The Michael Knowles Show - Catholic REVIEWS Wes Huff Vs Billy Carson DEABTE ｜ Michael Knowles

00:00:00.000 Did you know that over 85% of grass-fed beef sold in U.S. grocery stores is imported?

00:00:05.240 That's why I buy all my meat from GoodRanchers.com instead.

00:00:08.900 Good Ranchers products are 100% born, raised, and harvested right here in the USA from local family farms.

00:00:14.600 Plus, there's no antibiotics ever, no added hormones, and no seed oils.

00:00:18.820 Just one simple ingredient.

00:00:20.360 That's meat.

00:00:21.280 Best of all, Good Ranchers delivers straight to your door for added convenience.

00:00:24.760 So lock in a secure supply of American meat today.

00:00:26.980 Subscribe now at GoodRanchers.com and get free meat for life and $40 off with code DAILYWIRE.

00:00:32.400 That's $40 off and free meat for life with code DAILYWIRE.

00:00:35.720 Good Ranchers, American meat delivered.

00:00:37.740 I love debates.

00:00:39.080 I like participating in debates.

00:00:40.840 I like watching debates.

00:00:42.540 And I like debates because they will present two sides of an argument.

00:00:47.940 And often in debates, even in debates in which I participate, often both sides have something to contribute.

00:00:55.040 Usually there's a winner.

00:00:56.400 Usually one side is a little closer to the truth than the other.

00:00:59.380 But at least you learn a little bit from both sides.

00:01:03.120 Sometimes that isn't true.

00:01:04.380 Actually, sometimes there are debates where one side is just completely right and the other side has no idea what it's talking about.

00:01:10.620 And the former totally destroys, with facts and logic, the latter.

00:01:15.800 That is what happened in a debate over the Bible and religion between Wesley Huff and Billy Carson.

00:01:23.820 I was not really aware of either of these people before I watched their debate.

00:01:27.300 Wes Huff I had heard of before, but I didn't know much about him.

00:01:30.480 Billy Carson I'd never heard of in my life.

00:01:32.800 Everyone kept telling me, you have to watch this debate.

00:01:34.720 It's a debate over the Bible, the Christian religion, who God is, what Christianity looks like.

00:01:43.060 I said, okay, that interests me.

00:01:45.380 Whatever, I'll take a look.

00:01:46.920 I could not look away.

00:01:49.000 This was the most thorough drubbing I maybe have ever seen in a debate.

00:01:55.700 It's definitely up there.

00:01:57.020 Are you able to pull up a website with the viewers or listeners or whatever and be able to see that?

00:02:03.000 Most of that is oral history, correct?

00:02:06.980 Oh, it's all oral history, even the Bible.

00:02:08.920 Billy Carson comes in and he makes all sorts of wild claims that Christ, our Lord, was not crucified, 0.51

00:02:14.780 that God in the Bible is evil, is narcissistic.

00:02:18.700 He makes all sorts of wacky claims about angels getting drunk and I don't know, crazy stuff. 0.94

00:02:23.760 But he says he's got the goods.

00:02:24.860 He's been talking about this for a long time.

00:02:27.180 And he says if you look back at the old texts, the earliest texts,

00:02:30.980 they prove that Christianity is bunk and that Billy Carson's view is right. 1.00

00:02:35.440 Take a listen to how Wes Huff examines that claim.

00:02:39.540 The statement is according to the Sinai Bible, okay?

00:02:43.720 According to the Sinai Bible, Jesus wasn't crucified in that Bible.

00:02:48.460 That Bible predates the King James Version of the Bible.

00:02:50.920 And the text there actually is about 12,000 to 14,000 differences between the Sinai Bible

00:02:59.400 and the King James Version of the Bible, which came much later.

00:03:02.760 Okay.

00:03:03.380 So he says the Sinai Bible predates the King James Bible.

00:03:06.200 Well, I would hope so because the King James Bible is very recent and modern.

00:03:11.480 It actually corresponds to the reign of King James, who is a modern king.

00:03:17.000 So what is he talking about here, the Sinai Bible?

