Wes Huff is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada and was also born in Pakistan, making Wes my favorite Pakistani. He is an expert in ancient texts and apologetics, and has spent much of his career debunking "new age" ideas about the Bible and Christianity.
00:01:40.280It's a magnificent multi-hour conversation that ends in pyrotechnics.
00:01:47.120But it raises a lot of questions for people.
00:01:49.640A lot of people believe things about the Bible and Christianity that are just not so.
00:01:57.640Some more outlandish than others, but some of these legends recur and recur.
00:02:02.820So I was wondering, since you are an expert in ancient texts and obviously apologetics, if you could, well, if I could tee these up and you could just completely knock them down.
00:02:14.680The first one, I've heard this for some time.
00:02:18.060Have you ever heard the story that Christ traveled to India?
00:02:22.260And I've heard some of the ways I've heard this told is Christ went to India and, you know, studied with some Buddhist yogi or something and learned the sitar like George Harrison and then came back to the Holy Land.
00:02:33.720And that's how you explain Christianity.
00:02:37.200Yeah, well, this one actually comes from, there was an individual in the 19th century, a Russian individual named Nicholas Notrovich in 1894,
00:02:46.440who wrote a document where he claimed that Jesus traveled to India and Nepal.
00:02:52.080He said that he went to this Nepalese monastery and that the monks told him there.
00:02:57.060And he found documents that talked about Jesus of Nazareth, who went there and learned Hinduism on his ways through India and learned about Buddhism.
00:03:05.220And that's where, when he eventually comes back at around the age of 30, he gets his esoteric teachings.
00:03:12.760I mean, unfortunately for that, you know, this comes from the idea that there's somehow lost years of Jesus because the Gospel of Luke in particular, it has the story of Jesus being a 12-year-old.
00:03:23.260But other than that, you get his birth story and then you get him being a traveling itinerant Jewish rabbi as an adult.
00:03:30.320But even if we look at what we can see from the historical sources, from the Gospels, I mean, Luke tells us that narrative in chapter 2, verses 41 to 52, where the 12-year-old boy Jesus goes to the temple and, you know, Mary Joseph promptly lose the Son of God.
00:03:46.500And it says there that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.
00:03:51.560And so that implies that he's at least there doing that, growing old as a human being.
00:03:59.380Matthew's Gospel, actually, in chapter 13, when Jesus goes back to Nazareth to teach, the crowd, they respond by saying, isn't this the carpenter's son?
00:04:11.360And aren't his brothers James, Joseph, and Simon and Judas?
00:04:15.740And so that at least implies, you know, this is the equivalent, I've heard it said, of someone saying, like, hey, isn't this the guy who we went to prom with?
00:20:42.840It is an interesting accusation because we know approximately what the second council of Constantinople was.
00:20:50.340It was called for the goal of doubling down on the Chalcedonian Creed,
00:20:53.520which affirmed dogmatically that Jesus was both fully God and fully man,
00:20:57.580combating the heresy of Nestorianism, which taught that Jesus' divinity and humanity were separate
00:21:02.200and that Jesus was actually comprised of two separate persons, the human Jesus and the divine Logos.
00:21:07.360And so you would first have to establish that something like reincarnation was even on the table for this conversation.
00:21:15.000And also you have to account for all of the manuscripts of the Bible that predate the sixth century and would not have been known at that time.
00:21:24.780Because we have copies of, say, the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Matthew, certainly all of the Pauline epistles that were buried in places like Egypt and Syria hundreds of years before the Council of Constantinople ever happened.
00:21:38.760So if we're pulling out a doctrine, we really have to ascribe some sort of almost omnipotent ability for the individuals at this time to go find these manuscripts, alter them, put them back in the sand for us to find, you know,
00:21:53.000in the 19th century and date them to that time and do this systematically throughout all of the ancient world.
00:22:00.640And I think this brings up an interesting point, Michael, these types of accusations, you know, reincarnation not being compatible with historical Christianity or ancient Judaism aside.
00:22:09.280Um, what this assumes is impossible because we know from the dissemination of how the Christian documents were copied and then spread throughout the ancient world that it negated any one group or one person controlling the text of those documents at any one point in time for this exact reason, because the early Christians were very eager to get these documents in the hands of people.
00:22:32.980And so within only a couple hundred years, you have copies up into the British Isles, you have copies of these books all over North Africa, the Middle East, into Asia and Europe.
00:22:43.720And so we just find copies, even if they're fragmentary, of the documents of, you know, the Old and New Testaments all over the place.
00:22:52.840And so if anybody, you know, pick a council, Nicaea, Constantinople, you know, you can insert any name of any ecumenical council that took place.
