The Michael Knowles Show - Wes Huff DEBUNKS Top 10 Bible Lies with 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. 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.

00:00:32.420 That's $40 off and free meat for life with code DAILYWIRE.

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

00:00:37.640 I am occasionally accused of belonging to a church that added books to the Bible.

00:00:43.380 I think it's more complex than that.

00:00:45.200 Augustine considered the larger canon of Scripture, and Jerome considered the shorter canon of Scripture.

00:00:50.900 Does that ever shake your confidence in principle in the inerrancy of Scripture?

00:00:55.700 You know him from bodying heretics on the internet.

00:00:59.980 If you don't know Wesley Huff, you certainly should.

00:01:03.060 He is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada.

00:01:07.620 A great pity that he has to live up in America's evil top hat.

00:01:11.000 He was also born in Pakistan, making Wes my favorite Pakistani.

00:01:15.780 Wes, thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:01:18.040 I'll take it.

00:01:18.900 I don't know how many Pakistanis you know, but I'll be your favorite one if you really want me to.

00:01:24.080 You've increased my number of Pakistani friends dramatically just by coming on the show right now.

00:01:29.540 Yeah, doubled them.

00:01:30.600 Wes, a lot of people I think were first introduced to you because you absolutely destroyed this kind of new-agey heretic on the internet. 0.99

00:01:38.800 And we don't need to get too into it.

00:01:40.280 It's a magnificent multi-hour conversation that ends in pyrotechnics.

00:01:47.120 But it raises a lot of questions for people.

00:01:49.640 A lot of people believe things about the Bible and Christianity that are just not so.

00:01:57.640 Some more outlandish than others, but some of these legends recur and recur.

00:02:02.820 So 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.

00:02:14.680 The first one, I've heard this for some time.

00:02:18.060 Have you ever heard the story that Christ traveled to India?

00:02:22.260 And 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.

00:02:33.720 And that's how you explain Christianity.

00:02:37.200 Yeah, well, this one actually comes from, there was an individual in the 19th century, a Russian individual named Nicholas Notrovich in 1894,

00:02:46.440 who wrote a document where he claimed that Jesus traveled to India and Nepal.

00:02:52.080 He said that he went to this Nepalese monastery and that the monks told him there.

00:02:57.060 And he found documents that talked about Jesus of Nazareth, who went there and learned Hinduism on his ways through India and learned about Buddhism.

00:03:05.220 And that's where, when he eventually comes back at around the age of 30, he gets his esoteric teachings.

00:03:12.760 I 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.

00:03:23.260 But other than that, you get his birth story and then you get him being a traveling itinerant Jewish rabbi as an adult.

00:03:30.320 But 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.

00:03:46.500 And it says there that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.

00:03:51.560 And so that implies that he's at least there doing that, growing old as a human being.

00:03:59.380 Matthew'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?

00:04:07.540 Isn't this Mary's name?

00:04:09.860 Isn't his mother's name Mary?

00:04:11.360 And aren't his brothers James, Joseph, and Simon and Judas?

00:04:15.740 And 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?

00:04:24.340 Like, they know who Jesus is, right?

00:04:26.420 So they're very familiar with him.

00:04:27.600 So if he had left and become some sort of traveling Jewish sage who learned Buddhism and Hinduism, you wouldn't get this kind of response.

00:04:36.720 Because what we see when we eventually do get Jesus as the adult is that he is a first century Second Temple Jewish rabbi. 0.95

00:04:44.580 We're not seeing multilingual, cosmopolitan, ecumenist guru.

00:04:49.820 We're seeing what we should see in terms of his teaching and in terms of what exactly fits for the time frame.

00:04:56.180 Jesus is a person of his day in terms of being a first century Jewish individual.

00:05:01.620 He's communicating Jewish things, and his influence is the Hebrew scriptures.

00:05:05.580 And that makes sense.

00:05:06.760 Yes.

00:05:07.060 On the Emmaus Road, I recall our Lord opening up the scriptures, not the Bhagavad Gita.

00:05:12.960 And even, you know, as you mentioned, you know, Christ grows in wisdom and in stature.

00:05:17.880 He is subjected to his mother and stepfather after they find him in the temple.

00:05:23.480 So there's another irony, which is there's a story that St. Thomas the Apostle goes to India.

00:05:31.340 And I've actually been pretty close to where he was.

00:05:33.820 He should have landed down by the tip.

00:05:35.240 And he died in Chennai, India, on the other coast.

00:05:39.280 And I think there's a mountain there, Mount St. Thomas, I believe, where his body supposedly is.

00:05:43.760 And there will be people who question this.

00:05:45.580 They'll say it's so ridiculous to suggest that the Apostle Thomas actually made it all the way to India.

00:05:50.160 But it's not at all ridiculous to suggest that Christ himself, about whose wanderings we know quite a lot more,

00:05:58.360 that he went to India and learned how to become a yogi or whatever,

00:06:01.980 and then came back and somehow no one knew about this for 1,800 years.

00:06:06.360 The next one.

