccer is an exciting sport. And then you go and you go to a match and And you're like, why isn't anybody scored in two hours? And so it gives you an unrealistic expectation of what sex should actually be.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Because sex is something that's good and something that's beautiful and something that is God-ordained. But when we're given this kind of faulty, very dramatized perspective on what sex is in pornography, it changes the way that we understand ourselves and others in a very dangerous and not just problematic but actual way. actually harmful way in shaping how you view other people.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
You know, I've talked to young men who struggle with porn and a lot of them struggle with looking at women as not being objects because of the way it tunes your brain. That's a terrible thing to look at someone else as an object. You know, we used to use things and love people. And now we use people and we love things.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think that's a dangerous shift in our society in that there are, apart from the fact that I think that sin is, or sorry, porn is sinful, lust is sinful and is going to have implications that are gonna harm you spiritually, that are going to have echoes that go into eternity. I think even if you move that aside, although I think that that's the most important part of the conversation,
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
the health aspects of the way it's going to shape your thinking as a young man, the way it's going to shape your perspectives on discipline and how you view the people around you, how you're going to respect them. I think that that's dangerous. And we see in our society in that like a lot of people I mean, I think this is a problem in places like Asia a little bit more.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I don't know if you've seen the statistics on places like Korea where like- Sexless society. Sexless society, yeah. And part of that is porn, is that they're getting this like dopamine hit. They're getting the highlight reel. And so they don't feel like they need to get, they don't need to pursue the actual connection. And sex is a spiritual thing. And so it's meant to be created.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Like the first promise, the first covenant that God made when he created humanity was that he gave woman to man and man to woman. to be unified, to become one, to reflect that image of God. Both men and women are symbols of the image of God. And when they come together in unity, that's the perfect reflection of what the image of God is.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so there's a spiritual component that I think we understand in what I was talking about before with rape. There's something that's sacred about that, that we know is when you see these OnlyFans models talk on these podcasts and they're just talking about their body count and how many times they're having sex with different guys.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
He just said, you know, well, the first claim was that it was from the Sinai Bible, which is Codex Sinaiticus. And I happened to have a facsimile, a photocopy of Codex Sinaiticus on my shelf. And so I simply pulled it off my shelf and said, well, do you mind telling me where you think it denies the crucifixion or that the crucifixion isn't there? Because this is a fourth century Greek Bible.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Lily Phillips. Yeah, I mean... In a day. This is... I mean, this kind of thing breaks my heart because this is someone... who is an image bearer, and this is defilement, right? And I think even I saw a clip of afterwards, they were trying to interview her and she just breaks down crying. If sex is just like any other thing you can just give away, why would it impact her?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean you see that. You see that in her demeanor, in her voice. This is a publicity stunt, but it has ramifications for her as a person which are sad, which are a picture of brokenness. Because you shouldn't, this isn't sex. This isn't what sex is meant to be. This is an abuse of what the goodness of something is meant to be. And we all understand when something is abused, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Like whether it's a worldview system or an idea or when other people are taken advantage of, this is not what it's meant to be. And you can see that very starkly in the way that she is reacting.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I don't think I was confused on that matter.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It has the crucifixion. And so he kind of pivoted to saying, well, no, that's, I misspoke. I actually meant the Gospel of Barnabas, which is a known forgery. And so I think the... My surprise was that he didn't try to double down. He just completely capitulated and then tried to move the topics onward.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, so I think you have different categories in that you have like Christianity broadly in the statistic sense where you have the major Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, Toledo, Ethiopic, and then what's the Oriental Orthodox. So Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox are not the same thing, but they're similar. Oriental just means Eastern.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So that's a little bit confusing, but those are kind of the overarching umbrellas in terms of what we're talking about global Christianity. I mean, inside, I'm a Protestant, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I'm a Protestant out of conviction, not out of convenience or complacency in that I truly believe that the tenants of historical Protestantism coming out of the Protestant Reformation of individuals like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Knox, these are guys who reformed the church back to what it was meant to be.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so in that, there's a smaller conversation under the umbrella in, okay, well, now you have all these denominations. Now, I actually think denominations are a good thing because humanity is very different, right? Patrick, you and I don't look like each other, right? I can't wear my skin after Labor Day, I'm so white. There's problems with that, right?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So we're different in that people think differently, they look differently. I live in Toronto, it's a multicultural city. The amount of different cultures represented in my church is phenomenal. And so I think there is something to say of if we agree on the centrality of the gospel and the message of who is Jesus and what he came to do to be saved. Now, there's obviously caveats to that.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
If it's just that, then I mean, it is just that in one sense. But if it was only that, then you have a lot of people in the New Testament writing a lot of letters and wasting their time. So there's obviously more to that. But I work for an organization, Apologetics Canada, where I'm a Baptist and all the other individuals who are on my speaking team along with me are not Baptists.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So my colleague Steve is Anglican. Andy is, I believe, is Mennonite Brethren. And then Troy is non-denominational charismatic. Okay. And we work fine. In fact, I think we compliment each other in a lot of ways in that we have our disagreements theologically, but the disagreements are always on secondary issues. And I think there's room for that.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
There's room to disagree on secondary issues as long as when we are coming down to what matters, when we are going out and we are articulating what is ultimately true with a capital T in the gospel, we all do agree on that. So I am actually a fan of denominations because I think it gives an opportunity for people to be reflective of the diversity within the kingdom of God.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And unity does not always mean uniformity. And that's a good thing.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yes. Okay.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No opinions whatsoever on Justin Trudeau. I mean, I...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
have to be careful what i say politically but uh let's just say i'm not mad that he's resigning okay got it got it interesting well actually no we can we can skip that billy billy actually in in his response video um said that i was part of the ndp which is the uh new democratic party in canada which is a left-leaning party um that was one of his accusations against me and
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
I have had people reach out and say, Wes, why do you support the NDP? They're obviously not in favor of lots of things you adhere to, the Christianity. And I can say definitively, I'm not part of the NDP. I don't know where Billy got that.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Okay. So politically you would be? Oh, politically I would be conservative, yeah. Whether that means that the Conservative Party of Canada or there are others, the People's Party of Canada, like there are, but yes, politically. What do you think about this Pierre guy? Pierre Poliev? I like him. I think he's good. I think he's bright. I think he's intelligent.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
He, I believe, was the finance minister under Stephen Harper. And so he knows what he's doing. And Canada is in a very dire situation right now in terms of its housing market, in terms of its economy. I think it needs a lot of help. And if Pierre is going to do the things he says he is, I'm all for it. I like it.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I obviously have caveats. Right. And I'm never going to find a political party that's going to agree with me on everything because I think, you know, the problem with politics is it's full of politicians. And so based on that, you're never going to find anybody who agrees with everything you say.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, I mean, I'm encouraged by the things that Polyev says he's going to incorporate. I hope that those play out well, because as a young person living in one of the most expensive cities, not just in Canada, but in the world, and looking at our housing market, looking at our economy... Um, I want my family to grow. I don't want to, you know, I'm, I'm only planning on having more kids.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so there are, uh, there's a trickiness to that right now in Canada with everything that's going on.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Um, once again, need to be careful politically. Um, I, why do you say that? I work for a national not-for-profit that has charitable status. And so, uh, I, I, Within the way that that works in Canada, advocating overtly for a political candidate could compromise our charitable status. Is that a law? Yes. You can have your charitable status revoked if you're advocating for politicians too overtly.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I thought what was surprising to me about my interaction with Billy was that I was expecting some sort of rebuttal. Billy went to Mark's house with a handwritten cease and desist letter.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Wow. And that has happened in Canada. Yeah. How do you feel about that? I don't love it. Are you going to be in Canada the next 20 years? Yeah. I mean, I work. I love my country. I'm a Canadian. I'm proud to be a Canadian. I wish Canada would sort itself out.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
No, and I don't think Canadians want that either. I mean, I think the partnership with the U.S., should grow more. We are the biggest trading partners in the world. We have the, what, is it the longest border? Is it unmanned border? That's probably not the right way to describe it.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think Americans and Canadians are probably more similar than either of us want to admit. And I think that's a good thing. We're a little bit more British because of our colonial heritage and the fact that we still have the monarch on our money. But I think both countries can only benefit from more open trade, more...
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
open border, more open, you know, in the right ways.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Mark is- While he's doing that, let me just say, Mark's gotten a lot of flack online. And I think, you know, I have nothing but good things to say about this guy. His work in his business is- so good and noteworthy. And he's a great guy. We've become good friends over the last, however many, three months. Mark was saying when he drove me over here, it feels like it's longer.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
It feels like we've known each other longer because of what's taken place and transpired. And so I think it's really good for people to see that In this whole crazy situation, Mark and I are, we're not just advocates for one another, but we're friends.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, we did the podcast and then it was very clear that Billy did not want the podcast to air. So he got in contact with Mark and he said, this thing can't go out. And he had a couple of different reasons, which he verbalized. But the reasons did kind of shift. There was some talk of a debate.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Well, at first he said, you know, I didn't really understand that this was going to be as of a debate as it turned out to be. And I typically ask a fee. So he says he, you know, asked 50 grand for a debate. That was never... And so it was unfair because this is his kind of standard practice is that it costs $50,000 to debate Billy Carson.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
They just, about all three of us. Yeah. Mark Anton and myself.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Anton is the social media manager. Oh, okay. He's the media manager who set it up.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And then he brought forward that there was some sort of interaction, formal debate that was being set up with another Christian that this was interfering with. Now, I doubt that that was the case. I've been part of events where debates have taken place. And why this conversation would have truly impinged on a later debate is unclear to me. But that was what he said.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, you know what? So at Apologetics Canada, we've been doing a series, which is kind of my baby, that is called Can I Trust the Bible? And so there are two episodes out right now on the Apologetics Canada YouTube channel. You can also go Wes Huff on YouTube is mine and WesleyHuff.com is mine. But Can I Trust the Bible is a series that we are doing where we go to the places.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
So two years ago, we flew over to Egypt and we went to the places where the majority of our biblical manuscripts come from. I explain those discoveries. We went to Nag Hammadi. We visited the Coptic Museum in Cairo. That's cool. We looked at the Gospel of Thomas. We went where the Gospel of Thomas was discovered. Sick. And talked about, OK, we have these books in our Bible.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and not Thomas?
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so this upcoming year, well, it is 2025. This year, we're going to be producing. I'm heading off to overseas again. We're going to be going to a number of countries. And we're going to be filming more. Why we can have historical, solid truth in terms of the historicity and the content of the Bible.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Yeah, it was great. Thank you so much for having me.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Thank you.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so at this point, Mark and Billy are friends. They've known each other for years. They live in the same neighborhood. And so... For the good faith of their friendship, Mark decides to do Billy a solid and hold on to the footage. But Mark contacted me only a couple days later and said, you know, here's the situation, Wes. It's not going to go out. Billy doesn't want me to put it out.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And I think Mark was a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that Billy didn't want it put out. And so I simply said, you know, that's fine. It's your podcast. But I'm going to make a video and simply say that this event happened. And so that's what I did.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And as things transpired, it was clear that not everything was adding up on Billy's side, but then also a lot of people were accusing me of actually making up the interaction. And so as that kind of took place- What percentage? Your own audience? No, just people online. Okay.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
Right. Yeah. And then I just kind of say to Mark, as we're talking back and forth, because we're communicating throughout, you know, the course of the aftermath of this. And I said, you know, hey, people are accusing me of lying, of making this up. And Mark was quite uncomfortable with that. Mark was quite uncomfortable with the fact that people are accusing me of dishonesty.