00:23:00.880If you want to say that they did something in terms of editing a doctrine or a concept, you have to account for Christians writing in previous centuries, the manuscripts of the Bible.
00:23:13.820And, you know, it's just, it's an impossibility.
00:23:16.360Yeah, it must have been a real hassle, you know, to send the various bishops all to the ends of the earth to secretly edit all of these manuscripts.
00:23:23.540But on the point of reincarnation, I have a friend of mine who's Jewish and she's relatively conservative.
00:23:28.560I don't know exactly what flavor of Judaism she belongs to, but she told me that Jews believe in reincarnation.
00:23:37.140I mean, you know, I guess my only text is the Hebrew Bible.
00:23:40.300I haven't, you know, read like the Talmud or really no one's read the Talmud, you know, it's very, very long.
00:23:44.960And then I looked into it and it seemed like maybe there was some kind of Kabbalah concept that maybe touched on reincarnation, but I don't know.
00:23:51.960Have you ever come across that or do you kind of limit your scope of inquiry to Christianity?
00:23:59.220I mean, it's certainly not a concept that would have squared with ancient Judaism.
00:24:04.140So like pre-70 AD, before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, you have a very strong line of thinking of the resurrection, right?
00:24:14.460Which then leads into what we believe as Christians about the resurrection of the dead.
00:24:18.480Even read something like in the Maccabees, first, second, and third Maccabees, when the Jews are being slaughtered.
00:24:25.100And we have instances of, you know, them being, their hands being threatened with being cut off and them holding out their hands and say, you know, cut them off.
00:24:35.480I'll get new ones in the resurrection.
00:24:37.020That doesn't, the resurrection is not reincarnation.
00:24:40.760Those are fundamentally different ideas.
00:24:42.540And I can say, especially during this period, during like the Hasmonean era, when you have stories like first, second, and third Maccabees taking place, the understanding of the resurrection of the dead is very concrete.
00:24:57.720And that plays directly into what we see in the New Testament theology.
00:25:01.440So I think at face value, I don't know about, say, like mystic Judaism, yeah, rabbinic Judaism.
00:25:11.700I'm not an expert in that necessarily.
00:25:13.880Maybe some rabbi in the Middle Ages gave credence to it somewhere.
00:25:17.680But in terms of ancient Judaism, I think what we see, especially in understandings of what takes place in the afterlife, I'm not sure that's compatible.
00:25:36.900Okay, what about, this one always comes up because as you know, I'm a mackerel snapping papist myself.
00:25:43.280And I am occasionally accused by some of my Protestant friends of belonging to a church that removed, or rather that added books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.
00:25:56.660That there were really 66 books of the Bible, and then the dastardly Catholics added extra books.
00:26:03.960So they got it up to 73 at the Council of Trent in response to the Protestant Reformation.
00:26:10.020Now, you are not a mackerel snapping papist like me, but you are a great scholar of these texts.
00:26:20.000I would say throughout the tradition of canon lists that we find between like the 2nd to the 5th centuries, there is certainly precedent for both the Protestant and Roman Catholic canon traditions.
00:26:33.120I would say that to say that Roman Catholics added books or that Protestants removed books is probably not being honest with the data.
00:26:41.780There's a long conversation that happens.
00:26:46.760In the Reformation, what basically happened is that the Protestant reformers said, let's cut out the noise and agree on the minimalist canon that we all agree on.
00:26:55.920But you can find individuals throughout church history, individuals like Pope Gregory the Great, who wrote a commentary on Job, who says that Maccabees is not scripture.
00:27:04.880And, you know, even in the Reformation, the people who put Martin Luther on trial, guys like Cardinal Jimenez and Cardinal Cayetan, in their own writings say that what later become the Deutero-canonical books, they have that title, are not scripture.
00:27:21.340And neither did Deutero-canonical books, who compiled the Greek New Testament that actually was used then to translate things like the Luther Bible and then the later King James Bible as its base text primarily.
00:27:33.300He didn't believe that the other books were scripture.
00:27:35.980So in one sense, at Trent, what you get from the Roman Catholic tradition is the official, infallible, ecumenical decision of what is scripture.
00:27:47.140However, I think that it's not that there isn't precedent to point to individuals in the ancient world who actually talk about these as scripture.
00:27:55.060I mean, the famous ones are that Augustine considered the larger canon of scripture and Jerome considered the shorter canon of scripture.
00:28:02.520And so we have these conversations all throughout history, but I think in sort of the polemics of Roman Catholic and Protestant divides, I think we're not really playing very fairly when we just accuse each other of adding books or taking out books.
00:28:17.060I think it's more complex than that, even though I would say that I am fine and actually more than fine with having just 66 books in my Bible today.
00:28:26.420But I think there is, you know, as history always is, it's much more complicated than easy, pithy statements.