00:06:07.240 The notion that the Genesis creation story is copied word for word from the Enuma Elish.

00:06:16.440 I'm probably mispronouncing that.

00:06:18.000 But this notion that the Genesis story is totally derivative, even a copy from a pagan tradition.

00:06:26.540 And so, you know, there's no reason to really give it any credence in a particularly Christian way.

00:06:33.640 Yeah.

00:06:34.060 Well, you didn't mispronounce it.

00:06:35.320 So you're not off to a bad start in that regard.

00:06:38.540 All right.

00:06:39.340 But the Enuma Elish is the, it's a Babylonian origin story.

00:06:43.180 And I think that's important to highlight that, you know, Genesis 1 is a creation story.

00:06:48.080 The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian origin story.

00:06:51.860 Now, there's a subtle but important difference there.

00:06:53.980 Because the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures,

00:06:56.640 they believe that matter in the created order was more or less eternal.

00:07:01.500 And deities come from the creation.

00:07:03.320 Whereas in the Bible, creation comes from the one true deity.

00:07:07.740 And that's important to note too, Michael, because the Enuma Elish is polytheistic as its assumption.

00:07:14.480 The idea of a single creator God who not only makes everything, but exists outside of time, matter, and space.

00:07:20.360 Because that's a feature that separates something like the Enuma Elish and the book of Genesis.

00:07:24.640 And in the Enuma Elish, the slain gods, because there's this big battle,

00:07:29.140 they become things like the earth.

00:07:33.140 And humanity springs from the dead gods.

00:07:36.520 So Tiamat, the sea goddess, is slain by Marduk. 0.99

00:07:39.600 And her body is split into two.

00:07:41.420 And half becomes the earth and half becomes the sky.

00:07:44.340 And that humanity is brought forth from the blood of Cuencu, Tiamat's advisor, 0.89

00:07:48.980 who also loses the battle along with her.

00:07:50.560 So we also have no linguistic parallel.

00:07:53.520 So you can see the content is very, very different.

00:07:56.960 And so if we're ascribing a word for word or a plagiarism,

00:08:01.300 I mean, all you have to do is read each text and see,

00:08:03.480 listen, that's not what we're dealing with here.

00:08:05.440 And then if we look at the languages themselves,

00:08:08.020 you know, the Akkadian and the Hebrew of the Enuma Elish, 0.65

00:08:12.120 and then Genesis chapter one,

00:08:13.560 the parallels such as copying or plagiarizing for something like the Enuma Elish in the Akkadian text,

00:08:18.640 and then the Hebrew Genesis,

00:08:20.380 I don't think evidence literary borrowing.

00:08:23.560 And there are no legitimate connections between the content.

00:08:28.780 So though both are Semitic languages originally as they're written,

00:08:32.380 I don't think we have an issue of causation, right?

00:08:37.540 We have an issue of correlation and sort of broad ideas that are general ancient themes.

00:08:43.200 But in terms of trying to establish a correlation versus causation issue,

00:08:48.400 if we want to say that something like the Enuma Elish is word for word of Genesis,

00:08:52.140 we need to establish a causative link.

00:08:54.500 And we just don't have that.

00:08:55.740 So why would people say this?

00:08:57.880 Is the answer as simple as just sheer ignorance and presumption?

00:09:02.620 Is there any other reason why they would draw this parallel?

00:09:06.580 Yeah, I think it's a bit of that.

00:09:07.960 I think it also is.

00:09:08.740 It's not that you can't draw parallels.

00:09:10.580 There are generalities that we can find.

00:09:12.540 It's similar to when people say that Jesus is also copied from ancient pagan deities in that

00:09:18.520 this is sometimes called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy,

00:09:21.380 where you have this image of a Texan who is firing shots into the side of a barn.

00:09:26.320 And then he promptly goes and he draws a target around the closest cluster of shots,

00:09:30.800 making himself look like a great shot, right?

00:09:32.500 And so if you find enough of these parallels, you can draw conclusions,

00:09:36.800 but that's not honest with what's going on.

00:09:39.820 And so you can say, okay, well, here we have an origin story or a creation story.

00:09:44.680 So I would make the differentiation between those two.

00:09:46.720 You have, you know, certain themes that come up.

00:09:49.380 There's chaos being ordered, which is pretty much common to any ancient Near Eastern story.

00:09:53.940 And you have the waters being kind of the first,

00:09:57.440 the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters of the deep.

00:10:01.220 And then you have similar waters in the Enuma Elish.

00:10:05.320 But these are generalities that when you, when you get into the specifics, you know,

00:10:09.000 sometimes I like to say, Michael, that arsenic and Advil both come in pill form,

00:10:12.940 but it's, it's not the A on the pill that, you know, makes me choose one or the other

00:10:20.180 randomly when I have a headache.

00:10:21.660 It's the differences that make the difference.

00:10:24.040 And in this case, there's a little bit of ignorance.

00:10:27.000 There's a little bit of cherry picking,

00:10:28.620 and there's probably a lot of wanting to downplay what Genesis actually is

00:10:34.060 and its implications for the rest of the story that plays out.