00:03:19.700 I will confess, I've never read the Sinai Bible.

00:03:23.580 I'm not a formal classicist or anything like that.

00:03:27.660 However, this guy, Wes Huff, apparently does have a lot of ancient languages,

00:03:33.940 at least with some working facility under his belt.

00:03:36.860 Here's how he responded to those claims.

00:03:38.620 When you refer to the Sinai Bible, would you be referring to Codex Sinaticus?

00:03:43.920 Like the codex that comes?

00:03:45.320 Okay.

00:03:46.760 That's why I was trying to get some clarifications.

00:03:49.440 Because, so you can actually go and see, Codex Sinaticus is at the British Library.

00:03:56.200 So you can go and see it.

00:03:57.360 It's on display.

00:03:58.480 And the British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript.

00:04:01.580 I mean, I can go on right now, Codex Sinaticus, and I can look up the end of,

00:04:08.160 you know, say, Matthew 27, where it has Jesus being crucified.

00:04:12.560 Are you able to pull up a website with the, like, viewers or listeners or whatever,

00:04:18.380 be able to see that?

00:04:19.000 Right now, the mixer has the right version.

00:04:21.320 And then the moderator is, well, hold on.

00:04:23.240 Let's see here.

00:04:24.200 This is so beautiful.

00:04:25.640 This is so beautiful.

00:04:26.780 This is just a reminder.

00:04:28.060 Guys, if you're going to make any claim in public, make sure you've checked your source.

00:04:34.760 Certain claims, you don't need to know everything yourself.

00:04:37.000 You don't need to be a specialist in ancient languages and devote your entire life to studying

00:04:40.900 a handful of texts with rigorous expertise.

00:04:43.560 You don't have to do that, okay?

00:04:45.520 But if you are going to contradict what has been established wisdom by people in authority

00:04:51.580 for millennia and by serious scholars, you need to have the goods.

00:04:55.960 And immediately, you see this guy, Billy Carsey, pulls out the phone.

00:04:58.860 You say, man, the minute you see someone pull out the phone in a debate, it is not going

00:05:03.760 well for that guy.

00:05:04.540 But then he brings up this other thing, Billy Carson.

00:05:06.960 He talks about the gospel of Jesus's wife.

00:05:09.800 These are gospels that were written, gospels, quote unquote.

00:05:11.820 These are books that were written much, much later than any of the canonical gospels.

00:05:16.280 So in this case, Billy Carson references the gospel of Jesus's wife or the gospel of Barnabas

00:05:21.940 or the gospel of this or the gospel of that.

00:05:24.200 Yet again, he clearly has very little familiarity, if any, with the text, as Wes Huff points out.

00:05:32.140 Um, the gospel of Barnabas is a really interesting document because it is a known forgery.

00:05:39.720 And so that's why I think it's important to get to these sources.

00:05:42.760 So it does things like, um, in chapter 92, it, uh, it says that Jesus spent 40 days on Mount Sinai.

00:05:52.240 And then he came to the Jordan River and he walked to Jerusalem.

00:05:55.140 But Mount Sinai is more than a week's journey away from Jerusalem and neither Mount Sinai nor

00:06:01.460 Jerusalem are close to the Jordan River.

00:06:03.300 And I think a bigger problem is that the gospel of Barnabas actually paraphrases Dante's Inferno,

00:06:10.080 which was written in 1314.

00:06:12.900 So there's a lot of internal evidences that disqualify the gospel of Barnabas.

00:06:18.620 Nevermind the fact that we don't have any evidence of it prior to the 14th century.

00:06:22.700 Now we're getting into a text that I actually am familiar with.

00:06:25.460 I'm not, I'm no scholar, you know, so I'm, I'm not deeply familiar with many texts, but

00:06:31.800 one of them that I have read many times is Dante.

00:06:34.420 And so if I were to be reading the gospel of Barnabas as Billy Carson is proposing, and

00:06:41.500 I read something that had echoes of Dante, I, I would know that.

00:06:45.500 And Wes Huff, who's a real scholar, he clearly knows that and can pull on all sorts of sources.