00:28:32.940Although easy, pithy statements, I think you and I, Michael, are both very much a preach.
00:28:38.400And, you know, I actually, it's funny you mentioned St. Jerome because across from me in my desk in my office, I have Caravaggio's St. Jerome writing because there's a skull there and it's a memento mori that I need to stop wasting time and actually do my work.
00:28:49.460And it's not the most effective painting, but it's pretty nonetheless.
00:28:53.600And St. Jerome, famously the translator of the Bible, did not agree with the inclusion of some deuterocanonical work.
00:29:00.340I think including Jude, you would know better than I, but I think he didn't think that Jude should be canon.
00:29:06.620What do you make of the Synod of Rome, which is usually the example that's cited, but then other ones after Rome, you know, Hippo, Carthage, much later on, the Council of Florence, you know, all occurring before Trent.
00:29:18.900But starting really with Rome saying that the deuterocanonical works, which the Protestants would call the Apocrypha, that they are in the canon.
00:29:26.520You know, that's not just some Pope or even some saint, or even the great saint translator of the Bible, St. Jerome.
00:29:33.560Does that not, is that not binding, you know, to say, look, at Rome and later affirmed by these other synods and councils, we include these books, even if some great scholars and churchmen and saints didn't totally buy them.
00:29:48.900Yeah, well, I think what I would say is that, you know, you have these ancient canon lists.
00:29:53.920And actually a friend of mine, Dr. John Mead, has written the official documents on ancient Christian canon lists that's published by Oxford University Press.
00:30:02.460And I would really encourage everybody to look into, you know, to really dig into the matter, if they're really interested in this, in how the early Christians have a conversation about these things.
00:30:12.200The Council of Rome is not an ecumenical council, it's a local council.
00:30:15.240And so it has no kind of official binding in terms of that.
00:30:19.260I think what we can say is that early Christians provide these canon lists to provide at least some degree of clarity.
00:30:25.400I mean, another one that's pointed too often is Athanasius' festal letter, where he provides a list, which more or less agrees with the Protestant list, in terms of some of these disagreements.
00:30:36.020I think if you were to go back in time and ask these people, were you choosing the official canon of Scripture, I think that they would be a little bit uncomfortable with that and saying, you know, these are the ones that we hold to as that which we derive doctrine from.
00:30:50.360That which we pull theological dogma in terms of faith and practice for the church.
00:30:56.540But I think without, you know, going back in time and hopping in my time machine or reading their minds, I think they would be hesitant to say, well, we are making any type of official delineation on this.
00:31:08.640And one of the reasons I think we can know that is that during Trent, you still had back and forth with people who were likewise uncomfortable with kind of the official pronouncement because there was even disagreement going on during that day.
00:31:22.040But the historical precedence for both canons, I think, is there.
00:31:26.940I think that it's more on my side than is on your side, Michael.
00:31:29.560But given that, I don't think we're being fair if we just kind of say, well, it's this council or it's that council or officially until you get to Trent.
00:31:38.420And then you have, from a Roman Catholic perspective, an infallible proclamation on what is canon.
00:31:44.440And even, you know, deutero-canonical, that's second in terms of reception, not in authority.
00:31:50.880Now, what about, speaking of books that are, well, a book that is not included in either the Protestant canon or the Catholic canon, but it sometimes comes up.
00:31:59.300What about the book of Enoch, which I don't know, every time I speak to people, especially people who are a little bit hippy-dippy, they love to bring up the book of Enoch, which relates to this other thing that I don't really know that much about, the emerald tablets.
00:32:15.700The emerald tablets, which I really only know with reference to like medieval alchemy and all sorts of weird esoteric writing.
00:32:24.080But the claim that is the full statement, that the emerald tablets should be observed because Thoth is linked to Melchizedek and Enoch, the putative author of the book of Enoch.
00:32:40.600The book of Enoch included in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, but not in the Catholic canon or the Protestant canon.
00:32:47.340Enoch is actually related to Hermes Trismegistus, this Egyptian kind of mystical figure who crops up in all sorts of writing throughout the Middle Ages and onward.
00:32:59.040Yeah, I think I got a little bit dizzy from all of the connections that are being made across large spans of time.
00:33:04.000What I would say is in terms of reliability, Enoch has far more ancient historical reliability than the emerald tablets.
00:33:12.260And I'm impressed that you know about at least sort of the alchemic tradition of the emerald tablets that come out of the Middle Ages.
00:33:18.680That's actually, though, completely different from the emerald tablets of Thoth.
00:33:22.440The emerald tablets of Thoth were invented in 1925 by this guy named Maurice Doriel, who considered himself a self-taught Egyptologist.