00:10:37.560 All right.

00:10:37.780 Well, to get to the rest of the Bible,

00:10:39.800 what about the claim that the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest Bible that we have?

00:10:46.280 And therefore, I actually don't know that this would necessarily follow even that dubious premise.

00:10:52.460 Therefore, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the first church, perhaps even the true church.

00:10:59.720 I like the Ethiopians quite a lot, but that seems like a bold claim.

00:11:05.280 Yeah.

00:11:05.700 So there are a number of assumptions going on there.

00:11:08.540 I mean, the first copies of the Bible that we have in terms of Old Testament, New Testament,

00:11:14.620 the Old Testament is Hebrew, the New Testament is Greek,

00:11:16.920 and we have Old Testament Hebrew copies like the Dead Sea Scrolls

00:11:20.400 or the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

00:11:22.460 In the collection of the Septuagint, and then we have the Greek New Testament.

00:11:26.780 So the Ethiopian Bible is written in a language called Ge'ez,

00:11:30.700 and our oldest copy of that comes in the form of a collection of manuscripts called the Garima Gospels

00:11:36.460 from potentially as early as the 4th century,

00:11:39.220 but the extant manuscripts go anywhere between the 4th and the 6th centuries.

00:11:43.820 But this is only the 4 Gospels, and they're very much a translation from the original Greek

00:11:49.620 into the ancient Ethiopic language of Ge'ez.

00:11:52.260 We, of course, have copies of each individual book of the Bible that exists in independent scrolls

00:11:58.380 and books that predate these by centuries.

00:12:01.020 So both, you know, in the form of the Hebrew Old Testament,

00:12:04.260 and even the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and then the Greek New Testament.

00:12:08.980 The earliest copy of a Genesis to Revelation Ethiopian Bible actually comes in the ballpark

00:12:13.620 somewhere between the 14th and 16th centuries.

00:12:16.320 So we're talking Middle Ages.

00:12:17.480 No, no, I hear this online a lot.

00:12:22.480 I, to be totally honest, don't know where it originated.

00:12:25.500 But there's a picture of an old Ethiopian guy holding what looks like a very, very old manuscript.

00:12:31.220 And then you always see the headlines of, you know, first Bible ever discovered.

00:12:35.140 We actually know the story of how the Ethiopian Bible kind of originated.

00:12:39.940 There is a document that, a number of documents actually,

00:12:44.080 that tell us that Syrian missionaries brought versions of the Greek translation of the Hebrew

00:12:49.240 Old Testament and other Jewish literature and the Greek New Testament down to Ethiopia

00:12:54.260 into what was then called the Kingdom of Aksum, where it was translated into Ge'ez in and around

00:13:00.640 the 4th century.

00:13:01.480 So we have that catalog and we can pinpoint where the Ethiopian Bible actually found its inception.

00:13:08.920 And it is very much a translation from the Greek that pre-existed it and did

00:13:13.960 pre-exist it, arguably going back to the, you know, originals by the authors we see in

00:13:19.120 our New Testament in the 1st century.

00:13:20.820 Yeah, this one was a bit of a head-scratcher when I read it because, because of the fact

00:13:25.960 that, I'm certainly not a Bible scholar, but because the Ethiopian Bible is translated from

00:13:31.140 the Septuagint, that means the Septuagint pre-exists the Ethiopian Bible.

00:13:35.320 I think people just like it because Ethiopia sounds kind of exotic.

00:13:38.260 And because they like the idea of the Book of Enoch, which is included in the Ethiopian

00:13:42.760 canon, but not in the Western canon.

00:13:44.520 Maybe we'll get to that in a little bit.

00:13:45.940 Before we get to that more legitimate and substantive question, though, I want to raise 0.98

00:13:51.240 another really stupid point that people bring up, namely that magic mushrooms, you know, 0.96

00:13:57.080 like psilocybin or what, you know, kind of spooky psychedelic stuff is actually at the 1.00

00:14:02.820 heart of the origin of Christianity.

00:14:05.500 I don't have a bong on set that I can rip before we delve into this very silly suggestion,

00:14:11.460 but have you heard it before?

00:14:14.040 Yes, I have.

00:14:14.880 It seems to have started with an individual named John Marco Allegro, who was a legitimate

00:14:19.640 Dead Sea Scrolls scholar.

00:14:21.020 So this was an individual who worked on part of the original editorial team that was evaluating

00:14:25.920 the Dead Sea Scrolls when they were discovered, you know, between the late 1940s and the 1970s.

00:14:31.040 And so this was an individual who actually had credibility in terms of his credentials.

00:14:37.680 However, he wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, where he really starts

00:14:42.020 to go off the rails.

00:14:43.420 Now, this was, Wes, if you don't mind the interjection, that book came out in like 1970 or something,

00:14:48.940 right?

00:14:49.240 So we're kind of reaching peak hippie, psychedelia, druggie.

00:14:54.240 So I'm not downplaying his credentials.