PBD Podcast
"Billy Carson COULDN’T Fight Back" – Wesley Huff DESTROYS Fake Bible Lies & Debate Drama MELTDOWN | PBD Podcast | Ep. 532
And so then he made a video where he said that it did happen. And in that video, he included a number of clips of the actual interaction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He also he he commissions books of the Bible to be written. And so this is where we first get our understanding. Like when we think of a Bible. We think of it as like in a single bound volume, like because we have the 66 books of the Bible and, you know, has a nice cover on the page or on the front. But in the ancient world, those existed independently.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So like P52, like that would be a separate copy of the Gospel of John. And that's what it would have been understood as scripture. Well, Constantine, as like a peace offering, commissions all of these documents to be brought together and published in one book. And so we actually have what we think are some of these documents.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So when I was talking with Billy Carson, he brought up the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these documents that Constantine commissioned because it's one of our earliest examples of a cover-to-cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible. And it comes from the fourth century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And based on both its dating and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make, like it took 360 sheep just to put together, which would have been the equivalent of like. I don't know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So the reason why we're pretty sure that documents like Codex Anaticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they're such giant documents. giant projects in, you know, very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this other than an emperor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so we actually have some of these documents that survive today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Great question. So this is the issue of what's sometimes called the canon of scripture. Right. So very early on when you have Christians having these conversations, the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there's unanimous agreement about those. Right. particularly, and that's not to say that there aren't other gospels that pop up,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So initially they gave me steroids to reduce the swelling. So I spent 11 days in the hospital being overseen by a pediatric surgeon. neurologists and specialists in this because it's a very rare condition. And so they were studying me and they gave me steroids and they did some other tests. But really, there was no true kind of treatment in that. So I was doing physiotherapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It's that you have this chain of custody that goes back to the earliest Jesus community. Jesus has disciples. And there's a group of individuals who we call the apostolic fathers who are the disciples of Jesus' disciples. And so they comment on the books that the disciples of Jesus or that people within the community of the disciples of Jesus wrote.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so we actually have a very close connection to the time. And we see early on that you have guys like – Ignatius of Antioch, arguing that there are only four gospels, he's in the second century, and there couldn't be any more than four. Or Theophilus of Antioch makes the similar argument, and they name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now, Ignatius of Antioch
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
also talks about other gospels, but he specifically highlights the fact that the gospel of Thomas, gospel of truth, gospel of the Hebrews, gospel of, you know, these ones that we kind of hear about Mary, Judas, that the reason we know that they're not associated with the names that are attached to them is because they're being written in times when those people were dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they have these rings of pagan philosophy that are incorporated into them, which is completely foreign to first century Judaism. So Jesus would not have. So in the Gospel of James, Jesus is worshiping a goddess named Sophia. It's like, okay, well, no first century Jew is going to do that. That's obviously paganism. And so we have these early conversations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But when Christians are thinking about, well, what is and isn't Scripture, the earliest Christians are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah. And the Jews had this idea that the promises of God are followed up by the writings, the documents that established those. So the word that's often used is covenant, right? God makes a covenant with people and that's always followed up by written text.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So this is why sometimes, well, in the case of Moses, it's literally inscribed on a tablet, right? And in the prophets, sometimes you get this command, write this on a scroll, inscribe this on a tablet. And that the Jewish scriptures in Jesus' day were seen as a story in search of a conclusion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because they were looking for this figure, this Mashiach, the Messiah, who would come and fulfill things like the reign of David. So they're talking about these things. They're actually expecting them to happen. And so the story in search of a conclusion... in the Christian understanding is that Jesus is that individual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He comes and he does things like he says at the last supper, right before his crucifixion, that he's establishing a new covenant in his blood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so the earliest Christians, mostly who are Jews, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, they see, okay, there's a new covenant, which is actually promised in Jeremiah 31, 31, when God says that he's going to make a new covenant and inscribe the law in people's hearts. That covenant has come. The promises have come. So the earliest Christians very organically say, okay, where's the writing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because we expect this to happen. Promises are followed up by writings. And so they start to have these conversations of what are the writings and where can we find them? And so very early on, because the New Testament has 27 books in it, Very early on, 24 of the 27 are unanimously accepted.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So by the time you get to the middle of the second century, we have lists in documents like there's a document called the Meritorium Fragment, which there's debate on its dating, but it's probably like mid to late second century. And it includes 24 of the 27. And it gives reasoning why.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Now, the other books that are in our New Testament that aren't in that 24 are ones that were discussed because the earliest Christians were trying to figure out, OK, can we can we tie this to either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle? Because we have a lot of books flying around with the names of John and Peter on them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So you have the Acts of Peter, and you have the Revelation of Peter, and you have the Gospels of Peter. So how do we do our due diligence to try to tie this back? So there's two letters of Peter, 1 and 2 Peter, in the New Testament. And the early Christians are like, we've got to make sure we can tie these to Peter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Or the book of Jude and the book of James, which are ascribed to the brothers of Jesus. They were like, can we really say that those are written by those people? And so there are some books that the dust kind of takes time to settle on within the whole 27 canon because these groups are debating and discussing, you know, well, why – why do we have these ones and not other ones?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so there are various canon lists. that come up throughout the ancient world where some people are hypothesizing, well, maybe this book is part of it, or maybe this book is part of it. But it's this ongoing conversation of people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And by basically the end of the second century, we have more or less unanimous agreement of the 27 books being those that encapsulate scripture that can be tied to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I would be pulled out of gym class in school. But it was a little bit of a joke. Like, can you move your legs? Could you move anything? No, nothing. Could you feel anything? No. No. In fact, when I was in the hospital, I'd wake up and there'd be pinpricks in my legs because they'd be testing where the reactions were. And they'd have used a syringe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, so part of the problem with some of these other books is they appear to be almost completely reliant on the other books. So you do have, and some of them have an agenda to them. So like the docetic gospel of Peter seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
because in the ancient world, women were not seen as good eyewitnesses. So you almost have this apologetic trying to solve that problem by having all the right people be witness to the resurrection. So you have all the Roman and Jewish officials camping out in front of the tomb, which also gives away the fact that like no Jewish priest
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
on the eve of Passover is going to be camping out in front of a dead body. Like they didn't do that. So it betrays that the author of the Gospel of Peter has no understanding of purity ritual rites within first century Second Temple Judaism, but is also clearly trying to remedy this embarrassing fact.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the most interesting ways that we figure out, okay, how can we tie, say, the Gospel of Matthew to the first century in Judea? is studies that have been done on name frequency. This is called onomastic congruence, where we look at the most popular names within a particular geographical area, and we compare it to how names are differentiated. The name Joe is pretty common.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So when you have a room and there's more than one Joe, you differentiate. Okay. That's Joe Rogan or, you know, that's MMA Joe. You know, we figure out a way to do it. And that's called a disambiguator. And we see this in the New Testament when you have lots of Peters. You have Simon Peter, you have Peter the Canaanite, or James the son of Zebedee, or you have lots of Marys.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So you have these disambiguities. You even have lots of Jesuses, which is why Jesus is often described as the Lord Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth, because Yehoshua is a common Jewish name. And so we can look at the popularity of names written in documents and actually pinpoint some of these documents to particular times in particular places.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
In fact, Jamie, are you able to, if you go on Apologetics Canada, our YouTube page. So the first episode of the Can I Trust the Bible series we did, we made an animation about this where we looked at the data and then we actually compared it to one of these other gospels, the gospel of Judas. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so in the first episode of Can I Trust the Bible in the right books, partway through, it's near the end, the last animation, if you can find it, we had a guy put this together for us where we looked at the studies. And there have been some really recent ones by a guy named Luke Vanderway who published this in, I believe it was at Cambridge. No, no, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Birmingham University, he did his PhD on it and he narrowed the gap within all of these literary bodies that talk about names and were able to pinpoint and actually show, yeah, so if you go to, yeah, right here. These particular decades that they're writing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so I'd wake up and they'd be just tiny little pinpricks in my legs because they'd been testing while I was asleep to see what the kind of, you know, whether it was registering neurologically with anything, but I couldn't feel anything. I was fully a paraplegic. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
A series of scholarly studies has shown that, though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located. By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered, and by comparing these to the lists from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen. Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not. Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description. When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with names we see listed in key places in the biblical gospels, we find that all the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claim to be narrating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
In contrast, the Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit. Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first century Judea or Galilee, like the biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the second and third centuries.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have four biblical gospels with four different authors, and yet each gets this test of naming, frequency, and attribution right every time. A test and standard that the non-biblical gospels simply do not pass.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, so it's the levels of methodology that we can use to find internal accuracy. If we really want to figure out, okay, where was this written? And is it coming from early eyewitness testimony? We look at something like the biblical gospels, and they fit the bill for something that's written in first century Judea. But if we look at something like the other gospels,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But, but going back to that, like, so I've, I experienced this, what I consider to be a true supernatural experience in that I walked into the hospital and to the doctors that had overseen me, and they were the first ones that used the word miracle. They said, we really don't have any type of medical explanation. And mainly because there was no atrophy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
They're doing things like the Gospel of Judas does, where other characters are coming up with names that are almost either non-existent or very unpopular in places like Judea and Galilee, but are popular in 3rd and 4th century Egypt. So what can we then conclude from that? Well, this is being written in 3rd or 4th century Egypt. Right. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. And lots of this stuff, like the onomastic congruence is something that has really only been studied to the level that it has within the last like 50 years. So we're constantly discovering ways that we can use different types of methodological analysis to figure out the historical validity of something. So this is – we call it verisimilitude, which is historians are looking for –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
what can show us the appearance, likelihood, and probability of something being true. And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true because they inadvertently include these clues.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So the Gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as an evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion, it talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth. But Nazareth is landlocked. So that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of like first century Israel, because you're not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So, but if you're writing, I mean, in the case of the gospel of Barnabas, you're talking about like a thousand plus years later, but if you've never been there and you don't understand, it's like, have you ever seen middle-aged paintings of lions?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Well, a lot of the Middle Ages, throughout the Middle Ages- There it is. Look at that. Yeah, that's crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, yeah. Crazy. And lions look a lot like dogs. Yeah. Because they're like- what's your frame of reference? Right, right, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, yeah, tertiary, secondary. So, and a lot of these writings kind of, Out themselves as that, literarily, within the things that they choose to include. Names are a small example, but geography or distances between places. The biblical gospels describe going up to Jerusalem. And we can kind of read that and not think anything about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But Jerusalem, on the elevation of sea level, you do go up to it. And so it's like these small clues that we as historians are looking for, or on the parable of the Good Samaritan, it's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. And you literally, you go down like an elevation in sea level to go to Jericho. Or the story of Zacchaeus, who's the guy who climbs a tree to see Jesus. He's a wee little man.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because of the cutoff of the communication, my muscles in those 30 days were fine. And in a short amount of time, but they said there should be something and we're picking up nothing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He's like a... He's short and he can't see over the crowd. And here's this miracle worker, Jesus is coming. So he climbs a sycamore tree. And the gospels specifically say he climbs a sycamore tree. Well, this can be like a detail we can pass over, but we know based on kind of the acidity of the soils, that sycamore trees only grow in those areas in that, you know, timeframe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So we can look and see, okay, well, Luke, whoever Luke is getting this from, He's adding this detail. Maybe he's not even aware of the significance of it. But whoever he's getting this from has been there. Because they actually know what tree would have been growing there and tell him that Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so it's like fauna and flora and distance between locations, things that actually other ancient writers get wrong sometimes. Have you ever had a debate with a snarky atheist?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, deny the virgin birth, but not the virgin birth of the universe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Yeah. So that was the kind of predication for them using the word miracle. And so that's kind of – it marks this – what I do consider to be like this supernatural something happened and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So I knew enough about the ways that he'd articulated things about the ancient Near East and the Bible and Christianity to know enough that... His level is pretty surface. But the fallout was that not only did he not want us to release the conversation, but then he started throwing out cease and desist letters. And then he started, you know, trying to sue people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. What is it? Why does this, you know, however many three pounds of gray matter in my brain, why is that able to plummet the intricacies of the universe? Right. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