00:06:50.620 This is why it is helpful to have a good general kind of education, a good background knowledge

00:06:58.420 so that if some, if some text is ripping off, not just Dante, but I don't know, Shakespeare

00:07:03.300 or Milton or Aristotle or whatever, you can know that it can give you a cultural context

00:07:09.200 here.

00:07:09.520 But, but in this case, you don't even need to know that much about Dante.

00:07:12.360 The text is in Italian and Spanish.

00:07:15.740 So, so to be fooled by it, it means you have to have read it in translation, have no interest

00:07:24.500 in the actual source material of it, and, or be totally ignorant of ancient languages.

00:07:32.000 But I think if I were going to make a claim that upended established teaching of 2000 years,

00:07:39.100 I, I might have the curiosity at least, or maybe even the humility to say, hum, let me

00:07:44.920 make sure that I've dotted my T's and crossed my I's here.

00:07:47.740 You know, this seems a little bit, it's reckless.

00:07:51.140 It's at this point that Wes Huff raises a, a meta historical question.

00:07:57.240 It's, it's, it's, he's not just talking about the texts.

00:08:00.520 He's not just talking about the claims that Billy Carson is making.

00:08:04.280 He's, he's talking about how you even begin to approach texts.

00:08:08.940 And he points out that an historian or really anyone who's approaching a text needs to have

00:08:14.120 some kind of hermeneutic, some, some method of interpretation that is principled and consistent

00:08:21.860 to allow you to even know what you're dealing with.

00:08:24.440 So if we're talking about say Codex Sinaiticus, that's in the fourth century.

00:08:28.540 Now that is, I would agree with you, Billy, our oldest copy of the Bible in the sense of

00:08:33.480 a cover to cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible.

00:08:37.380 The problem is that we have individual copies of all four gospels going back hundreds of years

00:08:44.220 before Codex Sinaiticus.

00:08:45.960 I, I work with this particular manuscript.

00:08:48.520 I can just show the screen right here.

00:08:50.660 This is a, an almost complete copy of the gospel of John, um, and it has the crucifixion.

00:08:57.380 Is that the, by any chance?

00:08:59.020 Yeah.

00:08:59.540 So papyrus is just the, the, what it's made out of.

00:09:03.440 The papyrus is just what it's made out of.

00:09:05.540 This is not just pie in the sky academic stuff that you need a principle of interpretation here.

00:09:10.100 Let's say you're just approaching the Bible the way you would approach the Bible.

00:09:12.440 What is the Bible?

00:09:14.140 We say, well, the Bible is the inerrant word of God.

00:09:17.760 All scripture is inspired by God and it's written down by different men over a long period of time.

00:09:22.780 Okay.

00:09:23.460 How do you know what the Bible is?

00:09:24.820 How do you know how many books are in the Bible?

00:09:26.140 How do you know that the gospel of Barnabas or whatever doesn't fit into the Bible?

00:09:30.340 Well, you know that you can't know that from the Bible itself.

00:09:33.380 So you have to, you have to know something about the Bible.

00:09:35.960 Okay.

00:09:36.140 We know that because the Bible canon was set at the council of Rome and was reaffirmed by later councils.

00:09:41.120 Okay.

00:09:41.440 Well, what does that mean?

00:09:42.260 That means that there's a church.

00:09:43.880 Okay.

00:09:44.380 And what do we know about the church?

00:09:45.720 Well, we can read about the church in the Bible and we can read about the church outside of the Bible.

00:09:49.020 But okay, that's the lens through which I am examining this.

00:09:53.760 Here, however, Billy Carson not only doesn't seem to hold to that methodology, he doesn't seem to have any interpretive principle.

00:10:02.580 He doesn't seem to have rather any consistent interpretive principle, which he demonstrates when he starts talking about oral traditions in other cultures.

00:10:10.420 Then you have the information in the Egyptian book of going forth by day.

00:10:15.420 More accounts by people, our ancestors, that have accounts that do not match up with the biblical text.