00:14:56.020 I know the guy's a real scholar on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:14:58.060 But, you know, that time period, I mean, who wasn't taking magic mushrooms back then?

00:15:03.900 Right.

00:15:04.480 Well, I wasn't around, so I wasn't.

00:15:06.260 So I can at least exclude myself from that group.

00:15:10.040 But yeah, it's interesting because I've read Allegro's work and he, and actually his fellow

00:15:15.960 contemporaries chastised him quite a bit because a lot of his thesis was predicated on etymology,

00:15:21.660 which is the study and origin of words.

00:15:23.120 And he connected particular important words in the Bible, like the word Christ.

00:15:28.760 And then he kind of made these causation links that he saw to a few other religious texts.

00:15:35.900 And then to some of these ancient fertility cults having what he described as hallucinogenic

00:15:41.960 experiences with plants.

00:15:43.600 But based on this, you know, he came to this conclusion that Jesus did not exist and the

00:15:49.300 Gospels were more or less a hoax and that what Christianity turned into was nothing more 0.96

00:15:52.880 than a misunderstanding of ancient fertility cults, that the object of worship was a psychedelic

00:15:58.840 mushroom.

00:15:59.740 And one thing to keep in mind is that no scholar from any background, now I mean this honestly,

00:16:05.300 religious or secular, either in Allegro's day or now, accepts Allegro's theories and conclusions

00:16:10.480 based on the actual arguments that he makes.

00:16:13.080 And because his theory is fringe, doesn't necessarily mean it's false, right?

00:16:19.100 Just because nobody else in the world or academia is on your side doesn't mean it's not true.

00:16:24.620 But I think it should raise flags for like the entirety of ancient historiography, linguistics,

00:16:32.980 particularly though I think philology.

00:16:34.580 Because if you talk to people who study things like languages like Assyrian, or sorry, Sumerian,

00:16:41.700 not Assyrian, you'll see that Allegro's conclusions are really problematic.

00:16:48.600 And they're problematic because they just don't connect where they should.

00:16:54.740 And even Allegro's daughter wrote a book where she went through her dad's notes and kind of

00:17:00.480 highlighted some things that actually revealed that Allegro didn't really know Sumerian,

00:17:05.180 that he was kind of jumping to these conclusions.

00:17:07.200 And he was really using words that sounded similar and then trying to make connections because

00:17:11.840 Sumerian and Hebrew are not related linguistically in any way.

00:17:17.280 Sumerian is a language isolate.

00:17:19.160 Hebrew is a Semitic language.

00:17:21.640 And so it's kind of the equivalent of, you know, Stephen Seagal, the martial artist,

00:17:28.920 has the last name Seagal.

00:17:30.120 And the seabird, a seagull, well, they sound the same.

00:17:34.200 So, you know, actually all seabirds are martial artists.

00:17:38.820 Yes, and there is no such thing as an historical Stephen Seagal.

00:17:43.020 He's never really existed.

00:17:44.260 He really is a figure that was created in the imagination of people who worshipped birds.

00:17:52.520 Is that about right?

00:17:53.220 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:53.780 I think you're on the right track.

00:17:55.160 I see where you're going.

00:17:56.320 Yeah, we're off to a good start.

00:17:57.820 Yeah, so it's that type of level of argumentation.

00:18:00.540 And, you know, he was a smart guy.

00:18:02.780 And so you read his book and even myself as someone who's very interested in this,

00:18:06.800 who studied these things, often found myself getting lost and trying to make the connections.

00:18:11.180 So I think Allegro, unfortunately, as the sort of inspiration and origin of this myth,

00:18:19.420 if you want to call it that, was just not just off base, but actually he was,

00:18:24.700 all of his underpinnings for his arguments were faulty.

00:18:28.860 Especially if the centerpiece of it is that Christ never really existed, which I've heard before.

00:18:33.800 It seems to me we know more about Christ as an historical person than just about anyone else of his era.

00:18:43.360 I mean, not literally anyone else, but we know a lot about him.

00:18:47.040 Do any serious people seriously doubt his existence?

00:18:51.180 I mean, I think I can comfortably say that of people who have accredited PhDs in some relevant fields,

00:18:58.740 historiography, New Testament studies, biblical studies, classics, that would touch on the historical Jesus.

00:19:04.980 You probably can count the people who doubt his existence on two hands.

00:19:10.040 And that's probably for everybody who's currently holding an accredited degree in those fields right now.

00:19:16.880 So it's not that nobody does, but it's that it's the evidence, like you said, Michael,

00:19:21.220 is just so overwhelmingly substantial that even if you want to be a hyper skeptical scholar and say,

00:19:26.960 well, we really can't know anything other than he was probably baptized by John the Baptist and he was crucified

00:19:32.360 under the leadership of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.

00:19:38.660 But really nothing else we can say about him.

00:19:40.560 I mean, that's still granting that he existed, that he was, you know, an influential Jewish rabbi and that he was crucified.