In all of this, what do you think of Jesus? Like, in terms of your own, like... journeying and trying to find answers to ultimate questions. What do you think of the historical person of Jesus?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, as much as you could at 12 years old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And you don't know how you can wrap your head around that particular claim.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's probably why Jesus came in the first century and not the 21st century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I really appreciate... I mean, guys that you're friends with, right? Like the Jordan Petersons and the Douglas Murrays of the world, or the Tom Hollands, not the Spider-Man actor, the historian, who talk about this stuff. I think I really like the way that Jordan Peterson articulates it, but I think he misses the forest for the trees. How so? In that he sees Jesus as an archetype.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, well, it definitely led to things like later in life, I got very involved in athletics and in track and field. And part of that was feeling a conviction that I knew what it was like to not be able to wake up and walk out of the room.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And I don't think actually even Jesus gives you the opportunity to see him as the archetype. Because I have this love-hate relationship with all of Peterson's stuff because he seems to get so much right where he walks up to the line, but he doesn't want to cross over.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I wonder, and I'd love to talk to him about this, like how do you remedy this issue that – because he seems to think that the concept of Jesus as an example –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
is more important than the actual flesh and blood first century itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified and rose from the dead physically, which is the claim of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, that that's an example for us to look on and live by. But I actually think that Jesus condemns moralism. And ultimately what I see Peterson doing is looking at Jesus as a moral example.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don't actually need a savior. And so I think actually Jesus would have critiqued that because Jesus was very against moralism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, Jesus looks at the religiosity of his day with like particular groups, like the Pharisees and the Sadducees who are these other like, uh, these other groups of Jews during his day. So we talked about the Essenes, who actually aren't mentioned in the Bible, but there are other groups like the Pharisees who are like lay scholars and the Sadducees who are professional priest scholars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And he's constantly critiquing the fact that they have this hypocritical religiosity to them where they're doing things like tithing their mint leaves, like to make sure that they get all of, this is where we get the idea of the letter of the law versus the intention of the law. Like Jesus critiques them for that because he says, you're trying to do everything right and you're missing the point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So one of the things he says is like, if your donkey falls in a ravine, on the Sabbath, do you pull it out? Or is that work? Like, what's the point of the Sabbath? Is it to not do any work? Like, is it to make sure that you're not working too hard? Because you might be breaking the Sabbath. Or like, what is the point? He says, like, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that there's this intention. This is the whole Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter five, is he keeps saying, you have heard it said, but I say, And he refers to the Mosaic Law. And it looks like he's critiquing the Mosaic Law, but he's not actually. He's getting back to the intention of the law. So he says, you know, you have heard it said, do not commit murder.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But I say to you, anybody who harbors a hate for their brother in their heart has already committed murder. And what he's getting to is like, what's the intention? What's the meaning of the law that God gives to you? Because the law is like a mirror. It shows you how dirty you are. But his critique is he's like, you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror. That's stupid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
If anything, it's gonna make you more messy. Like get in the shower. The law is not what cleans you. The law is what reveals that you're dirty. And so in that sense, I think, you know, if Jesus is a moral example, It actually misses what I think Jesus actually said about what his purpose was in that you can't do enough to actually live up to the standard that God holds you to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so if you keep striving, you're actually going to wear yourself out and be exhausted.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I felt like a motivation to be able to, okay, I don't want to waste this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, so I work for a national not-for-profit in Canada that is an organization. We want people to have an intellectually robust and a biblically grounded and a... Faith. We want people to know what they believe and why they believe it. And so we produce materials like we played that clip from Can I Trust the Bible? That's a series that's ongoing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I'm going to be traveling in 2025 to produce more of that content to try to get this stuff that's all up here out into people so that they can be able to access it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. And then later on, in terms of your original question, the difference in that was that I realized, okay, there's something out there. Something happened that I can't totally explain on naturalistic terms. But how do we go from that to saying, okay, well, then this worldview is correct. And so despite being raised in a Christian home, I felt like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Yeah, so WesleyHuff.com is my website. ApologeticsCanada.com is where if you want to see where I'm speaking or what we're up to. I'm part of a team that does a lot of this stuff. So those are the two places. All my social media handles can be found on WesleyHuff.com.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
My parents telling me what was true is not the worst reason to believe it, but it's also not the best. And so as a teenager, I did a lot of kind of soul searching. And like I said, you know, I was able to do that to a certain level of degree because of the openness within my household where I did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I pulled the Quran off the shelf and I read it, you know, front to back, just trying to figure out, OK, what's going on here? What's all this about? Right. And it was through that period of, like, searching, and it wasn't a crisis of faith. That would be an over-exaggerated term.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Maybe, yeah. Digging through, okay, well, what do these guys believe? Right. What does this perspective hold? Right. And that was about a period of about a year and a half. And at the end of that, I did truly feel that, okay, well, I think... in the ways that I in my limited ability as a teenager. to investigate these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I think that Christianity is true, but it wasn't until I went to university where I was engaging with people of other faith perspectives in Toronto at York University, where I was talking to Muslims and Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and atheists, you know, from the gamut. And I was having these conversations and I was expressing kind of my perspective on what I believed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they would say things like, well, that sounds great, Wes, but, you know, that's all the Bible. You can't trust that. And so that's where I started to take the. Do Mormons say that to you?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the sense that so. The Mormon was the craziest one. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. And he's a shady dude. He is a shady dude. Well, no, they did in the sense that the Book of Mormon trumps the Bible. So they would believe. I think it's the 10th article of the Mormon Church is that they believe the Bible insofar as it is translated. And so they have this perspective that there's been things that have been affected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I mean, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible, and it's rough.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, I think it was later on that he made the Joseph Smith translation, but I don't even know if the official LDS Church ascribes to the Joseph Smith translation because I think they even see like, ugh, this is... We know what the Greek and the Hebrew looks like, and this is not even... Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So, I mean, I was never worried because I'm a Canadian. And... Anybody who's tried to sue internationally knows that. Good luck. Yeah, right. Yeah. As far as I understand it, he would have had to file a claim in a Canadian court that would have been reviewed to have legal precedents that he'd have to prove that he could win.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. In religion and politics and like all sorts of things. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Right. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's why, you know, experts themselves feel a lot of inadequacy is because they study a subject and realize, like, I'm never going to get to the bottom of this hole. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. And part of the whole, like what I was trying to get Billy in that conversation that I had with him to get to the bottom of partly was a question of methodology. Like I think he got, he got frustrated at me at one point. Cause I kept asking, you know, what are the criteria that you're using to when you're looking at one source versus another source and coming up with a conclusion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because in historiography, it's the inference to the best explanation. And so there are different ways that you go about that, different methodologies. And historians very rarely disagree on the data and evidence. It's the conclusions that you draw from that. But then there are some things that are just out and out false.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And I don't think Billy totally knew what I was talking about, but it's those criteria that we look at when we look at something that does come from like an oral tradition and eventually gets written down and becomes a literary text. And then you analyze that on the basis of it being a literary text.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
12 years or 20 years 30 years like it's your whole life essentially it's all been this yeah to a certain degree i mean i went to university with full intention of going into the police force i did like um my undergraduate studies and then i kind of mapped out this plan that i was going to become a police detective and that was my goal and i think i realized why not um
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Apart from the fact that he was embarrassed that he lost.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I hope so. Um, I think that might've been part of it. I also, there was an aspect of when I was in high school where they were like, you got to figure out what you're doing or you're going to be homeless and you're going to die. Like I, I felt that like the pressure in life, man, I always tell people when they're in high school, like you can chill out. Like it's going to be okay? I don't think so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You don't think so? I wonder if it's different now. I think you should have a certain amount of desperation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, there's probably something to that. I mean, desperation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, and stress is good, right? Stress creates perseverance and creates patterns that allow you to succeed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You got to push yourself. And I think actually part of that also led in, like, I'm a big believer in athletic discipline. Needs to go hand in hand. I mean, I know you are too. It needs to go hand in hand with any other type of like, whether it's an intellectual endeavor or like, because it trains you to be able to go into places that are uncomfortable. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that uncomfortability allows you to then become stronger, you know, realize where your inadequacies are. And especially when you're with people who are better than you. I mean, when I was running at York university, um, there were two guys on our team who – because I was okay individually, but I ran for the relay team. I was a sprinter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And one of the guys was part of the – they medaled – when Canada medaled at Worlds, he was part of that relay team. And then my other training partner, Busy, who – he ended up competing in Tokyo for Canada. And when you're beside someone who is like –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
just a genetic freak you're like oh okay like that's different yeah right and and it both pushes you but it also reveals your limitations where that doesn't inhibit you like you shouldn't that shouldn't discourage you to go up to that line of being able to push yourself but at the exact same time it it creates a realism that like i'm never gonna i can train
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
As much as I want to, I'm not going to run like that. Right. And so, yeah. But but going back to what you're asking, like, I think there was part of that in wanting to go into the police force. But then realizing like around my third year of university. That my passions and motivations were very, very different and that I didn't know how to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
go about that or where the proper place to do that was, but I knew that I needed to lean into that to some degree, particularly with the Bible. Cause I was, I was claiming that this Bible talks about this guy, Jesus, and I'm a Christian. So I have a friend, Andy Bannister, he's out in the UK and he says, if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And Ian's a great guy. He's not going to save you from your sins. And so, like, if I'm wrong about the Bible, those people who push back on me, right, those skeptics of various worldviews, if the things they were saying about the Bible were true, then it did actually legitimately undermine what I believed. And so I needed to take that seriously.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I had an obligation to actually investigate those things as far as I could.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest of the Old Testament. So when they were discovered, I mean, so they were discovered in 1946 to 1957. And at that point during their discovery, they pushed back a lot of our previous oldest manuscripts a thousand years, which was a big deal. How old are they? They're anywhere between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century BC.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So it's kind of tricky because the Dead Sea Scrolls are, they're like a library that we refer to. So it's approximately 970 documents, but it's distributed out between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments. Wow. So there's a lot going on there, right? And some of these, I mean, are so fragmentary that you look at them and it's like confetti. Because they're, I mean, 3,000 years old, but not quite that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, all sorts of things, animal skins, papyri, and then some of them are actually done on copper. Really? They're like inscribed in copper.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, one of the coolest ones. Actually, this relates because I know you're a Marco Allegro guy. The first time I was introduced to Marco Allegro was not his Sacred Mushroom and the Cross stuff, but he published a book on what's called the Copper Scroll because part of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments is this inscribed document on copper, which is an ancient treasure map.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So it's in Hebrew, and it is wild. So it has these sites where it says buried treasure is found. Whoa. And there have been a number of guys who have tried to, like, look for it. Does it say what the treasure is? You know what? Off the top of my head, I don't know. Look how crazy that language is. I know. Right. And so but the Dead Sea Scrolls. So it's like stuff like this. It's papyri.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It's animal skins. And it's a number of different languages. So the vast majority of it is in Hebrew. But there's also a lot in Aramaic and then Greek and in Nabataean. So it's like a it's like a. an umbrella term to just describe a whole bunch of literature. So a lot of it is biblical because it was written by this group out in the desert called the Essenes who lived at Qumran.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So but then other stuff of it is just, you know, it's just Jewish literature of various stripes that is is were hidden in caves all around the Dead Sea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Oh, Jamie, look at that. 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver. 65 tons.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
How many Cuban links can you make out of that? You can see why someone would try to track that down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Wow. And you know, when we're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, like you have ones like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is fully complete. Like it's a copy of the book of Isaiah and it's a full complete scroll. But then other ones are so fragmentary that we think they're written in Hebrew, but But we can't actually tell. Oh, wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because no one's willing to, like, piece these – and this is true for a lot of stuff. So, like, the largest grouping of papyri literature in the world is the Oxyrhynchus Collection, which we get a good portion of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament from. But if you go to Oxford and you –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
look at the ox or the ox or rink is collection and you pull out that drawer it just it's it's like a jigsaw puzzle and you're like right like most of it is is untranslated untranscribed because the amount of man hours that it would just take to even put it together never mind then go to the effort of transcribing and translating it and most people are not willing to do that and if you're missing chunks how do you even make that puzzle connect you
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, that's part of... So part of my area of speciality in research is in regards to that. So I study paratextual features. We're really going to get nerdy today. Let's get nerdy. So you look at the features of the manuscripts, not necessarily the words, but things like the spaces between the words, the development of punctuation, indentation or outdentation. And I look at the margins of...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And I try to, based on the average size of manuscripts in and around that time, and also the average spacing of words and the margins on top, bottom, and the side, recreate what the manuscript could have possibly looked like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So that one is fascinating. So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Word for word. Wow. Yeah. So this is the Great Isaiah Scroll. So if you go to Israel and you go... Is that papyrus? Yes. No, I think that one is vellum. What is vellum? So I should be more specific. So parchment is animal skin. Vellum can be used synonymously with the term parchment. Technically, parchment is... like baby animal skin, like calves or lambs. But this is the great Isaiah scroll.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And you can see like they stitch together the parchment because it's so long.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Oh, cuneiform is wild. Weird. It's really, really tricky. And that's the thing when, like, if you're studying ancient languages and you start to study Greek, like, the Greek alphabet is similar enough that you're like, okay, alpha. Yeah. Looks like an A, right? Delta looks like a D. So you can figure it out. And so it tricks you because you start off and you're like, oh, this is phobias, fear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I know what a phobia is. And you get this false sense of encouragement. And then the further you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, I'm screwed. But Hebrew is completely the opposite because the writing system is so different. The learning curve is hard at the beginning. And then you're like, everything is just three letters with a suffix added to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so it feels like whereas the opposite is true with Greek. Greek, you're like, I get this. And then when you really go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh, crap. None of the things that I learned about that are supposed to be standard, all of them have exceptions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But yeah, cuneiform is a wild one. Do you know who Rick Strassman is? No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I mean, he's doing it himself. Yeah. Self-teaching. Yeah. I self-taught myself Greek at first, and then when I started learning it formally, I realized how much you miss when you self-teach yourself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. I mean, this is the big debate with ancient languages. Like same thing with, yeah, arguably we don't know how any of this was pronounced. Right. I mean, modern Greek speakers get really mad at me when I say that because they're like, of course we know how it's pronounced. It's pronounced like we pronounce it. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And on all my videos where I'm like site translating Greek manuscripts, there's so many comments of modern Greek speakers getting mad at how I'm pronouncing things. But realistically, yeah, we don't really know how most of the things are pronounced with anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Well, Sumerian's a wild one because it's a language isolate. So Hebrew is an Afro-Semitic language. So Hebrew is related to all of these other languages like Aramaic and Akkadian. language isolates have no adjacent comparisons. So, because I tried to teach myself Sumerian and I failed and I just gave up because I couldn't do it because I had nothing to really compare it to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So Sumeriologists are very like, they're a field of their own because I learned a little bit of Akkadian because I had studied Semitic languages and there's enough crossover between things like Hebrew and Aramaic and Akkadian, but Sumerian, you have nothing to compare it to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It just died. It just died? It just died. How? Do we know? I mean, the Sumerians lost to the Assyrians, and the Assyrians got taken over by the Babylonians. I mean, it's just the course of history where things happen. But there are a number of ancient languages that are language isolates, like linear Elamite. We had no idea what linear Elamite even said until 2021. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, the cease and desist letter, yeah. The cease and desist letter said, I don't want you to use my name or my face. In anything going forward and anything you've used up until this point, you need to remove. And I was given 24 hours notice to do this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I know. There you go. Jamie, if you pull up, if you look up – what's it called? There's a cup, a silver cup. It'll come up if you Google image linear elamite because you think cuneiform looks wild. Linear elamite is completely different than that too. And there's a silver cup, which we had no idea what it said, and then a bunch of researchers –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Ancient Near Eastern researchers developed... So let's... In the corner there, that one on... Far left corner? Oh, no, no. Here. Now it's moved because he clicked it. That one. Yeah, yeah. Click that. So that's linear Elamite. Whoa. And so that's in and around the same time that languages like Sumerian.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So there's this very interesting kind of... If we're talking about a story in the Bible like the Tower of Babel, where it says that God confused their languages... And everybody started speaking different languages. You have these languages that just pop up and out of nowhere and have no relation to one another. So Akkadian starts to adopt certain words in Sumerian, but they're still Sumerian.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It's like pizza is Italian, right? Or like kayak is Inuit. But when you're looking at... The words that carry over, it's not because there's a relationship between Akkadian and Sumerian. It's because you have these cultures that live side by side. And eventually, Akkadian starts to adopt these things. But Sumerian is... So that's why...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
When I see people like Billy Carson talk about being able to read Sumerian, I'm like, dude, I read ancient languages, and I've tried, and I can't make heads or tails of Sumerian. That's a tell. Unfortunately, it kind of gives away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Actually, see if you can find the cup. That's pretty dope right there. If you scroll, there should be a – I think it's called the dashed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
No. It's not the cup? No. It's got – yeah, if you look up cup, yeah, that guy. So see that inscription at the top beside the face? Yeah. So that's the one – so it goes around the top of the cup, and they cracked that. Look at that dude's honker. That's a big nose, isn't it? That's a hell of a nose. Yeah, he can smell that linear elamite.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so when, so actually, interestingly enough, if you pull back, Jamie, that's my, that's my, so there's an infographic that I made that just popped up. So if you click that guy, that's the one I made. Why is it coming up like that? Someone else reposted it. Oh, okay. So is it just bad resolution is what you're saying?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So if you go, Jamie, to WesleyHuff.com and then click my infographics tab at the top. So I started making these things for the graduate students I was teaching. And yeah, so if you go down, there should be an archaeology section. And in the archaeology section, I have that one on, I'm blanking on what it's called. I make ones for manuscripts too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Is he a lawyer? No. So he actually, it's interesting because he, Mark Menard, who was the guy who hosted this interaction, he sent Mark a handwritten one. And then he eventually gave Mark an official one from his lawyer. So I actually was sent one by his lawyer, which I, you know, screenshotted, posted publicly online and said, I'm going to ignore this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Right there. Oh, there it is. Yeah, Marv Dash. That's what it's called. So yeah, you see this. So I have Sumerian, linear Elamite, Akkadian, and Paleo-Hebrew there at the bottom, the comparisons. And these are languages that operated like alongside one another, but are almost completely foreign to one another. So there is crossover between Akkadian and Paleo-Hebrew.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Well, it's all done, um, with the stylus. So it's like a little wedge stylus. So there, there are different variations of it, but, um, ultimately it's done with the stylus. The thing that's interesting, like, like you're probably thinking more of what that later Acadian looks like, right? Where it's like the wedges. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So, so they, Acadian basically borrowed the writing system. And it had development over time, but it was very close.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Well, even if you look at the – I mean language systems develop. Paleo-Hebrew turns into what we saw in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Whereas Paleo-Hebrew is a little bit different than what we eventually see in the Dead Sea Scrolls because there's like a development within the language. And then modern Hebrew adopts the Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
it has vowels that were developed in the Middle Ages to figure out how to pronounce it. Because basically, ancient Hebrew doesn't have a vowel system in its writing that's overly comprehensive. And so in the Middle Ages, when you have... These groups of Jews who are copying these Hebrew scriptures who aren't speaking it as much as they're reading it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You got to figure out how to pronounce it because vowels make a difference. But if you took all the vowels out of English, if you're a natural speaker. English reader, you could probably figure out what was what if you're looking at the page. And so in the Middle Ages, the Masoretic scribes come up with these vowel pointing systems.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that's what you see when you look at a Hebrew Bible today, is you see these vowels. And sometimes the introduction or removal of the vowel is significant in the changing of the words.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Well, let's hope people in the future are still able to read the Declaration of Independence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And then but he'd sent Mark, who was the podcast host, as far as I'm aware, numerous cease and desist. And Anton, who was the media manager, he'd sent a number of cease and desists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Partly, I mean, there were proto-reformers before Luther, guys like Wycliffe. So John Wycliffe and William Tyndale both translated the Bible, parts of the Bible into English, and they predated. I mean, and they weren't very popular for it either. I mean, Wycliffe was declared a heretic, and then his body was exhumed and burned because of the work that he did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Burned him after he was already dead. Yeah, well, Tyndale's line was that he wanted – I believe it was Tyndale. It was either Wycliffe or Tyndale. My friends who are specialists in this are going to get mad at me for this. But one of those two guys said that they wanted the plow boy to be able to read the Bible and know it as well as the priests.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so that's that was their motivation is that they're like, you know, public education for literacy in these areas was largely because they just wanted people to read the Bible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But that was a big motivation behind Luther was he's like, I'm going to translate this thing to German because part of his kind of kicking off of the what we call the Protestant Reformation was that he read the Bible in Greek. Because there was a guy named Desiderius Erasmus, who was a, they call them humanists, but it means something different than now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Humanists were like scholars who were trying to figure out the entirety of human knowledge up until that point. Like Renaissance men kind of, right? So Desiderius Erasmus is like one of the last Renaissance men. But he was compiling, and he produced the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so he comes out with this printed edition of the Greek New Testament and Luther gets his hands on it. And so he's reading that and he notices that in Matthew's gospel, the word that's in the Latin is penitentium agate, due penance. In Greek is metanoite, which is repentance. And the church was using this as like, you need to do penance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You need to do all of this stuff to show that you're sorry. And part of that was paying the church. And Luther reads this and he goes, hey, guys, This means something different. This means repentance. It means changing your mind. It doesn't mean like to actually do things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so part of his motivation is like the Latin isn't reflecting, at least at the point that Latin had developed in that day, like maybe. When Jerome translates the Latin Vulgate back in the fourth century, and it's called the Vulgate because Vulgata means like regular. Like you think of vulgar, right? It's just the regular people language.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Part of the reason was that in the fourth century, very few people were reading Greek. They were reading Latin. And so they're like, hey, Jerome, you need to produce a Bible in Latin because nobody can read the Bible anymore. Right. And so he produces the Latin Vulgate. And ironically, by the time you get to Luther, a thousand years later, no one can read Latin. And they're all using the Vulgate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Wow. And even Erasmus was... So he dedicates his first few editions to the Pope because he knows that the Pope is going to get wind that he's producing Greek New Testaments and the church is using the Latin. And he... He's risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the Pope, maybe the Pope will take it easy on him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, the irony of this situation is if he just kind of left it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
They're just looking out for your best interest, Joe. Yeah. Right? They just want to make sure you're doing the right thing. Did you see Wild Wild Country? Oh, yes. It's fucking awesome. Unfortunately.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
probably wouldn't have made anywhere close to the splash no that it's made and we told him that we said like hey barbara streisand effect yeah is going to happen yeah like you're a big enough personality that if i make a video and say like hey i had this conversation didn't go well for billy and billy doesn't want it released that's gonna start to gain traction sooner or later
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. One of the ways my wife and I bond, we have very different tastes in movies, but there's enough crossover that our guilty pleasure is cult documentaries. I love them. They're so interesting. I love them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You know, what's interesting about that is I have less of a problem with the objective truth claims and more of a problem with them saying, but don't look into it. Like, don't test it. Like what I say goes and you're not allowed to explore it. Like talking about the Mormon church, they recently did this thing where they're like. you don't need to go on the internet and you don't need that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it's like, guys. Don't watch the Book of Mormon. Yeah, guys. I don't think you realize what you're sounding like when you come across in that way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
We know why they're family oriented, right? Why? Is because in what Joseph Smith wrote, there's an idea that everybody's soul pre-exists. And you were born as a spirit child in a previous life. And the reason you need to have children is you need to bring those people's souls into existence. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so there's like, because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly mother and you're all children of God in the actual like physical sense. And that the pursuit is exaltation where you will be a God on your own planet if you've done everything right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You get your own planet. And, and this is so Joseph Smith in, uh, in the, the King's fall at funeral discourse, this is what he wrote. This is where he like formulated this idea where God, the father has a body as tangible as ours of flesh and blood, and that he lived on another planet. And he, it was, you know, circled around the star called Kolob. And that if you do everything right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
you will also be the God on your own planet. And so you got to encourage people to have kids because you're pulling those spirit babies out of the spiritual realm. But you're right. They are. They're incredibly nice people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, especially with languages. Yes. Like we didn't get into it. I hoped to have in our initial conversation kind of pressed him a little bit more on the more overt things he'd said about like Greek and Hebrew and Sumerian. Because I've studied a number of ancient languages. And when you study the languages, you realize the complexities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, it's only really been recently that we have the levels of literacy that we have today. I mean, this is part of the reason why you have these long spans of time between like when people live and then the ancient biographies that start to pop up about them is because most people are just illiterate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. I mean, up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament manuscripts predated the Old Testament manuscripts by a long shot. Really? Yeah. Because the Christians were... The Christians were less discerning in their proliferation of written documents. So the Jews had this whole system where you had to be a trained scribe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they were very, very careful with the procedures that you went through. Whereas the Christians were like, we want to get this thing out as fast as we can, as often as we can. Which had a lot of benefits in that their goal was... proselytization and evangelism and that worked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But the downside of it was that you get really messy copies where you have copies all over the place, but human error gets involved with like spelling differences and, you know, additions, deletions, mostly for completely like understandable reasons.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But we actually have manuscripts where we know the person copied it and they didn't know how to read it because they make mistakes that you wouldn't make if you We knew how to copy. There's this really great example of a guy who copies, I believe it's the genealogy of Matthew.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And he he's looking at a manuscript that has two columns and he's copying it from left to right and he's copying it like this. Whereas it's like the column you go down and then the next column. So in the genealogy of Jesus, he's got all the wrong people begetting all the wrong people. And you're like, you wouldn't do this if you know how to read because God is in the middle of the genealogy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So like that kind of thing. That is a real problem. That is a real problem. But ironically, with the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it's actually because of the mistakes that we're able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because if you have copies that are floating around North Africa and places like Egypt, and then you have copies in Syria, and you have copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles, when mistakes pop up, they're geographically located. And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay, well, this obviously happened here at this time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And you can pinpoint those things. So this is a field called textual criticism. And we do this with all ancient documents. Like the Bible is a... a more kind of fleshed out field of textual criticism because we have so many manuscripts. But we do it with Marcus Aurelius. We even do it with Shakespeare with the different copies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
of these things and so when someone hasn't and they're making statements that are obviously indicative of someone who hasn't studied them it's it's super apparent right and so i think it's one thing to be making claims about say like christian history or the bible but when you start to get into like linguistics and philology it gets messy and if you don't know what you're talking about it gets really apparent really fast
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because if you only have one copy, you have to trust that the person who copied that got it right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Which is the issue that we have for Beowulf. We only have one copy of Beowulf. And so we don't know what it looked like prior to that. So we just kind of accept that, okay, this is Beowulf. Like there's no way to compare and contrast the tradition of the manuscripts of Beowulf.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. And fortunately, in the modern era, we get computers involved, and that cuts out a lot of just manpower.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, there's an interesting ... So in Germany, at the Center for the Study of New Testament Research in Munster, they're actually ... It's called CBGM, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. And it's tracing not manuscripts, but readings within manuscripts and finding the relationships between the different ones by like computer models.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so they are actually, so this is actually the way that like modern era textual criticism is being done is with these language models that operate on tracing readings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And how certain readings are related to one another, which has allowed us to do things like look at fourth century manuscripts and actually see that their readings come hundreds of years earlier in other manuscripts that we have in collections.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So one of the clearest examples of this is there's a manuscript in the fourth century called Codex Vaticanus because it happens to be in the Vatican right now. And there is a manuscript from the second century which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it's P75, which is a papyrus 75, but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar. And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they're fourth century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus, are actually second century in their origination.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And a large part of this is because of these like models that the computers got involved in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. How close is it? In some ways, it's very close, and in other ways, it's not. So that's the story of Upnupishtim, which is kind of a side story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh realizes his mortality and he's trying to find eternal life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And there's this guy, Upnupishtim, who he runs into, who tells him this story of the gods gifted him with eternal life because he saved all the animals on a boat. And so there are actually parallels between that and say the Genesis 6 Noah arc story in like making a big boat, putting all the animals on it, and then they get off and they make a sacrifice to, in his case, the gods in the Bible God.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And I think what you're looking at there is probably a cultural remembrance of something that did take place. And so you have these adjacent cultures who they're existing within this framework of the ancient Near East. And you're seeing these kind of parallel echoes of things that actually did happen. So there are definite parallels.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But I think sometimes people look at those and they overplay that. So one of the examples I often give is Advil and arsenic both come in pill form and have an A on the bottle. But it's not the similarities that matter in that case, it's the differences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so if you look at the differences, there are significant differences in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upnupishtim story and the Genesis 6 story. If for another reason, then the Noah arc story is a very small part of the book of Genesis. And the story of Upnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more stretched out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It has more to do with the theme of what Gilgamesh is doing in his epic. But there are obviously parallels between that because these are both ancient Near Eastern stories and they're products of their day. In the same way that I think you see parallels between some of the New Testament gospels and other ancient Greco-Roman biography.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
in that these are products of ancient history, and so they're gonna look like other ancient historical writings that kind of parallel around that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, and I think that there's an aspect of like a message that's trying to be communicated. I mean we are modern people of the Enlightenment. So we almost have a perspective where we want something to be very like exhaustive that ancient writers didn't have those same sort of conventions. So they're going to capitalize on certain –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
ideas and concepts for the purpose of, when someone tells you a story, you don't memorize everything. You go to university, you write notes, right? The people who are writing everything the professor is saying word for word, probably not the people who are gonna remember what the professor says as well as the people who write down the main things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And when you write down the main things, the main points, without all of the other stuff that kind of is just – it's icing, then you get the main idea more – ancient writers talk about this. So there's a guy named Quintilian who exists in the first century B.C. And there's this series of writings that we call – pro-gymnasmata, which are basically like, how do you do good writing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He's training people, maybe even individuals like Plutarch, who is one of the best known ancient biographers. And saying, like, it's just as important what you don't say as to what you do say. Because you don't want to, A, writing in the ancient world is expensive, really expensive. And B, you want to make sure that... your audience is actually getting the message that you want to convey.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so this is something that when you read like German scholars, biblical scholars of the 19th and 20th century, or even prior to that, like 18th, 19th century, They look at the Gospels and they're like, this isn't biography because it's not capitalizing on Jesus' childhood. And we all know that good biographies tell about your childhood and psychologize and these sorts of things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Whereas if you look at some of these ancient writers who are talking about how you should write biography, they say if there's nothing in their childhood that's that significant— Don't write it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It's going to distract from... Like if there is something, say like Jesus's birth or Luke tells a story when he's 12 of Jesus, when he goes with Mary and Joseph and Mary and Joseph lose the son of God and they start going home without him. And they're like, where's Jesus? And they got to go back to Jerusalem. That's a significant story.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so it appears that Luke includes it because there's a significant reason to include that. But they wouldn't have had any... problem with leaving out large portions of someone's life if it didn't contribute to what the ultimate goal of telling that person's life was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Yeah. These are documents. Well, in terms of the Bible, like as someone who identifies as a Christian, I would say that these are the Bible is written for you, but it wasn't written to you. It had a completely different original audience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But you should do your best at figuring out who it was written to and how that made a difference to them, because then the application is going to come out even clearer for you. And that should be ultimately the goal of everyone who's looking at ancient documents. Who was the original audience? How would they have understood it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because you can read all sorts of things because of your modern conventions into what someone is talking about in the ancient world and completely bypass what they're actually trying to convey in their intention.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He's fun. I'm not convinced he could read Sumerian either. Really? Yeah. I think he was bullshitting. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He takes so many liberties with the stuff he's commenting on that I have a hard time getting my head around.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Is that what it is? Yeah, I think to a certain degree. I mean, even something like Nibiru is not a Sumerian word. It's an Akkadian word. But he makes a big deal about it being related to Sumerian. And it is a word that appears within Akkadian language.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Akkadian is just after. So it exists kind of in a crossover where Sumerian predates Akkadian, but Akkadian develops alongside. And then, you know, as cultures like the Assyrians come into power and kind of subvert the Sumerians.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And then Akkadian is when? There's some overlap, but it develops into a language like just after, like the rise. And Akkadian develops into like, it has stages. And then you have like Babylonian, Proto-Babylonian, Persian, Old Persian, Elamite as we looked at.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Or at least that we figured out that looks like writing. Yeah. I'm really hoping to go to Gobekli Tepe. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. I mean, I'm not an archaeologist. I have friends who are archaeologists. And I think it's... Archaeology is tricky because so much of archaeology is dependent on governments and institutions and funding. That getting mad at archaeologists for not excavating is kind of like getting mad at construction workers for not fixing your potholes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Where it's like, yeah, they're kind of doing the last stage. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly incentive by the Turkish government to want to capitalize on that being a tourist destination. And... you really need to safeguard archeological excavations because otherwise it's being compromised and like pillaging and stuff like that. It happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I mean, when I was in Egypt two summers ago and you go to the Valley of the Kings, they've got security cameras up everywhere. Because there are tombs there that we still haven't discovered. And so they're like, we don't want people digging around in here looking for.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Like there's a thousand years between the pyramids being built and Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings. Yeah. A thousand years. Yeah. Nuts. It's so crazy. Egypt is one of the wildest places you'll ever go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And you're like, what? I can't get paint to stay on my wall for 10 years. And it's almost exclusively because of the climate. And it got buried in sand. But it's so wild. So wild.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Of the percentage of what we know that happened in Egyptian history, 1% has been excavated in terms of what we can actually pull out of the ground and look at artifacts. So there's whole eras of pharaohs that we don't know where they're buried. Even when Tutankhamen was discovered, he was kind of a footnote in the pharaohs that we knew about at that time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And we didn't know he was, you know, as extravagant, as rich as, you know, until we discovered his actual tomb. A lot of people at that time didn't even think it was, he was worth looking into because we have these lists of pharaohs. And the thing with the pharaohs is that they're always trying to, the next pharaoh is always trying to prove that he's the better one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And this is why you go to Egypt and you find statues of Ramses everywhere. And part of it was because Ramses, I think it was Ramses II, was he commissioned so many statues of himself. Because he's like, oh, I'm the best. I'm the greatest. And what they actually, they couldn't keep up with the commissioning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they started actually rubbing off the names of previous pharaohs on statues and just putting Ramses on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Wow. Because he was just, so you go like... from the top of Egypt to the bottom of Egypt and you're going to find statues of Ramses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Right, but that's a mark that just doesn't even make sense. There's something to that. I mean, if you think you're a god, and you have this whole kind of worldview perspective and theology that you need to make something and bear yourself with all this crap because that's going to make a difference in your afterlife, then you're going to go big rather than going home, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
the perceptions of people in the ancient world are just so different. We got it so good right now. Like longevity, health, food is just on a completely different scale. And so the conventions of needing to make sure that, especially if you're like the richest guy around, that you tick off all the boxes