00:33:33.540And he actually claimed in 1925 that he went to the Great Pyramids in Giza and discovered this artifact in the pyramids that he called the emerald tablets of Thoth.
00:33:42.860And then he produced a translation of said document.
00:33:45.260Now, his tablets disappeared, which is always convenient when these people come up with these things.
00:33:51.140But and and so no one could evaluate them.
00:33:54.740All he had was his translation, but he never actually produced any evidence of the tablets, merely told people that he did.
00:34:01.040And no archaeologist or Egyptologist today thinks that the emerald tablets of Thoth are anything of note, that they're just a fabrication of this guy's imagination.
00:34:10.640And actually, later on, he changed his story and said that they they were by divine dictation, by some sort of spirit guide.
00:35:15.600And so Thoth is the god of knowledge in ancient Egypt.
00:35:21.460And so I think what the connections are between like Melchizedek and Enoch is that you have these traditions of people within the ancient world.
00:35:30.380You know, Melchizedek in Genesis is then played upon to, by the author of Hebrews, to say that he has no beginning or no end.
00:35:59.820That all makes sense and affirms my priors, which is what I look for in any good answer.
00:36:04.760But on Enoch himself and on the book of Enoch, and getting back to the question of the canons, why is Enoch not included in the Western canon?
00:36:17.560Why is it only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?
00:36:22.400Was it Enoch or is it pseudepigraphal?
00:36:24.040And, two, if it's not included in the canon, then if you accept Jude, for instance, as the Catholics do, doesn't Jude refer to the book of Enoch?
00:36:38.060And so if Jude refers to the book of Enoch, a book that is not canonical, then how can that be canonical and what are we left with?
00:36:45.980Yeah, so the book of Enoch that we have, which is usually first Enoch, there's actually a first, second, then third Enoch.
00:36:52.560But when you talk about the book of Enoch, you're usually talking about first Enoch because that's the one that has the book of the washers, the book of the giants.
00:36:59.420And so that's the one that claims to be talking about Enoch, the grandfather of Noah.
00:37:05.480Now, we know from the Jewish tradition that there is no overt indication that anybody actually considered it as having origins in divine inspiration.
00:37:14.660In fact, if you read some of the early Jews who wrote about it, guys like Josephus, Josephus very overtly states that there were no books that were written before Moses that hold authoritative precedents.
00:37:27.140So it could not have been written before, you know, Moses compiling the Torah.
00:37:33.200So it couldn't really be written by Enoch.
00:37:35.440No, and there are actually problematic texts within the book of Enoch.
00:37:39.160Enoch 71 called Enoch, the son of man, who comes to the ancient days, alluding to Daniel chapter 7, which is exactly what Jesus describes himself as when he stands before the Sanhedrin at the end of the gospel of Mark.
00:37:52.660So in that sense, I think there's kind of maybe heretical, problematic sections of Enoch that ascribe things to Enoch that we would say are only and can only be described of Jesus.
00:38:05.740At the exact same time, first Enoch is kind of a hodgepodge in what we have today in that the earliest sections in Aramaic and Greek that are part of, say, Dead Sea Scroll fragments are in fact ancient.
00:38:22.400But there are sections in Coptic that are contemporaneous with the New Testament authors, and it comes all together in what we call first Enoch.
00:38:31.560But it is kind of an amalgamation where we can say there are some books, Book of the Watchers, Book of the Giants.
00:38:37.120Those are genuinely ancient, but they also show indications internally of coming from the Hellenistic period.
00:38:44.320They refer to timekeeping that appears to be influenced by the Greek timekeeping.
00:38:50.000It also refers to places that only exist after the Exodus period.
00:38:55.860So it talks about Mount Sinai, which would not have been, you know, known in, you know, a pre-prood era.
00:39:06.700So I think there are some things, you know, it's very interesting.
00:39:09.740It's clearly a book that is written by ancient Jews that are trying to figure out, okay, what's going on in Genesis chapter 6 with the flood?
00:39:18.580What's going on with these supernatural creatures that we refer to as angels and demons and seraphim and Nephilim?
00:39:26.760So in one sense, there's kind of some, like, thinking out loud that's going on in the Book of Enoch.
00:39:33.260And it clearly is a very popular book.
00:39:36.500It's debated whether Jude quotes it officially or just alludes to something that's going on there.
00:39:43.340Because what Jude includes is not necessarily a quotation that we can find from any of the Enochian documents.
00:39:51.520But he's clearly referring to something that his audience is aware of.
00:39:55.020But I would also point to the fact that Paul quotes Greek philosophers.
00:39:59.120He quotes Menander as he quotes a hymn to Zeus.
00:40:03.620And so you don't have to be quoting something that is scripture to be using a piece of literature that's applicable to your audience.