00:19:47.900 And so, you know, the bare, bare, bare, bare bones of that, and I think we can obviously say far more than that historically,

00:19:55.440 to doubt his existence entirely is really a pretty, pretty fringe.

00:20:00.420 Okay.

00:20:00.760 Now, speaking of life, death, resurrection, there's a related concept that comes up in the fringes here,

00:20:11.460 which is reincarnation, not resurrection, but reincarnation.

00:20:17.420 There's some theory floating around that the early church taught reincarnation,

00:20:22.680 but that this truth of the faith was condemned at the second council of Constantinople in the sixth century.

00:20:31.100 I was not there at the council.

00:20:33.200 I don't think reincarnation was condemned there because I don't think it was ever taught in the first place.

00:20:39.840 Correct me if I'm wrong.

00:20:40.880 Yeah.

00:20:41.460 No, you're right.

00:20:42.840 It is an interesting accusation because we know approximately what the second council of Constantinople was.

00:20:50.340 It was called for the goal of doubling down on the Chalcedonian Creed,

00:20:53.520 which affirmed dogmatically that Jesus was both fully God and fully man,

00:20:57.580 combating the heresy of Nestorianism, which taught that Jesus' divinity and humanity were separate

00:21:02.200 and that Jesus was actually comprised of two separate persons, the human Jesus and the divine Logos.

00:21:07.360 And so you would first have to establish that something like reincarnation was even on the table for this conversation.

00:21:15.000 And 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.

00:21:24.780 Because 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.

00:21:38.760 So 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,

00:21:53.000 in the 19th century and date them to that time and do this systematically throughout all of the ancient world.

00:22:00.640 And 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.

00:22:09.280 Um, 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.

00:22:32.980 And 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.

00:22:43.720 And 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.

00:22:52.840 And so if anybody, you know, pick a council, Nicaea, Constantinople, you know, you can insert any name of any ecumenical council that took place.

00:23:00.880 If 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.

00:23:13.820 And, you know, it's just, it's an impossibility.

00:23:16.360 Yeah, 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.

00:23:23.540 But on the point of reincarnation, I have a friend of mine who's Jewish and she's relatively conservative.

00:23:28.560 I don't know exactly what flavor of Judaism she belongs to, but she told me that Jews believe in reincarnation.

00:23:35.440 And I thought, that's new to me.

00:23:37.140 I mean, you know, I guess my only text is the Hebrew Bible.

00:23:40.300 I haven't, you know, read like the Talmud or really no one's read the Talmud, you know, it's very, very long.

00:23:44.960 And 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.

00:23:51.960 Have you ever come across that or do you kind of limit your scope of inquiry to Christianity?

00:23:59.220 I mean, it's certainly not a concept that would have squared with ancient Judaism.

00:24:04.140 So like pre-70 AD, before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, you have a very strong line of thinking of the resurrection, right?

00:24:14.460 Which then leads into what we believe as Christians about the resurrection of the dead.

00:24:18.480 Even read something like in the Maccabees, first, second, and third Maccabees, when the Jews are being slaughtered.

00:24:25.100 And 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.

00:24:35.480 I'll get new ones in the resurrection.

00:24:37.020 That doesn't, the resurrection is not reincarnation.

00:24:40.760 Those are fundamentally different ideas.

00:24:42.540 And 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.

00:24:57.720 And that plays directly into what we see in the New Testament theology.

00:25:01.440 So I think at face value, I don't know about, say, like mystic Judaism, yeah, rabbinic Judaism.

00:25:11.700 I'm not an expert in that necessarily.

00:25:13.880 Maybe some rabbi in the Middle Ages gave credence to it somewhere.

00:25:17.680 But 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.

00:25:27.260 Right, right.

00:25:27.800 Maybe if our Lord had gone to India and studied under some yogi, maybe then he could have believed in reincarnation.

00:25:34.180 But alas, it didn't seem to happen.

00:25:36.900 Okay, what about, this one always comes up because as you know, I'm a mackerel snapping papist myself.

00:25:43.280 And 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.

00:25:56.660 That there were really 66 books of the Bible, and then the dastardly Catholics added extra books. 1.00

00:26:03.960 So they got it up to 73 at the Council of Trent in response to the Protestant Reformation.

00:26:10.020 Now, you are not a mackerel snapping papist like me, but you are a great scholar of these texts.

00:26:16.760 So what say you?

00:26:17.960 Yeah, here's what I would say.

00:26:20.000 I 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.

00:26:33.120 I would say that to say that Roman Catholics added books or that Protestants removed books is probably not being honest with the data.

00:26:41.780 There's a long conversation that happens.

00:26:43.720 Everybody agrees on the 66, right?

00:26:45.500 We can all agree.

00:26:46.760 In 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.

00:26:55.920 But 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.

00:27:04.880 And, 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.

00:27:21.340 And 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.

00:27:33.300 He didn't believe that the other books were scripture.

00:27:35.980 So in one sense, at Trent, what you get from the Roman Catholic tradition is the official, infallible, ecumenical decision of what is scripture.

00:27:47.140 However, 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.