00:10:24.580 And so all of a sudden we're saying that all these cultures, the Aboriginal people, I can go into them as well.

00:10:29.660 I've sat, I've gone to a walkabout in the outback.

00:10:33.180 In the outback, the Aboriginal elders, same thing.

00:10:35.620 They were seated here by Pleiadians.

00:10:37.340 This is their verbal hand in our history for thousands of years.

00:10:39.400 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.

00:10:50.860 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.

00:11:01.280 Sure, but so my question is, most of that is oral history, correct?

00:11:08.020 Oh, it's all oral history, even the Bible.

00:11:09.900 The Bible is not oral history in the sense that there's a book.

00:11:12.860 It is written down.

00:11:13.900 I'm not saying nothing comes from oral history.

00:11:15.820 That's not to discount oral history in itself.

00:11:18.260 But the stories he's talking about are actually just oral history.

00:11:21.780 There's no Bible of the Mahamahi tribe, you know, talking about space aliens giving them satellite dishes. 0.99

00:11:26.940 So when we're engaging with oral history, what methodologies are you using to confirm that the orality is accurate?

00:11:36.020 Oh, man.

00:11:37.600 Well, first and foremost, some of these texts or some of these cultures have written down information in caves.

00:11:45.520 You've got cave paintings.

00:11:46.820 The Dogon tribe actually have not only written down.

00:11:50.040 Sure, sure.

00:11:50.500 No, I don't disagree with that.

00:11:52.040 The question is one of historic.

00:11:55.560 Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there.

00:11:56.940 The question is one of methodological analysis.

00:11:59.700 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.

00:12:10.560 So this is what we do with documents.

00:12:13.120 How do you – do you know the – if I use the term verisimilitude, do you know what that term means?

00:12:17.100 No, but I can tell you this.

00:12:19.260 Tell me how the Dogon tribe saw Sirius B, knew the orbit of Sirius B, a trinary star system, accurately. 1.00

00:12:24.520 Okay, so you see the problem.

00:12:27.360 You see the problem here is Billy Carson approaches an event like the crucifixion.

00:12:32.680 He takes the historical accounts backing up gospel narratives from people like Tacitus or Suetonius or Josephus.

00:12:40.200 Or he takes the 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection.

00:12:43.400 He takes all of these accounts to say nothing of the rapid spread of the Christian religion and the enduring power of the church.

00:12:52.640 He says, well, that – forget about that.

00:12:54.520 Yeah, that's not real.

00:12:55.320 There's no evidence for that.

00:12:56.300 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.

00:13:07.360 And he told us that this really happened, so we got to believe that that's obviously true. 0.91

00:13:10.840 What are you talking about?

00:13:12.100 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.

00:13:24.880 And you're believing any ridiculous story that some guy tells you without any evidence.

00:13:29.480 That was really embarrassing. 0.87

00:13:30.540 That was one of the most embarrassing moments of the whole debate.

00:13:33.040 Go to hillsdale.edu slash Knowles.

00:13:35.640 The new year ushers in an abundance of people picking and choosing their resolutions.

00:13:39.180 We all get the opportunity to start the new year fresh, set new goals, tackle new and exciting challenges.

00:13:43.780 So what are you going to do?

00:13:44.840 This year, I encourage you to spend time learning something that you've not learned before.

00:13:49.040 Which is why I'm really excited that Hillsdale College, one of my very favorite institutions in the country,

00:13:54.380 is offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects.

00:14:00.260 You can learn about C.S. Lewis, Genesis, the Constitution, the Roman Republic, the ancient church.

00:14:05.340 I personally recommend Marxism, socialism, and communism, important topics to learn about these days.

00:14:10.260 It is essential that we understand these ideas and historical figures thoroughly so that we can better comprehend their implications and prepare ourselves accordingly.

00:14:17.280 So that we can understand what they were saying, what they were critiquing, and how to fight the really bad parts of it.

00:14:21.760 If you're ready to start off the new year with fresh knowledge and a renewed desire to learn, go to hillsdale.edu slash Knowles.

00:14:28.480 Can it be really yes?

00:14:29.320 It's free.