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Because you know you're going to die and you're probably going to die sooner than you want to, sooner rather than later. And you have this whole perception of, well, you know, if I bury myself with all this stuff and maybe even some of the people, we're just going to kill them and include them too. Because they're going to help me out. That's going to help me out in the afterlife.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, of course you do. You can't just do it by yourself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I don't know. I'm not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist necessarily, but he was, I think that was what, like 4,000 years ago? We only really have a tiny little statue of him. We don't actually have that much about him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, I think even just looking at the Sphinx, you can tell that no matter what your perspective is, you should entertain the idea at minimum that the head was built later.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Have you seen some of the restoration stuff that Saddam Hussein did in Iraq? No. Jamie, you got to pull up the ziggurat at Ur.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So if you look at that picture over there, this is 1932 and 2022. That's what he did is he basically tried to rebuild this entire thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it's amazing. I am trying hard to get to Iraq because I want to see this thing. Don't die. Yeah. Don't die, dude.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, the Sphinx. Even when I was in Egypt, they were doing some work in like…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, they're talking about putting encasing stones on the pyramid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Oh, so much of it is under sand for so long. Like, the temple of... the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut was mostly under sand for a long, long time. Wow. Before they, like, uncovered it. And fortunately, like, the aridness of Egypt... preserves things like crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
trying to do and how did he approach you yeah so he's friends or I should say was friends he was friends with Billy they live in the same neighborhood so it's actually become really it's become pretty rough for him so he released a video yesterday which I think people should go and check out where he kind of gives his perspective he's been friends with Billy for years he was at Billy's wedding Billy had 15 people at his wedding Mark was one of them
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Numbers are tricky in ancient languages because – It's not entirely clear whether numbers are meant to be representational.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, you have that and you have the Sumerian king lists, which have people living hundreds and thousands of years too. And I mean, there are some interesting academic articles on like the probability of the numbers that come up in those. Because we have a base 10 counting system because we count our fingers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Ancient Near Eastern cultures like the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, they had a base 12 counting system because they would count each hinge or whatever you call these, like spaces, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Marc Thiessen Yeah, the joints. That's what I was looking for. Trevor Burrus Yeah. And so that's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 365 days in a year. Like this comes from the Mesopotamian counting conventions. And you look at some of these lists and they're operational and all divisible by like 12 and 60. And you're like, what's going on here?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So not all of them, but enough of them where it's statistically impossible. And- I don't totally know what to make of those things because you do have the genealogies. I believe it's Genesis chapter 4 and Genesis chapter 11 where they're all divisible by these types of numbers that were very common in the ancient Near East. They're not random.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Whereas if you look at the genealogies later in like Chronicles and Kings of the ages of the Israelite kings, they're random. And so it's just like what do we do with that? Because numbers are also far more – representational, which is why we see numbers like 12 and 40 and seven come up in the Bible, but also other ancient Near Eastern literature.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Like there are certain numbers in Egyptian society that also were seen as like perfect numbers or like numbers that you wanted to incorporate. So-
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And there are different timekeeping conventions depending on society. Like ancient Jews had a different timekeeping convention than ancient Romans. Yeah. And so that's why you see like in Genesis chapter one, it talks about there being evening and there being morning is because, well, Jews today, right? You start the Sabbath on sundown the day before, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So that's why it's because there's different cycles. And so we go on a 24-hour time system. But ancient Jews had a different convention of that. Ancient Romans had a different convention of that. Ancient, you know, Mesopotamian cultures had their own kind of conventions about these things. And calendars were all over the place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they live in this community in Florida. Their sons are friends. Their wives would hang out. And Mark told me, he's like, I've been hearing Billy say, you know, he wants to debate. Nobody will debate him for years. And so as far as I think Mark was concerned, he was giving Billy the opportunity that Billy had told a lot of people he wanted. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You know, when you get to the Julian calendar and they're like, we got to standardize this thing because everybody's operating on a different, you know, the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar. Yeah. Ancient timekeeping is very inexact and very messy. And so you kind of got to take certain things with a grain of salt in terms of that. But yeah, ancient calendars, I don't even know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I know that actually, talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the group in Qumran, they were a sectarian group of Jews. who believed that the Jews in Jerusalem had basically capitulated and were not holy enough. And part of their reasoning is that they believe they have a perfect calendar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so they use a different calendar that doesn't have to do things like incorporate an extra month every certain number of years because their thing is not perfect. And part of their reasoning as to why they're like the chosen is that they have a timekeeping system that they say is perfect.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
This is why solstices are so key in like most of human history. It's because you got to figure out like what's a marker point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Right. How did you guys nail that? Yeah, I mean, just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I mean, there have been a lot of things that have been lost. We still, as far as I'm aware, don't know how the Romans made their concrete. Roman concrete is like this thing that survives. They were able to make domes out of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so this was set up in that Mark and Billy have been talking. They've been on each other's podcasts in the past, and they've been friends, but more like business colleagues. Like Mark has come out and said – I hadn't really gone into the stuff he'd said about Christianity or ancient religions or whatever that much. Mark is a he's a Christian. He has like a public profession of faith.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
This whole thing was populated. Yeah, that's crazy, the ground-penetrating radar stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that's why you see, I mean, the literary comparison of ancient Near Eastern origin stories is like a really interesting thing to do. Because when you look at something like the Enuma Elish, which was the Babylonian creation story, and then you look at something like Genesis chapter one, there are obvious crossovers with, like I said before, these ancient Near Eastern conventions. Mm-hmm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Mm-hmm. Where some gods fight against other gods and the world around us that we see and like human beings are the end result of this battle. And so they would read this on every Babylonian new year. And one of the main themes was basically that like, it's all chance. It's all a random mistake.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And he him and Billy had talked about the fact that they wanted to talk about like faith stuff and some of their differences. And that that Mark was kind of prepping for this and his media manager, Anton. had sent him some of my stuff and said, like, Wes has done some stuff on some things that Billy has talked about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You were created without purpose and intention because Tiamat gets destroyed and she's the God that you know you come from. And then you read Genesis chapter one and it says, in the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth. And he makes it good. And there's this idea that like that's countercultural in the idea that the Babylonians did not think that the world was good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that like at every – at the end of every refrain, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. And then it's very good at the end. And that humanity in particular is created in the image of God. Like that's a very – not just like kings, which a lot of ancient Near Eastern cultures believed that kings were created in the image of God, but that humanity in general is created in the image of God.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And this idea of the Imago Dei, that you're – that's why you're different. Like why are you different from all the animals? Because you're given something that exemplifies humanity. of a unique quality, and then the ancient Near Eastern cultures that believe that the planets are gods and that the sea is a god.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Genesis chapter one looks at that, and it subverts the expectations of the day in getting to this ultimate question of, why are we here? what are we supposed to do while we're here and how do we get out of here? And it says that, no, there's purpose, there's meaning, there's intention. And actually a lot of the things that you worship, it's pretty stupid because God created them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I mean, the Enuma Leash is pretty old. There are a number of different like variations. The problem is that we're largely relying on like our complete copies are coming in languages like Akkadian where the ones in Sumerian are very fragmentary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So like even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the copy that we have that kind of is the final, if you go and you read a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's going to be the one from an Akkadian from the library of Ashurbanipal. But the earlier versions in Sumerian don't even have the flood story in them. Really? Yeah. And they're more pieced together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And we actually do have another flood story in the Atrasis, which appears to have been influenced. The Epic of Gilgamesh story is influenced by the Atrasis. But I don't know. In terms of like written language, I guess it's the Enuma Elish. I wouldn't actually know what like the oldest, oldest one is. But you get a lot of these origin stories and they have these themes. We see it in the Bible too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
The ancient Near Eastern cultures were very preoccupied with chaos and order. And so it's all about kind of creating order out of the chaos of the world. And that's where I think you do see the parallels.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And, you know, maybe you should look up some of this stuff, you know, read into it. And Mark, very last minute, was like, well, I feel inadequate. Do you think I could just ask Wes? And so he DM me on Instagram and just kind of laid this out like, hey, I'm going to have Billy in my studio in 24 hours. I can tell him you're coming, can tell him who you are. I can like give him your background.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, yeah. And establishing chaos and certain things being representational of chaos within the created order. Like the Bible included, but a lot of other ancient cultures saw things like the ocean. As the embodiment of unpredictability and chaos. And so that's why you have sea monsters are this very common depiction. The Leviathan in Job, which is this, you know, sea monster.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it's representational in a way of because it appears actually in Babylonian literature to the Leviathan. Yeah. And it's it's encompassing chaos in the world. And the point of God bringing it up to Job in the book of Job is like God has the ability to tame this thing. And even in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, it says that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no sea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it's not because, you know, I had a friend who is Australian and we were kind of working through translating sections of Revelation. And he's like, hold on, there will be no sea. It's like, I'm Australian. I love the sea. But the point of that, though, is not necessarily that like the body of water is not going to exist. It's that the ocean, the sea exists. is so unpredictable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You go out there and storms can come out of nowhere and you die. And so there are these motifs that are representational in the ancient world. And we see a lot of those in these creation stories. So would it be that the dangers of the sea would no longer exist? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So the sea kind of working as an analogy of that which is unpredictable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And actually, there's a lot of concepts of the realm of the dead being in the sea that we see throughout this literature. If you read the book of Jonah... there's this kind of stylistic, which you miss when you read it in the English, but it's very apparent in the Hebrew, where Noah keeps going down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He goes down from his town to the dock, and then he goes down into the boat, and then he goes down into, you know, the... inside of the boat and then the storm happens and then they throw him overboard down into the sea and down into the fish. And he eventually the fish takes him down into the depths of the sea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And when Jonah prays, he says, I cry out from the depths of shale, which is the realm of the dead. So there is actually a form of Jewish interpretation where it argues that Jonah actually died and was resurrected when he was spit up by the fish.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it could be because in the Gospels, Jesus says all the people are following him and they keep asking him for miracles because they're like, we saw you do miracles, do more miracles for us. You know, come on, do a trick, do a trick, Jesus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And Jesus says, the only miracle you're going to get is the sign of Jonah, that just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, I will be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights, you know, prediction of his own death and resurrection.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But there is an argument within rabbinical literature that when Jonah says that he's crying out from the depths of Sheol, it's because he's actually dead. And that's one interpretation. But another interpretation could just be that he saw and understood as a person of his day the depths of the ocean as where the dead people ended up anyways.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Like your soul goes down into the chaos and the disorder of Sheol, which is the realm of the dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Not that I know of. I mean, Jews would definitely—I mean, really ancient Jewish conventions have— Burial you would just bury someone in the earth and then by the time you got to Jesus's day You had like family tombs and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But would you be willing to come? And so that's what I did. And so that's how it got set up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Not normal stuff. You just don't want to crawl in a cave?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. I mean, burial conventions change over time. The ways that they're burying, like, in the ancient Israelite days are very different in the conventions than when you get to Jesus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I got to stay in my lane. I ultimately would be an advocate for intelligent design, where I would say that God purposefully created humanity in a way, you had Steven Meyer on, right? Yeah. So, I mean, he's one of those guys who talks about kind of the issues that he sees with evolution. And I think I have some of those issues too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
No, he'd been given all of the prerequisites. Like he knew we're going to go over some of his stuff that he'd said about Christianity, that I was going to come in, who I was, what my name was, some of my background, and that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and rebutting some of the things that he said.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
My friend, Jonathan McClatchy is a biologist and he does some really great presentations on the ways that he sees kind of the intricacies of new Dorian evolution is not quite explaining some of what's going on with evolution. things like the fossil record and some of the gaps that we have in there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
When you talk about early hominids, I mean, ultimately, I think that there are aspects of the fact that there are ancient cultures, which, I mean, humanity obviously looks very different today than it did if we're going tens of thousands of years ago. And so I think that there's a different kind of convention in understanding. But ultimately, I would ascribe to there being an original Adam and Eve
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that those are our like, if you want to call them like our first parents kind of thing. But there are other Christians who I would disagree with, but I think have interesting articulations of that in terms of theistic evolution. I disagree with them, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility to find explanations. I don't think the Bible is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
is trying to explain how people came into existence in the same way that maybe we want it to. And a lot of people read the origin stories in Genesis as a scientific textbook. And I think ultimately that misses the point of what Genesis is trying to say. This goes back to what we were talking about with like, how would have the original audience understood this? When they read Genesis chapter one,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Are they looking at that as an exact prescription of what God did? I mean, in some ways, maybe, but in other ways, they could see that as this like counter-apologetic to the other ancient Near Eastern stories, like I explained. So I just think we need to be careful when we're looking at, or even like counting up the genealogies and coming up with how old the earth is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I think that might be missing the forest for the trees. in what we're actually looking at when we look at ancient documents and how we're trying to interpret them. But it is a big question, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So he, you didn't watch the three hour live stream that he did, did you? I watched chunks of it. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. And I mean, I think we get that in history, too, whereas we have these kind of what we think are established conventions. And all of a sudden we discover something and it like completely overthrows the ideas that we have. Like Clovis first. Yeah. Or go back. Yeah. Or actually good. Good segue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I make papyri facsimiles. Oh, my description is a little bit wonky here. I'm going to fix that. So you were talking about like what is our oldest manuscript evidence. So this guy is P52, John Ryland's 457. So that's a genuine Egyptian papyri that I made. I cut it out for you. And then I transcribed the text on – That manuscript.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament, this manuscript that most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus Egypt is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one. And that contains John 18, where Jesus is on trial before Pilate. And yeah, so that's the one that's in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, so I cut that out on the papyri with a scalpel, and then I transcribed the text on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So unfortunately, Billy there says he had no idea going in. And I mean, as Mark said in his video that he released yesterday, I mean, that's poundly false. He knew what it was going to be, who was going to be involved, and even some of the things that we would be talking about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I know. For real, nerded out. This is a real nerding out of... So that's someone else's facsimile, which is not as good as the one I made.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yours is better. And where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who follows... the truth who is following the truth follows me and on the back has the words of Pilate saying what is truth and But so part of my research, so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was because of a guy named C.H.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Bauer that the Gospel of John was second century. And so he had this, he was a student of Hegel. Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic? So you have like a thesis, synthesis, and antithesis. So Hegel is... had this philosophical theory and his student Bauer takes that and he incorporates this into history. And he says, you know, the earliest gospel, Mark, has this very Jewish Jesus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And then the later gospels have a very, like the last of what I call the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus. And so he says, based on this, John is the last, last written one. And it combines these two where you get a very human and a very divine Jesus together. And so based on this, he says that John has to be second century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, we discover this guy. C.H. Roberts is, you know, literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away. And he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides, which is almost exclusively a Christian convention. Because in the ancient world, they used scrolls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And the Christians, for reasons we're not entirely clear on, they start to make codices, books. And so they write on both sides. And so he says, OK, this is written on both sides. It's probably a Christian manuscript. So he sends it off to the leading paleographers or guys who date manuscripts. And they all say this is the beginning of the second century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so there's still debate about the dating of this, but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably second century, potentially the beginning of the second century, which means that this is found in Egypt. John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So it has to be written by John, spread around, find its way to Egypt, be copied, and then end up in this manuscript, which means that at minimum, you've already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century comfortably and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these events.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so all of the literature up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the Gospel of John gets totally rewritten. And it's because of that guy. And because of my academic work where I was telling you like in paratextual features, when we look at these tiny manuscripts and you figure out, okay, well, what does that look like on the page? I also made you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So this is, I use two different variations of papyri. So you have there where P52 would have been on the page and based on the, it's called codecological conventions, the spacings of the words and the way that the size of the margin that we can see where it would have been on the page and how big the page would have actually been. So this is like a reconstruction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So this is, this is the kind of work that I do in terms of trying to figure out, okay, you have these fragments, how big would have this codex actually been? How big would have the document been? And then, um, then you compare and you contrast them to say like, uh, non-Christian literature, like Thucydides or Tacitus or Pliny or Cicero or, um, Cassiodio, those kinds of guys.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And look at the differences between how these documents would have been put together and written in their day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
You know what's wild is when you actually get the chance, which I have a number of times, to actually handle the original documents.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
No. You know why? We used to do that, but actually the oils in your hands are more abrasive than latex or even cloth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
No, sorry. I said that wrong. They're less abrasive. So it used to be that you always had to handle things with, you know, gloves. And nowadays we don't do that anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. That's got to feel bizarre. I was at the, um, two summers ago, I was at the university of, uh, uh, And I was looking at a manuscript called P1 or Poxy 2, 1.2. And it's a beginning of the third century copy of the first page of Matthew's gospel. And when I requested access to it, they told me that the last person to request it was
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
was when Pope John Paul II came and visited the States and they pulled it out for him. So on the like, you know, the library when you used to like have to punch your name, write your name on the cards. Yeah. If there was a card. Yeah, that guy. So I made a facsimile of that one too. And that one is the, that's the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew's gospel. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Actually, you know what, Jamie, if you go up to the search bar and put CSNTM, those letters, csntm.org. So this is the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. So if you click Digital Manuscript Collection, So they go around the world and they try to digitize all the existing New Testament manuscripts to preserve them. And so you can actually see there on the side, you can click.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, I want to look at a papyri and you can go the different conventions of the date or the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So ideally, you always want to go look at the original. But because of organizations like CSNTM, which is actually in Dallas, people like me don't have to go to Europe where a lot of these manuscripts are housed. We can look at them. And because these are such high grade that you can figure these things out. So actually –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
A guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that and he actually figured out that there was a prominent manuscript, P50, which is a forgery. And so he used that based on like looking at the digital. Yeah, he filled in the gaps within the reps And saw that the words didn't match up when you fill in the gaps.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it wasn't a debate in one sense. It wasn't. We didn't do opening statements and cross-examination and rebuttal. It really was a conversation. And it only kind of turned into a debate in the sense that Billy, I think, got caught out, and so the things that were talked about kind of showed that he needed to go on the offense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so when he's transcribing the text, he's like, wait a minute, I don't think that word fits in there. And based on that, he's like, yeah, that's a forgery. Because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is, these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri. Someone gets it from like the black market antiquities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, right there. So P50. So if you fill in these holes, they're called lacunas. The words, a lot of the words don't fit. So someone's come along and they've like written, done a really good job because it fooled scholars. And they've written in the text, but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I have no idea what to think of the Voynich manuscript. But it's Middle Ages. Yeah. It's just a weird one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I don't know. They must have been a rich schizophrenic person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So a lot of the languages, because he was a linguist, a lot of the languages are based on existing languages.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, like Elvish and Dwarvish. They're all based on ancient Norse or Old English. So he would take those languages and he'd actually... I mean, if there's anyone who's the best at world building, you can learn Elvish. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I mean, he was a genius. Guys like him and even Lewis, they were friends. Oh, really? C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Really? Yeah, yeah. Tolkien played a big part in Lewis's conversion because Tolkien was Catholic. Ah. And I think Lewis was Irish and so he couldn't quite become a Catholic, but he became a Protestant Anglican. But yeah, they were the Inkling Society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
They would meet in Oxford at the, oh, what's the pub called? People are going to listen to this and get mad at me because there's something in Childs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, right. And they would meet and talk. They were called the Inkling Society. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Eagle and Child. Yeah, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, it's funny when you read how Tolkien really didn't like Lewis's stuff because he said it was way too straightforward. He's like, you got a Jesus lion? Good one. Like nobody, no, you're not beating around the bush on anything when you got a literal Jesus who's sacrificed. Come on. Rises from the dead. What are you doing here?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Apparently the guy who wrote Dune sent a copy to Tolkien. Before he published it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He sent it back and said, like, I got nothing good to say, so I'm going to say nothing at all. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Well, he was wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
We definitely lose our sense of awe when we can't see kind of ourselves in the grand scheme of the universe. Yeah. And you're right. When you go somewhere where there's no light pollution, you look up at the sky, it's like... Even not at somewhere like the Keck Observatory where you can get a crazy view of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
When you just go out in the country and look up and you're like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, I always say that when people ask me about, you know, the miracles in the Bible. And I say, well, you know, if the first miracle happened, if everything, you know, nothing became everything, then, you know, Jesus turning water into wine. That's an easy one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, I mean, I think there's an inconsistency there. And you do see when the Big Bang is first hypothesized that there are individuals who are uncomfortable with that sounding like in the beginning. Because before that, the idea was that the universe was eternal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And if you propose a point in time where everything starts to exist, well, that for, and you see some of these people are pushing back on it. They say things like, well, that sounds too religious. That sounds like a beginning point in time. And at that point, if there's a Big Bang, you have to figure out, OK, well, what's the Big Banger?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, so I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were missionaries. So I was born in Pakistan and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East with my parents working in Amman, Jordan. And then we came back from the Middle East when I was pretty young. And so I grew up in this very diverse home in the sense that my mom was a missionary kid who grew up in India.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And I mean, that's ultimately it's a metaphysical religious question. How did that thing get kicked off?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Is this like Lawrence Krauss having a definition for nothing? I don't know. It's not nothing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
In theology, it's often described as the difference between understanding and comprehension, which my wife tells me are synonyms, and that's nonsense. But the idea is like, you can understand eternity as a long point in time. You can comprehend it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
I can comprehend. Like, it's like, that's a lot of water. But when you start talking about like tens of thousands of gallons, I'm like, lost me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, I think that's why you see natural materialism being woefully inadequate, to really explain the ultimate worldview questions that we have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so we had a lot of worldview kind of perspectives around represented in our home. Like I often say, we had the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the Quran on the shelf. Yeah. And I think, you know, that always, although my parents were never overt with this kind of stuff, they always had the perspective that, you know, we're Christians.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, I mean, that is kind of the crazy thing about Christianity, where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who's walking around first century Roman-occupied Judea. He's making some pretty audacious claims, claims to be God himself. And then he predicts his own death and resurrection. And then his disciples... They think it's over. They're like, he's dead. We're done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And then they go from 11 scared men, because Judas commits suicide, scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple hundred years because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected. Right. Like there's something different that goes on there that they're like, this is a miracle, right? Dead people don't usually rise from the dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, I think so as a historian, I do think it is a historical question. You have a guy who objectively lived. He objectively died. And then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And I get that. But we've already talked about the fact that we don't think that the only thing that exists is matter in motion. We as in you and I, right? Like, we believe that there's something else going on in this world that's a little bit crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that to, I think, exclude that, I think excludes something that you're kind of putting blinders on for. And you do have, I mean, you're right in terms of all of these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around. But the gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
We believe that this worldly perspective is true, but hey, this stuff isn't scary. This stuff isn't, you know, off limits. You know, we can investigate these things. And they never said that outright. But I always felt this kind of attitude of that kind of perspective. And, you know, having been exposed in majority Muslim contexts and seeing that kind of stuff and my mom having like a pretty –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they're written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact-checked those things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
No, saw the resurrected Jesus. Yeah, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then he appeared to 400 people all at once. I mean, if we read the Gospel of Luke and Acts, so same author wrote these both documents, he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so these are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus' ministry, who were there, say, at something like the feeding of the 5,000, who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being said. And you go from a bunch of scared guys who – because Jesus wasn't the only messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
There were a number of – individuals both prior to and after Jesus, but they die and the movement dies with them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. I mean, we know a lot about Roman crucifixion. Pretty brutal. And we know that they did their job well. And so, in fact, if you look at, say, very skeptical biblical scholars, like non-believing atheist agnostic Christian scholars, they will say if we can know anything about Jesus, like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the Gospels in terms of the.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
actual historical Jesus of Nazareth, they'll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Because we have not just multiple attested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards. And talk about the fact that you have this guy. And it's mocked within earliest Christianity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So one of our earliest... In fact, not one of. The earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa Menos Graffito. And it's probably from the end of the first century. And it's a... It depicts... an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship, worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified. And right beside it, it says, Alexa Menos worships his God in Greek.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And it's mocking, right? Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low. It was for like slaves. In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, so the story is that they say, we're going to crucify you. And he says, it's like too big of an honor to die like my Lord. And they say, well, we can fix that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Shut your mouth, buddy. Listen, the Romans were pretty brutal. Oh, yeah. But this is why we know. Like we have... It's interesting. We know a lot about crucifixion, but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting. I believe it was Cicero who said that like the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips. I mean, the word excruciating, ex is off of in Latin and cruce, off the cross.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So that's where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be as painful as possible. There was actually a really good article done by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was done by a number of, I think it was in the 70s, early 80s. It was done by a group of biblical scholars and then medical professionals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Good knowledge growing up in India of things like Hinduism and Sikhism and that. And I don't know how much of the kind of testimony stuff you watched of mine, but just before my 12th birthday, I actually was diagnosed with a neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion. And then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out, okay, if we could diagnose how Jesus died, how would he have died? And so they basically came up with this idea that he probably asphyxiated to death. You kind of drown in your own blood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion, I think, are narrow to none. And the chance of him appearing three days later, completely fine. I mean, you don't, if the first thing you do, if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not, you know, peace be with you. It's get me to a hospital, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So this is an interesting question because of the differences between when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics. Because John appears to be using the Roman convention of counting time. And the other Gospels, when they describe the timing, appear to be using the Jewish ones. And actually, if you correlate between the two, they match up pretty well. So...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
The thing is, with Jews, any part of a day was considered a day. So three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day. So if Jesus, and because they count evening and morning, evening to morning is the day, it's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of three 24-hour days, especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Oh, no, he didn't have recovery time. That's what I'm saying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, you have Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The thing with Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Matthew and John are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus. Luke and Mark are not. So they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community. In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that. He's right up front about this. He's like, hey, I'm not an eyewitness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Don't confuse me with an eyewitness. But he actually uses conventional writing. What's the term I'm looking for? He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world. So you have a guy named Quintilian who is basically I mentioned before with the he he's teaching people how to write.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So that's a condition that's called acute transverse myelitis. which I often say is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it, because it's a complicated one. But what happened was that I had the flu and my body's immune system attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord and caused swelling and cut off the communication between my brain and my legs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And he says that if you're going to write biography. You need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't be too far away from the event to be able to write these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And Quintilian, Lucian, and Josephus, who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history, have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel, where he says, I'm interviewing eyewitnesses and I'm writing up an orderly account.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so he's saying, you know, I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day. I'm not an eyewitness. So I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses. And I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates what is being written.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
No, the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as Gnostics. And they're not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were. They're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So if Jesus was crucified, he – so let me back up. If Jesus is God, he cannot have a physical body. So they deny that he actually had a physicality to him. This is sometimes called docetism because docane in Greek means to seem. So these groups that we describe as the docetics – They are denying that Jesus had a physical body. He only seemed to have a physical body.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And they wrote documents later on. So the Gospel of Peter, which comes around in, you know, second, third, fourth centuries, is being written. And it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he's not really physical because he's divine and physical entities don't have physical bodies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So we don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages, which is actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had as the evidence that Jesus was never crucified, the Gospel of Barnabas. Well, the Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century. It paraphrases Dante's Inferno.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
It's not an ancient document. But in the ancient world, nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. The more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Or that you would worship a crucified, like, teacher was just seen as silly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Yeah. And that, like, a god would let himself go through this. Right. Like, what are you talking about? Right. The ancient world didn't really have a problem with supernatural events. There is an ancient writer who mocks Christianity, and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that, of course, Jesus did miracles because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, basically. I'd gone down for a nap. I was camping out in the bathroom floor for flu reasons. And when I woke up about 30 minutes later, I couldn't feel my legs. And so, yeah, that's the acute part of the acute transverse myelitis was that it was basically instantaneous. And that's what made the diagnosis as severe as it was. Like they said, there's a 30% chance. It was like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And he goes, all those Egyptians are magicians anyways. So he just learned the magic when he was a child. So he actually confirms, incidentally, two things, that the narrative in the Gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod, he corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did miracles.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways. And, you know, anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. Yeah, but everybody believed in supernatural events. Like, there's no such thing as... Like a secular work in the ancient world. Even Plutarch, who's one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world, he wrote 90 biographies, of which 60 still survive today. He was a priest of Apollo. So he's already assuming that the gods exist, that crazy things are going to happen in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so... They didn't have a problem with people doing miracles or crazy things happening.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah. So this historiographically is so when we do history, it's an inference to the best explanation. And so there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, OK, there's a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening. So the example I often give is like Jonah being swallowed by the fish.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Like that's low probabilistically, not that it didn't happen, but that like as a historian, we got to like say, well, there's no independent cross-reference sources. You don't have multiple attestation for this particular event. The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature. Because we have Matthew, Mark and Luke and John, these four biographies. There's really only one other person in and around that time that can claim to have that much kind of independent testimony of their life, and it's the Roman Emperor Tiberius. So he also has four biographers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He has Cassio Dio, Suetonius Tacitus, and Vellius Perturculus. And so the Roman emperor, who's the most famous, most powerful person at the time, has a similar amount of historiographical evidence biographically for his, you know, the events of his lifetime that Jesus does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
He was a crucified traveling rabbi. So you have individuals like Josephus mentions him, end of first century, beginning of second century. He was a Jewish Roman writer. Tacitus mentions him, who also wrote about the emperor. And, you know, you have a number of these individuals, Cassius or Suetonius.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But what they're doing mostly is describing what the followers of Christianity are saying about him. So you do have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt in that they're not saying things that they believe happened. They're talking about things that Christians believe happened. And Christians are this very unusual group.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
because they're monotheistic in a world that does not believe in monotheism. And Jews are monotheistic in that time as well. But there was this idea that your religion could be tied to your ethnicity, and that was okay. Like the Jews believe in one God and that's weird, but they're Jews. Whereas the Christians start to convert people who are of all different ethnic backgrounds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
A small percentage of probability that I would recover, but a much higher percentage that there would be a lot of either complete paralysis for the rest of my life or some kind of issues with walking. It's related to diseases like multiple sclerosis in that it's neurological and it affects that kind of thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And so they're like, well, what the heck is going on here? Because why are you saying... So the earliest criticisms of Christianity were actually that it was atheistic. Ah being the negative participle and theos meaning God, right? Because the ancient world was polytheistic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
But more than that, it was what's sometimes referred to as henotheism in that it's not that they believe in many gods. It's that they believe in many gods. And your gods could be my gods, right? Jupiter could be Zeus, just the same god by a different name. And your cities could have gods, right? Osiris and Ra can live in Egypt. And Zeus and Athena can live here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And that doesn't compromise anything. But then the Christians are coming around and they're saying, actually, no, none of those gods exist. If they exist, then they're demons. But they don't actually exist. And this was a big point of persecution within early Christianity is that – A lot of physical events were tied to supernatural events.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
So there's an ancient historian who has this line where he says, if the Nile River is too high in Egypt or the Tiber River is too low in Rome, the cry will ring out the Christians to the lions. Because if you have, say, a famine in Athens and they're going, okay, what's the reason for the famine? Well... Athena's mad because there's a bunch of people running around saying she doesn't exist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Well, it's interesting you say the expert thing because I literally was asked to do it 24 hours beforehand. So I had like the least amount of preparation going into it. And I was okay with that because I'd listen to Billy Carson. Well, and I'd listen to the stuff he'd said.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Okay, well, let's deal with them. Let's get rid of them and that'll solve our issue. So Christians were this very oddball group. Kind of crazy that it wound up taking over the area. Well, that's part of, I think, the argument of, well, how do you explain that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
How do you explain it going from 11 scared disciples in an upper room to being willing to go out and die for the proclamation that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and you saw him and you touched him and you ate with him and, you know, he wasn't a ghost. You actually ate fish with the resurrected Jesus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Yeah, so Constantine is a pagan up until a point in time when he converts. Who educates him? Good question. I don't know in terms of his education. I know he does have some crossover with some prominent Christians later on. He's a sun worshiper. But right before...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
Right before Constantine, you had a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor, who basically had the goal of wiping out Christianity entirely. And so the worst point of persecution was under the Diocletian rule. He actually made it so that if you had to go into the equivalent of your town hall, then you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it onto the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
altar of caesar him right the king and say uh caesar is lord and part of this was that they knew that christians say jesus is lord and christians wouldn't do that so here's how you outed them and if you didn't do this so if you did do it you were getting this given this piece of paper it's called a libelous and a libelous allowed you to buy and sell
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
If you didn't do it, you didn't get a Liblus, which meant that you were not allowed to buy and sell. And so you have this incredible era of persecution where Christians are being like killed and Christian literature in particular is being destroyed because they're hunting it out. So Constantine comes after this and he knows that this is bad for Roman society. And so him and Licinius get together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
They're both ruling the Roman Empire at the time. And in 313, they put out this edict of tolerance. which includes Christianity. So it's called the Edict of Milan, and it decriminalizes Christianity, so it's no longer illegal to be a Christian. What was their motivation? I think they just felt like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
And one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2252 - Wesley Huff
In order to establish peace within the empire, you need to make sure that people aren't fearing you constantly to that degree. And so it wasn't just Christianity that benefited from the Edict of Milan. A number of religious minority groups were benefited from this particular event, but This happens between 313 and 325. Constantine converts. And so he becomes friendly to Christians.