00:27:55.060 I mean, the famous ones are that Augustine considered the larger canon of scripture and Jerome considered the shorter canon of scripture.

00:28:02.520 And 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.

00:28:17.060 I 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.

00:28:26.420 But I think there is, you know, as history always is, it's much more complicated than easy, pithy statements.

00:28:32.940 Although easy, pithy statements, I think you and I, Michael, are both very much a preach.

00:28:37.100 I do. I love them.

00:28:38.400 And, 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.

00:28:49.460 And it's not the most effective painting, but it's pretty nonetheless.

00:28:53.600 And St. Jerome, famously the translator of the Bible, did not agree with the inclusion of some deuterocanonical work.

00:29:00.340 I think including Jude, you would know better than I, but I think he didn't think that Jude should be canon.

00:29:05.160 But then what do you make of this?

00:29:06.620 What 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.

00:29:18.900 But starting really with Rome saying that the deuterocanonical works, which the Protestants would call the Apocrypha, that they are in the canon.

00:29:26.520 You know, that's not just some Pope or even some saint, or even the great saint translator of the Bible, St. Jerome.

00:29:33.560 Does 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.

00:29:48.900 Yeah, well, I think what I would say is that, you know, you have these ancient canon lists.

00:29:53.920 And 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.

00:30:02.460 And 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.

00:30:12.200 The Council of Rome is not an ecumenical council, it's a local council.

00:30:15.240 And so it has no kind of official binding in terms of that.

00:30:19.260 I think what we can say is that early Christians provide these canon lists to provide at least some degree of clarity.

00:30:25.400 I 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.

00:30:36.020 I 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.

00:30:50.360 That which we pull theological dogma in terms of faith and practice for the church.

00:30:56.540 But 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.

00:31:08.640 And 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.

00:31:22.040 But the historical precedence for both canons, I think, is there.

00:31:26.940 I think that it's more on my side than is on your side, Michael.

00:31:29.560 But 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.

00:31:38.420 And then you have, from a Roman Catholic perspective, an infallible proclamation on what is canon.

00:31:44.440 And even, you know, deutero-canonical, that's second in terms of reception, not in authority.

00:31:50.140 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:50.880 Now, 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.

00:31:59.300 What 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.

00:32:15.700 The emerald tablets, which I really only know with reference to like medieval alchemy and all sorts of weird esoteric writing.

00:32:24.080 But 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.

00:32:40.600 The book of Enoch included in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, but not in the Catholic canon or the Protestant canon.

00:32:47.340 Enoch 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.

00:32:57.440 Was that confusing enough?

00:32:59.040 Yeah, I think I got a little bit dizzy from all of the connections that are being made across large spans of time.

00:33:04.000 What I would say is in terms of reliability, Enoch has far more ancient historical reliability than the emerald tablets.

00:33:12.260 And 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.

00:33:18.680 That's actually, though, completely different from the emerald tablets of Thoth.

00:33:22.440 The emerald tablets of Thoth were invented in 1925 by this guy named Maurice Doriel, who considered himself a self-taught Egyptologist.

00:33:33.540 And 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.

00:33:42.860 And then he produced a translation of said document.

00:33:45.260 Now, his tablets disappeared, which is always convenient when these people come up with these things.

00:33:51.140 But and and so no one could evaluate them.

00:33:54.740 All he had was his translation, but he never actually produced any evidence of the tablets, merely told people that he did.

00:34:01.040 And 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.

00:34:10.640 And actually, later on, he changed his story and said that they they were by divine dictation, by some sort of spirit guide.

00:34:19.220 Classic.

00:34:19.980 Many such cases over the course of history.

00:34:22.020 Now, how did they relate the thing that this guy made up in the 20s?

00:34:24.800 How does that relate to the emerald tablets as this kind of weird, quasi magical, you know, alchemaic text from the Middle Ages?

00:34:33.240 Or just doesn't relate at all?

00:34:35.240 So I think what there are there's this tradition of an emerald tab.

00:34:39.140 Now, that's the emerald tablet.

00:34:41.780 So it's a singular, whereas the emerald tablets of Thoth are plural.

00:34:45.280 So Maurice Doriel said that he found multiple of these and he translated them into these documents.

00:34:48.920 But the emerald tablet in terms of the alchemaic document is a single tablet.

00:34:55.040 And that has it pops up in the like middle, Middle Ages.

00:34:58.780 And there's different versions of it that claim to go back into antiquity.

00:35:05.920 But like everything else, in terms of the tradition of alchemy, they're really not.

00:35:12.940 It's a little sus.

00:35:14.300 Yeah, that's right.

00:35:15.600 And so Thoth is the god of knowledge in ancient Egypt.

00:35:21.460 And so I think what the connections are between like Melchizedek and Enoch is that you have these traditions of people within the ancient world.

00:35:30.380 You know, Melchizedek in Genesis is then played upon to, by the author of Hebrews, to say that he has no beginning or no end.

00:35:38.080 Maybe that's the connection.

00:35:39.620 Enoch is this kind of elusive character.