00:14:29.880 It's easy to get started.

00:14:30.980 It's one of the most respected institutions of higher learning in the country.

00:14:33.920 Hillsdale.edu slash Knowles to start.

00:14:36.780 Hillsdale.edu slash Knowles.

00:14:38.780 So now outside of the New Testament, what about the Old Testament?

00:14:41.660 They'll say, well, Genesis is just a myth in the same way that Gilgamesh is a myth.

00:14:47.780 And actually, they probably, the authors of Genesis, it wasn't God-inspiring writers.

00:14:52.700 It was actually just guys, old-timey guys who were ripping off other stories from pagan creation myths.

00:15:00.000 And this is Billy Carson's argument.

00:15:02.220 See if it persuades you.

00:15:03.440 A lot of the, in Genesis, a lot of the creation story that comes into Genesis.

00:15:09.300 But it's literally almost word for word from the Enum Elish and the seven tablets of creation.

00:15:15.700 The Epic of Atrahasis as well is also there in the Old Testament.

00:15:21.020 And so we tend to see this copying of ancient tablets, text, and scriptures, even some papyruses, into the biblical text.

00:15:31.160 I think a lot of people are saying that this information was written in real time.

00:15:36.420 A lot of people believe that.

00:15:37.380 If you ask the average person, they really believe that.

00:15:40.040 They think it was written in real time.

00:15:41.360 What is, he's, he's saying that Adam wrote the book of Genesis in the garden?

00:15:47.380 What is, what would it mean to be written in real time?

00:15:49.560 I don't, I don't know anyone who claims that or who has ever claimed that.

00:15:53.020 Okay, anyway, he keeps going.

00:15:54.400 There are certain words that they utilize that let me know that they copied it from that text.

00:15:58.560 Like, for example.

00:15:58.900 So what words?

00:15:59.700 Separating the water from the waters of the void, the earth being void.

00:16:03.800 That's, that information is literally just copied over.

00:16:06.280 So it tells you that somebody saw that and said, let me add it to this.

00:16:10.740 Sure.

00:16:10.820 They're superficial, you know, divided the waters.

00:16:13.160 But we find that in almost every society and culture.

00:16:17.060 That's not, that's not a parallel as much as it's just a generality.

00:16:20.260 I would say just with all due respect, the parallels linguistically are not there.

00:16:24.460 There might be superficial kind of concepts that are there, but they're so superficial

00:16:28.840 that we can find them in everything.

00:16:30.540 I love this.

00:16:31.300 I love his point here.

00:16:32.400 So he's, Billy Carson says, well, look at all these parallels.

00:16:35.980 And then Wes Huff says, well, what are the parallels?

00:16:38.080 He's like, well, there's water.

00:16:39.080 Like, yeah, there's water, man.

00:16:40.220 There's water in a lot of stories.

00:16:41.780 You know, you got anything better than that?

00:16:43.600 Well, it's an account of creation.

00:16:45.800 Yeah, there are lots of a kind of creation, but are they, are they parallel accounts?

00:16:49.640 Is one a copy of the other, or is it a harangue against the Babylonian account?

00:16:55.380 You sometimes hear the same arguments that Billy Carson is making about Christmas.

00:16:59.000 They'll say that Christmas was a pagan holiday, and then the Christians just borrowed it or 0.75

00:17:03.080 baptized it or something like that.

00:17:04.420 There's really no evidence for that.

00:17:06.260 It actually seems as though the pagans were trying to compete with the Christians, like 0.99

00:17:10.520 in the Feast of the Unconquered Son, or even the Eucharist, you know, the Holy Eucharist,

00:17:15.000 which is the center of the Holy Mass, we have accounts from the early second century of Justin

00:17:22.040 Martyr writing about the Eucharist and how the Christians considered the Eucharist to

00:17:25.600 be a sacrifice on the altar, and how it was not just common bread and wine, but rather

00:17:30.500 the true flesh and blood of Christ, drawing on John chapter 6, in which Christ says, my flesh

00:17:37.400 is real food and my blood is real drink, and if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of

00:17:41.500 Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

00:17:43.120 So this was central to Catholic liturgy and to worship.

