Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Tue, 13 May 2025
YERRR – the guys brought on Christian apologist and Bible expert Wesley Huff to break down faith, philosophy, and help us understand the history of the Bible. He breaks down misquoted verses, the myths about Jesus and his travels, why Christianity split so many times, and why Christmas is NOT a Pagan holiday. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 0:00 start 0:50 Wesley Huff vs Billy Carson in Turkey 3:25 Wesley Huff: Scripture Scholar 6:50 What is the OLDEST Bible? 10:30 Christianity in the earliest days was a fringe movement 13:15 John the Baptist, underrated and unexplained 23:10 Jesus wasn't the only revolutionary messiah 28:38 Misunderstood Mary Magdalene 32:30 Did Jesus ever go to India?? 34:00 Jesus' life was not well documented 40:05 Christians dealing with Biblical discrepancy 51:30 Bible is written FOR you, not TO you 1:04:00 Biblical translation against LGBT 1:12:11 Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation Reasons 1:15:40 Catholic's Reason for the Pope vs Orthodoxy 1:22:36 the removed Biblical apocrypha books 1:31:23 Pagan Myths Debunked 1:37:10 Why did Judas kill Jesus? 1:50:30 are there giants in the Bible? 2:02:21 Hyperbole in the Bible 2:10:15 do Non-Christians go to Heaven? 2:29:25 the misunderstanding of Hell 2:37:10 Babies going to Heaven and God protecting the innocent 2:39:22 an example of God's punishment 2:41:40 Karma, transactions and the Bible 2:48:10 the only sin you won't be forgiven for 2:56:22 What Christians can do that Atheists cannot 3:07:30 the father, son and holy ghost explained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Wesley Huff and what's his expertise in Biblical manuscripts?
Like, fill us in, dude. No, the lawsuit didn't amount to much because there was no credibility to the lawsuit. You can't sue for not liking what...
you you yourself said yes right yeah yeah it's okay but yeah i mean i haven't heard anything from him nor do i necessarily need to i don't be the guy that took down billy carson i don't want that to be my legacy yeah i don't think that's my origin story yeah he's still doing he's still doing all right yeah people still want to believe in aliens they want to believe in all this stuff you believe in the tablets of toad you got a necklace about it
Al is 100% locked in. Al's a flat earther. There's a lot of things that we know.
What do you think about flat earth? I don't know. I mean, I've been in an airplane in the sky, and I think I've seen the curve, but I don't know. You don't know. It's the windows. I'm not a scientist. Exactly. Don't make me say science-y things.
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.
Okay.
So ancient scribal culture.
So I study ancient scribes and how they produce and copy and disseminate manuscripts. So you're testing for efficacy of these ancient scribes. Yeah, different things. So, like, there's a field called textual criticism, which looks at the text of particular documents. Yeah. Because in the ancient world, we don't have any originals. Everything is a copy, no matter what it is.
And even if we found, quote-unquote, an original, I don't know how we'd verify it. Yeah, what makes something an original? The author writes it.
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Chapter 2: What is the oldest Bible and how were ancient scriptures preserved?
Okay.
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?
So all of these books are like independent scrolls. So there's no such thing. We think of a Bible and we think of like the single volume. When do we get that? Fourth century. So we don't get that until the year 300. Yeah, anywhere between. So Constantine decriminalizes Christianity in 313. Got it. The Edict of Milan, the Peace of the Church.
So he makes it so that it's no longer illegal to be a Christian. Yeah. Because before him... there was a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor. And Diocletian in 308 says, you know, I'm going to wipe these people out. So he makes it illegal for Christians to gather. And he beheads all the church leaders. And he like, it's this systematized persecution. So there's persecution before that.
The emperors were kind of loopy. So like Nero is famous for burning Christians in his garden as like the lights. He's nuts. Yeah. He got the lead poisoning, right? Probably. Yeah. I think he was the one who made his horse his general and like made a marble. Not like a few screws loose. So there was persecution, but it wasn't like empire wide until Diocletian. Diocletian comes in.
He's like, yo, we're getting rid of this shit. Yeah. So easy. And he's going to destroy the Christians. That's his kind of motivation. Constantine eventually takes control of the empire and
Now, in his effort to try to destroy them, does he just bolster the strength of the religion?
Which one? Diocletian. Diocletian bolster, like, you mean for Christians? Like, banning a book makes it sell more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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.
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Chapter 3: How did early Christianity develop and what was its cultural context?
Right. So Christianity is this like small fringe movement of a bunch of—and early on they're still associated in the pagan world with the Jews. They're like a group of Jews. They just follow this. So they're thought of as Jews at the time, but like an offset of Judaism.
Yeah. Because they kind of are, right?
But stranger. Because so your religion in the ancient world is largely tied to your ethnicity. Right. And so conversion wasn't unusual. This is interesting. Conversion wasn't unusual in the ancient world. In fact, if you got married and you were like a pagan Roman, it was expected that you would convert to your husband's religion. That's interesting.
Particularly if they had house gods, which was common. Okay. But the Christians and the Jews were unusual in that they just denied everybody else's gods existed.
fire so so actually one of the earliest accusations for christians is that they're atheists they deny the gods so they're accused of being atheists and they're accused of being anti-social yeah yeah yeah yeah okay okay like atheos yeah no god yeah yeah like you guys believe in a thousand gods why would you believe in one yeah and the ancient world is not just polytheistic it's what's called henotheistic okay so you don't just believe there are many gods you believe that there's like hierarchies of gods and actually your gods could be my gods by another name
So like Zeus and Jupiter. Yes. Like that's why the Greeks and the Romans have the similar, if not the same gods by different names. Right. They have like different stories to them. So that's assumed by one another.
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.
Everyone's a god.
Everybody's a god.
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Chapter 4: What role did John the Baptist play in early Christian history?
What, what are you, what are you doing? It's accurate description.
This is what happened. He runneth it back.
Okay. Um, immediate fallout after running it back. Yeah. Who's seeing him?
So the, the disciples run scared. They hide. Because they basically figure, okay, the movement's dead. So Jesus isn't the only messianic movement that happens within this time period. There are guys before him and after him who try to create like revolutions. So after just a short period after Jesus, there's a guy named Simon Bar-Jiora. And he's famous. And then there's Simon Bar-Kokva.
So the Bar-Kokva revolt is the one that kind of launches things that eventually gets Jerusalem destroyed under Titus. who then marches into Jerusalem. He sacked Jerusalem and they destroy the temple. That happens in 70 AD. Was Simon claiming to be the son of God also? No. So that's unusual. Most of these guys are just like military leaders.
So Jesus' messianic claims are kind of unique in that he's doing things that people didn't really expect the Messiah to do or be, in that they're still expecting a military leader. Because... Have you heard of Maccabees? Yeah. First, second, third Maccabees. The Maccabees is the story of Hanukkah. So the Greek... uh, emperor guy, he marches in and he takes over Israel.
And then he does something real bad for the Jews in that he sacrifices a pig on the altar in the temple to Zeus. So all, all bunch of layers of not being kosher. Right. And then, uh, the Simon or not Simon Judas, uh, Judas Maccabeus, Judas the Hammer, he goes in and he kicks them out and he rededicates the temple. That's the story of Hanukkah. Got it. So he's like a military leader in that sense.
So he's seen as not the messianic figure that they're waiting for, but a messianic figure in the sense that he's established, like he's kicked out the bad guys and he's established the kind of unification of the Jewish nation at that point. So they're kind of looking for that again. And Judas Maccabeus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, which is also what Jesus does.
So when Jesus does that, it's kind of a callback. Like, okay. And the people are like, I think we know what's going to happen.
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Chapter 5: Did Jesus travel to India or other locations outside the Bible's accounts?
What were the other things? You have a biblical scholar here right now. He's a historian. He benches 240 for 12 reps.
You're low-balling.
What?
What did you put up there? 285 for five, easy.
315.
315? I've done 404 for one. What? What? Yeah. Body of Christ. Jesus. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How should Christians understand discrepancies in the Bible?
So by the Great Schism, by the time you get to 1517 and Martin Luther... Posts his 95 theses on the castle door in Wittenberg, Germany, and launches the Protestant Reformation. And he didn't want to start a different denomination. That wasn't his purpose. He wanted to reform the church, but the church wasn't willing to get along with that. And so then that created the division.
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.
I mean— It's kind of crazy how that—
You got to talk to the cops. I'm just saying. They got Jesus's house in Cairo. So yeah, I was there. Yeah. So that's the Coptic. So they're, they're another group.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So you got, you got a bunch of different factions, right? But yeah, but I think you have a central core, which we would all adhere to approximately, but then you have differentiations in like theological disagreements. The Protestant reformation was to reform all of that and go back to the primitive church and, The print of church is? Well, like what scripture teaches.
Which would be closest to? I don't think it's necessarily closest to any of them. Like, I don't claim that. It feels kind of orthodox to me. It feels like you don't want to admit it. No, no, I'm not orthodox.
No, this guy is like a diehard orthodox Christian.
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.
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Chapter 7: What are the differences between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches?
I mean, that's the biggest differentiation when the Protestants come around, is they say, Martin Luther's reading the Bible. He's reading the New Testament in Greek, and he's saying, I'm reading this stuff, and I'm looking at the church. I'm seeing a big difference. Yeah. So the church isn't acting in the way that the book is written.
There have been a lot of traditions that have developed that are at minimum non-biblical and at most anti-biblical. Like what's an example of that? Well, Pope Leo, another Pope Leo, starts this process of indulgences. So there's this theological idea called the treasury of merit that you can draw from that's like the holiness of the saints and Mary.
and the copious outgiving of the blood of Christ that you can draw on. And so the Pope Leo in the 16th century says, hey, we need to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica. And so he commissions guys to go out and collect money by selling indulgences.
So you either can get out of purgatory faster, or if you have family members who are stuck in purgatory, you give the church money, they'll get so many years off purgatory. Yeah. This is still a thing, by the way.
Did that ever happen in the Orthodox Church? Do you know if they ever did anything like that?
They never did anything like that. Wow, it's fascinating.
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.
Yeah. Orthodox friends. So...
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
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Chapter 8: Is Christmas a pagan holiday and what myths surround Biblical stories?
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?
Yeah.
Yeah.
man you can't just find some jewish people see if they got some stick like floating around you know yeah start digging them up no no that's not how this works okay you know about dowries right
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
God. Yeah, the Canaanites. The Canaanites. Wow.
Why did he want the foreskins? What did that symbolize?
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.
Inspired by someone out there. Shout out him. Even though it might be illegal. Is it illegal in Christianity? It's frowned upon.
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