00:35:42.260 He's the great grandfather of Noah.

00:35:43.880 It says he walked with God and he talked with God and then he was no more.

00:35:46.520 Sort of alluding to the fact that he never died.

00:35:48.680 He was taken physically to heaven.

00:35:50.700 But maybe that's the connection.

00:35:52.700 Other than that, I really couldn't draw any linear lines between the dots because I think the emerald tablets are made up anyways.

00:35:58.440 What about, okay, that's good.

00:35:59.820 That all makes sense and affirms my priors, which is what I look for in any good answer.

00:36:04.760 But 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?

00:36:17.560 Why is it only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

00:36:19.700 And why, one, who wrote it?

00:36:22.400 Was it Enoch or is it pseudepigraphal?

00:36:24.040 And, 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?

00:36:38.060 And 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?

00:36:45.980 Yeah, so the book of Enoch that we have, which is usually first Enoch, there's actually a first, second, then third Enoch.

00:36:52.560 But 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.

00:36:59.420 And so that's the one that claims to be talking about Enoch, the grandfather of Noah.

00:37:05.480 Now, we know from the Jewish tradition that there is no overt indication that anybody actually considered it as having origins in divine inspiration.

00:37:14.660 In 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.

00:37:27.140 So it could not have been written before, you know, Moses compiling the Torah.

00:37:33.200 So it couldn't really be written by Enoch.

00:37:35.440 No, and there are actually problematic texts within the book of Enoch.

00:37:39.160 Enoch 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.

00:37:52.660 So 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.

00:38:05.740 At 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.

00:38:20.280 They're, you know, second century BC.

00:38:22.400 But there are sections in Coptic that are contemporaneous with the New Testament authors, and it comes all together in what we call first Enoch.

00:38:31.560 But it is kind of an amalgamation where we can say there are some books, Book of the Watchers, Book of the Giants.

00:38:37.120 Those are genuinely ancient, but they also show indications internally of coming from the Hellenistic period.

00:38:44.320 They refer to timekeeping that appears to be influenced by the Greek timekeeping.

00:38:50.000 It also refers to places that only exist after the Exodus period.

00:38:55.860 So it talks about Mount Sinai, which would not have been, you know, known in, you know, a pre-prood era.

00:39:06.700 So I think there are some things, you know, it's very interesting.

00:39:09.740 It'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?

00:39:18.580 What's going on with these supernatural creatures that we refer to as angels and demons and seraphim and Nephilim?

00:39:26.760 So in one sense, there's kind of some, like, thinking out loud that's going on in the Book of Enoch.

00:39:33.260 And it clearly is a very popular book.

00:39:36.500 It's debated whether Jude quotes it officially or just alludes to something that's going on there.

00:39:43.340 Because what Jude includes is not necessarily a quotation that we can find from any of the Enochian documents.

00:39:51.520 But he's clearly referring to something that his audience is aware of.

00:39:55.020 But I would also point to the fact that Paul quotes Greek philosophers.

00:39:59.120 He quotes Menander as he quotes a hymn to Zeus.

00:40:03.620 And 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.

00:40:10.040 Yes.

00:40:10.380 Yeah, I think that's kind of what really knocks it down is pointing to the Book of Acts and saying,

00:40:16.340 well, I don't know if Paul can quote pagans.

00:40:18.460 I think, you know, clearly a canonical book can refer to something that's not canonical.

00:40:25.060 Now, speaking of the pagans, what do you make, and we alluded to it a little bit earlier,

00:40:30.660 of the claim that you hear ad nauseum, especially around Christmastime,

00:40:34.400 when people bring up, you know, the Feast of the Unconquered Sun or Mithras or whatever, Saturnalia,

00:40:39.460 that our Lord is actually just a copy or a composite of pagan gods.

00:40:45.440 Mithras, Horus, Dionysus, I don't know, whoever else.

00:40:50.380 What do you make of it? Is our Lord just a facsimile of a pagan demon or something?

00:40:58.560 Yeah, well, the simple answer is no.

00:41:00.540 But the longer answer is that in order to establish that, you really need to show, once again, causation, right?

00:41:08.460 Not just correlation.

00:41:09.580 We can find correlative patterns all over the place.

00:41:14.320 We could pick on them and capitalize on them.

00:41:16.840 I am using a microphone.

00:41:19.380 Michael, you are using a microphone.

00:41:21.020 I am in an office studio.

00:41:22.320 Michael, you are in an office studio.

00:41:23.860 I bet you have a laptop in your room.

00:41:25.560 You know, we're both wearing shirts and pants.

00:41:27.980 You know, ah, interesting.

00:41:29.040 You don't know that for a fact, Wes.

00:41:30.580 You know about the shirt.

00:41:31.600 You don't know that for a fact.

00:41:32.940 We don't know that about either of us.

00:41:34.180 Let's just assume that we're both wearing pants.

00:41:36.600 We both are drinking from tumblers, mugs, you know.

00:41:40.840 So, we could draw all these correlations and say, well, Wes Huff doesn't actually exist.