00:17:47.100 But so you have to, just because there are superficial similarities or even more detailed

00:17:53.000 similarities, you have to show that which way the copying is going and point out, as Wes

00:17:59.680 Huff is pointing out, that it's actually not an invective, one against the other.

00:18:02.960 So this thing goes on forever.

00:18:04.720 I mean, this goes on for like two hours, but at a certain point, Billy Carson has exhausted

00:18:10.320 whatever nonsense he was trying to present.

00:18:12.780 And Wes Huff the whole time is so polite, but knowledgeable for Spolby.

00:18:17.140 He's really nice.

00:18:17.800 He's probably maybe a little bit too nice, but it serves a great rhetorical purpose.

00:18:21.880 Carson gets totally exhausted and he taps out.

00:18:24.300 If you were a king and you stole somebody and you sold them into slavery, they would punish

00:18:30.040 you by death. 0.97

00:18:31.160 But you steal somebody else's slave.

00:18:33.100 You can't steal somebody else's slave.

00:18:34.480 That's not a good thing to do, right?

00:18:35.580 But the point that I'm making here, I got to say something before I get out of here.

00:18:41.400 So you see, sometimes Wes Huff's camera and mic have been cutting out throughout this debate.

00:18:45.560 So he'll cut out and he'll try to get it back on.

00:18:48.060 And the other two guys, Billy Carson and the moderator, will just chat during that time.

00:18:52.040 So this is one of those moments where Wes Huff's camera has cut out.

00:18:55.320 He's waiting to cut back in.

00:18:56.880 We're living on an insane asylum.

00:18:59.000 Earth is an absolute insane asylum. 0.73

00:19:00.880 Mental illness has spread throughout the planet Earth like a complete virus. 1.00

00:19:05.580 This entire planet is a mental insane asylum. 0.89

00:19:08.540 And I'm talking everyone.

00:19:10.020 So if you know the beginning and the end, you have a certain level of foreknowledge.

00:19:14.840 You have advanced knowledge that goes beyond.

00:19:17.580 You know what's the ending before the end even occurs.

00:19:20.480 So you set up everything for success.

00:19:23.740 Why?

00:19:24.660 Because a genius solves problems before they happen.

00:19:29.020 And I'm going to drop the mic on that.

00:19:30.700 With some of that, too, I think came back on.

00:19:37.120 I got to get to this meeting.

00:19:38.380 Yeah.

00:19:39.780 So he just rambles about nothing.

00:19:41.580 He goes, yeah, and you know, and God, he should have done it better.

00:19:44.540 And he didn't do it great.

00:19:46.160 And people can misinterpret things.

00:19:48.320 And anyway, I'm going to drop the mic on that.

00:19:50.820 And then the moderator says, no, hey, we got Wes Huff back.

00:19:53.320 And Billy Carson says, no, I'm out of here.

00:19:55.720 I don't, I can't take any more.

00:19:57.880 Please, man.

00:19:58.820 That was just beautiful.

00:20:02.200 That was beautiful to watch.

00:20:04.080 I watched so few internet debates because often they're not moderated well.

00:20:07.740 And actually, this one was not moderated all that well.

00:20:09.660 But the debate was great anyway.

00:20:11.500 It's hard to moderate.

00:20:12.840 They're hard to reign in Billy Carson.

00:20:14.100 But Wes Huff held his own.

00:20:17.820 He was very patient.

00:20:19.220 And then he just absolutely destroyed this guy.

00:20:23.900 It is the most beautiful dismantling I've probably ever seen in an internet debate.

00:20:31.060 I feel like I'm back in 2015.

00:20:32.980 This title could be, you know, destroys with facts and logic and hermeneutics and philology

00:20:39.300 and the Codex Sinaticus.

00:20:41.260 Well done.

00:20:44.100 Thank you.

The Michael Knowles Show - February 09, 2025

Catholic REVIEWS Wes Huff Vs Billy Carson DEABTE ｜ Michael Knowles

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript