Catholic REVIEWS Wes Huff Vs Billy Carson DEABTE ｜ Michael Knowles
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
179.89452
Summary
Wes Huff and Billy Carson debate whether or not Jesus was crucified in the Bible. According to the Sinai Bible, the Bible predates the King James Version of the Bible, which came much later, and predates Christianity itself.
Transcript
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And I like debates because they will present two sides of an argument.
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And often in debates, even in debates in which I participate, often both sides have something to contribute.
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Usually one side is a little closer to the truth than the other.
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But at least you learn a little bit from both sides.
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Actually, sometimes there are debates where one side is just completely right and the other side has no idea what it's talking about.
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And the former totally destroys, with facts and logic, the latter.
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That is what happened in a debate over the Bible and religion between Wesley Huff and Billy Carson.
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I was not really aware of either of these people before I watched their debate.
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Wes Huff I had heard of before, but I didn't know much about him.
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Everyone kept telling me, you have to watch this debate.
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It's a debate over the Bible, the Christian religion, who God is, what Christianity looks like.
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This was the most thorough drubbing I maybe have ever seen in a debate.
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Are you able to pull up a website with the viewers or listeners or whatever and be able to see that?
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Billy Carson comes in and he makes all sorts of wild claims that Christ, our Lord, was not crucified,
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that God in the Bible is evil, is narcissistic.
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He makes all sorts of wacky claims about angels getting drunk and I don't know, crazy stuff.
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And he says if you look back at the old texts, the earliest texts,
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they prove that Christianity is bunk and that Billy Carson's view is right.
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Take a listen to how Wes Huff examines that claim.
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The statement is according to the Sinai Bible, okay?
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According to the Sinai Bible, Jesus wasn't crucified in that Bible.
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That Bible predates the King James Version of the Bible.
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And the text there actually is about 12,000 to 14,000 differences between the Sinai Bible
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and the King James Version of the Bible, which came much later.
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So he says the Sinai Bible predates the King James Bible.
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Well, I would hope so because the King James Bible is very recent and modern.
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It actually corresponds to the reign of King James, who is a modern king.
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So what is he talking about here, the Sinai Bible?
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I will confess, I've never read the Sinai Bible.
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I'm not a formal classicist or anything like that.
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However, this guy, Wes Huff, apparently does have a lot of ancient languages,
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at least with some working facility under his belt.
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When you refer to the Sinai Bible, would you be referring to Codex Sinaticus?
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That's why I was trying to get some clarifications.
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Because, so you can actually go and see, Codex Sinaticus is at the British Library.
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And the British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript.
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I mean, I can go on right now, Codex Sinaticus, and I can look up the end of,
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you know, say, Matthew 27, where it has Jesus being crucified.
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Are you able to pull up a website with the, like, viewers or listeners or whatever,
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Guys, if you're going to make any claim in public, make sure you've checked your source.
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Certain claims, you don't need to know everything yourself.
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You don't need to be a specialist in ancient languages and devote your entire life to studying
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But if you are going to contradict what has been established wisdom by people in authority
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for millennia and by serious scholars, you need to have the goods.
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And immediately, you see this guy, Billy Carsey, pulls out the phone.
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You say, man, the minute you see someone pull out the phone in a debate, it is not going
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But then he brings up this other thing, Billy Carson.
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These are gospels that were written, gospels, quote unquote.
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These are books that were written much, much later than any of the canonical gospels.
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So in this case, Billy Carson references the gospel of Jesus's wife or the gospel of Barnabas
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Yet again, he clearly has very little familiarity, if any, with the text, as Wes Huff points out.
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Um, the gospel of Barnabas is a really interesting document because it is a known forgery.
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And so that's why I think it's important to get to these sources.
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So it does things like, um, in chapter 92, it, uh, it says that Jesus spent 40 days on Mount Sinai.
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And then he came to the Jordan River and he walked to Jerusalem.
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But Mount Sinai is more than a week's journey away from Jerusalem and neither Mount Sinai nor
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And I think a bigger problem is that the gospel of Barnabas actually paraphrases Dante's Inferno,
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So there's a lot of internal evidences that disqualify the gospel of Barnabas.
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Nevermind the fact that we don't have any evidence of it prior to the 14th century.
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Now we're getting into a text that I actually am familiar with.
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I'm not, I'm no scholar, you know, so I'm, I'm not deeply familiar with many texts, but
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one of them that I have read many times is Dante.
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And so if I were to be reading the gospel of Barnabas as Billy Carson is proposing, and
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I read something that had echoes of Dante, I, I would know that.
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And Wes Huff, who's a real scholar, he clearly knows that and can pull on all sorts of sources.
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This is why it is helpful to have a good general kind of education, a good background knowledge
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so that if some, if some text is ripping off, not just Dante, but I don't know, Shakespeare
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or Milton or Aristotle or whatever, you can know that it can give you a cultural context
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But, but in this case, you don't even need to know that much about Dante.
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So, so to be fooled by it, it means you have to have read it in translation, have no interest
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in the actual source material of it, and, or be totally ignorant of ancient languages.
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But I think if I were going to make a claim that upended established teaching of 2000 years,
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I, I might have the curiosity at least, or maybe even the humility to say, hum, let me
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make sure that I've dotted my T's and crossed my I's here.
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You know, this seems a little bit, it's reckless.
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It's at this point that Wes Huff raises a, a meta historical question.
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It's, it's, it's, he's not just talking about the texts.
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He's not just talking about the claims that Billy Carson is making.
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He's, he's talking about how you even begin to approach texts.
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And he points out that an historian or really anyone who's approaching a text needs to have
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some kind of hermeneutic, some, some method of interpretation that is principled and consistent
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to allow you to even know what you're dealing with.
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So if we're talking about say Codex Sinaiticus, that's in the fourth century.
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Now that is, I would agree with you, Billy, our oldest copy of the Bible in the sense of
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a cover to cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible.
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The problem is that we have individual copies of all four gospels going back hundreds of years
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This is a, an almost complete copy of the gospel of John, um, and it has the crucifixion.
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So papyrus is just the, the, what it's made out of.
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This is not just pie in the sky academic stuff that you need a principle of interpretation here.
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Let's say you're just approaching the Bible the way you would approach the Bible.
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We say, well, the Bible is the inerrant word of God.
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All scripture is inspired by God and it's written down by different men over a long period of time.
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How do you know how many books are in the Bible?
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How do you know that the gospel of Barnabas or whatever doesn't fit into the Bible?
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Well, you know that you can't know that from the Bible itself.
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So you have to, you have to know something about the Bible.
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We know that because the Bible canon was set at the council of Rome and was reaffirmed by later councils.
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Well, we can read about the church in the Bible and we can read about the church outside of the Bible.
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But okay, that's the lens through which I am examining this.
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Here, however, Billy Carson not only doesn't seem to hold to that methodology, he doesn't seem to have any interpretive principle.
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He doesn't seem to have rather any consistent interpretive principle, which he demonstrates when he starts talking about oral traditions in other cultures.
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Then you have the information in the Egyptian book of going forth by day.
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More accounts by people, our ancestors, that have accounts that do not match up with the biblical text.
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And so all of a sudden we're saying that all these cultures, the Aboriginal people, I can go into them as well.
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I've sat, I've gone to a walkabout in the outback.
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In the outback, the Aboriginal elders, same thing.
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This is their verbal hand in our history for thousands of years.
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And I can go around the world and I can come up with all this information from all these eyewitness accounts from people that should be respected, dignified, and shouldn't be scoffed.
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And that we're now saying that all this information that they put forward, all their verbal hand in our history, all their written history, that's got to go to the side because this one text is 1,000% accurate.
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Sure, but so my question is, most of that is oral history, correct?
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The Bible is not oral history in the sense that there's a book.
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I'm not saying nothing comes from oral history.
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But the stories he's talking about are actually just oral history.
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There's no Bible of the Mahamahi tribe, you know, talking about space aliens giving them satellite dishes.
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So when we're engaging with oral history, what methodologies are you using to confirm that the orality is accurate?
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Well, first and foremost, some of these texts or some of these cultures have written down information in caves.
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The Dogon tribe actually have not only written down.
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The question is one of methodological analysis.
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So you have to have a method by which you can find either that something is falsifiable or that there are avenues by which you can show internal and external accuracy of credibility.
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How do you – do you know the – if I use the term verisimilitude, do you know what that term means?
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Tell me how the Dogon tribe saw Sirius B, knew the orbit of Sirius B, a trinary star system, accurately.
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You see the problem here is Billy Carson approaches an event like the crucifixion.
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He takes the historical accounts backing up gospel narratives from people like Tacitus or Suetonius or Josephus.
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Or he takes the 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection.
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He takes all of these accounts to say nothing of the rapid spread of the Christian religion and the enduring power of the church.
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But because Chief Babunga over in some random tribe in Africa tells us that Zeno 17 came down and gave him a neon-colored corncob.
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And he told us that this really happened, so we got to believe that that's obviously true.
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What – you obviously have no consistent principle of interpretation here, especially when you're using these two cases because you're discounting the records that we have pretty good authority for.
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And you're believing any ridiculous story that some guy tells you without any evidence.
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That was one of the most embarrassing moments of the whole debate.
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So now outside of the New Testament, what about the Old Testament?
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They'll say, well, Genesis is just a myth in the same way that Gilgamesh is a myth.
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And actually, they probably, the authors of Genesis, it wasn't God-inspiring writers.
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It was actually just guys, old-timey guys who were ripping off other stories from pagan creation myths.
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A lot of the, in Genesis, a lot of the creation story that comes into Genesis.
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But it's literally almost word for word from the Enum Elish and the seven tablets of creation.
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The Epic of Atrahasis as well is also there in the Old Testament.
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And so we tend to see this copying of ancient tablets, text, and scriptures, even some papyruses, into the biblical text.
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I think a lot of people are saying that this information was written in real time.
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If you ask the average person, they really believe that.
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What is, he's, he's saying that Adam wrote the book of Genesis in the garden?
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What is, what would it mean to be written in real time?
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I don't, I don't know anyone who claims that or who has ever claimed that.
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There are certain words that they utilize that let me know that they copied it from that text.
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Separating the water from the waters of the void, the earth being void.
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That's, that information is literally just copied over.
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So it tells you that somebody saw that and said, let me add it to this.
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They're superficial, you know, divided the waters.
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But we find that in almost every society and culture.
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That's not, that's not a parallel as much as it's just a generality.
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I would say just with all due respect, the parallels linguistically are not there.
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There might be superficial kind of concepts that are there, but they're so superficial
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So he's, Billy Carson says, well, look at all these parallels.
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And then Wes Huff says, well, what are the parallels?
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Yeah, there are lots of a kind of creation, but are they, are they parallel accounts?
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Is one a copy of the other, or is it a harangue against the Babylonian account?
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You sometimes hear the same arguments that Billy Carson is making about Christmas.
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They'll say that Christmas was a pagan holiday, and then the Christians just borrowed it or
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It actually seems as though the pagans were trying to compete with the Christians, like
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in the Feast of the Unconquered Son, or even the Eucharist, you know, the Holy Eucharist,
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which is the center of the Holy Mass, we have accounts from the early second century of Justin
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Martyr writing about the Eucharist and how the Christians considered the Eucharist to
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be a sacrifice on the altar, and how it was not just common bread and wine, but rather
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the true flesh and blood of Christ, drawing on John chapter 6, in which Christ says, my flesh
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is real food and my blood is real drink, and if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of
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Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
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So this was central to Catholic liturgy and to worship.
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But so you have to, just because there are superficial similarities or even more detailed
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similarities, you have to show that which way the copying is going and point out, as Wes
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Huff is pointing out, that it's actually not an invective, one against the other.
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I mean, this goes on for like two hours, but at a certain point, Billy Carson has exhausted
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And Wes Huff the whole time is so polite, but knowledgeable for Spolby.
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He's probably maybe a little bit too nice, but it serves a great rhetorical purpose.
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If you were a king and you stole somebody and you sold them into slavery, they would punish
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But the point that I'm making here, I got to say something before I get out of here.
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So you see, sometimes Wes Huff's camera and mic have been cutting out throughout this debate.
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So he'll cut out and he'll try to get it back on.
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And the other two guys, Billy Carson and the moderator, will just chat during that time.
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So this is one of those moments where Wes Huff's camera has cut out.
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Mental illness has spread throughout the planet Earth like a complete virus.
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So if you know the beginning and the end, you have a certain level of foreknowledge.
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You know what's the ending before the end even occurs.
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Because a genius solves problems before they happen.
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He goes, yeah, and you know, and God, he should have done it better.
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And then the moderator says, no, hey, we got Wes Huff back.
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I watched so few internet debates because often they're not moderated well.
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And actually, this one was not moderated all that well.
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And then he just absolutely destroyed this guy.
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It is the most beautiful dismantling I've probably ever seen in an internet debate.
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This title could be, you know, destroys with facts and logic and hermeneutics and philology