00:41:46.820 He is just a copy of the far more popular, far more influential Michael Knowles.

00:41:51.860 He's just a Protestant version.

00:41:53.300 And the Protestants wanted their own Michael Knowles. 0.64

00:41:55.300 And so, they created this fabrication.

00:41:58.460 People say this all the time.

00:41:59.440 I see it all over the internet.

00:42:00.660 They say, this Wes Huff.

00:42:01.920 And he's got that Jordan Peterson accent on there to make him even more popular.

00:42:06.020 Yeah, that's right.

00:42:07.360 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:07.940 Take all the best bits.

00:42:08.720 Okay, and so, but that's not a coherent argument.

00:42:13.120 It's just correlations.

00:42:15.240 It's if you want to find parallels, you don't find parallels all over the place.

00:42:19.320 I've even seen some as simple as Horus gets in a boat and Jesus gets in a boat. 0.55

00:42:24.900 Gotcha, Christian. 0.87

00:42:26.180 And so, we really need to, we need to show causative links.

00:42:29.280 And a lot of these really fall apart when you start looking at the specifics.

00:42:32.640 You know, okay, what's going on with Mithras?

00:42:34.800 Was Mithras virgin born?

00:42:36.100 Well, all of the stories that we have say, you know, either nothing about his birth or

00:42:40.180 that he came from a rock.

00:42:41.620 Well, not really what I consider a virgin, you know, birth.

00:42:45.720 Or, you know, he was created out of nothing from Zahora Mazda.

00:42:49.760 Okay.

00:42:50.340 Well, you know, that's not what I believe about, you know, the physicality of the incarnation.

00:42:55.060 So, it's in the specifics where these things die, in that you can find all sorts of parallels.

00:43:02.180 But once again, Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

00:43:04.200 If we want to paint those targets around those closest clusters, we can do that, but it's

00:43:09.620 going to ignore all of the shots that are all, the hundreds of more potential shots that

00:43:14.720 are all over the other side of the barn, as opposed to the five shots that I'm drawing

00:43:19.420 my target around.

00:43:20.280 There's so much more to say.

00:43:21.540 First, though, go to preborn.com slash Knowles.

00:43:23.480 During this holy season, I would like to take a moment to think about something amazing,

00:43:26.940 and that is you.

00:43:28.940 Psalms tells us that God carefully knit you together in your mother's womb.

00:43:33.020 He saw who you were meant to be before you even existed.

00:43:35.540 At Preborn Ministries, they believe each person is made in God's image and that all life is

00:43:39.620 sacred and eternal.

00:43:40.580 Maybe not all pregnancies are planned.

00:43:42.160 That's okay.

00:43:42.840 Whether planned or not, all life has value, and God has a purpose for everyone each day

00:43:47.380 that they're here.

00:43:47.900 Today, I invite you to thank God for the gift of life and to remember the babies still

00:43:51.540 in their mother's wombs. 0.81

00:43:52.880 Their lives matter, too.

00:43:54.000 Last year alone, Preborn's network of clinics helped save over 67,000 babies from abortion.

00:43:59.020 Your tax-deductible donation of $28 sponsors one ultrasound, which doubles baby's chance

00:44:04.080 at life.

00:44:04.760 When a woman sees her baby on an ultrasound, she becomes 100% more likely to preserve her 0.69

00:44:10.600 baby's life.

00:44:11.340 How many lives can you help save today?

00:44:13.380 To donate, just dial pound 250, say keyword baby, or visit preborn.com slash Knowles.

00:44:18.600 To make a donation, I strongly encourage you to give what you can, whatever it is.

00:44:22.820 I don't care if it's $2.

00:44:23.740 Whatever you can, go to preborn.com slash Knowles.

00:44:26.280 Thank you for supporting this life-saving work.

00:44:28.820 Okay.

00:44:29.200 Now, what do you say about a similar claim?

00:44:32.200 that the Trinity is not in Scripture, that the Trinity is actually just invented centuries

00:44:39.200 later.

00:44:40.500 And I mean, you know, you do actually hear this from people who today would call themselves

00:44:45.120 Christian.

00:44:46.000 Small group, but still, you do hear that, who deny the Trinity, which, as far as I'm concerned,

00:44:51.020 is the central mystery of the faith.

00:44:53.900 Yeah, I would agree.

00:44:55.880 I don't think you can have Christianity without Trinitarianism. 0.86

00:44:58.900 I think the Father sending the Son in the power of the Spirit and the self-giving of

00:45:05.600 himself and then empowering believers to then live a Christ-filled life is essential

00:45:10.860 to the Christian faith.

00:45:12.420 I don't think you can have anything other than that and it be historical, biblical Christianity.

00:45:17.740 Now, this accusation often goes in kind of the vein of people saying that the word Trinity

00:45:22.400 is not in the Bible, which I'm totally fine with because the word monotheism is not in

00:45:26.800 the Bible either.

00:45:27.520 And the Bible is clearly monotheistic, right?

00:45:30.700 So it's not that we have to find.

00:45:33.260 It's kind of the fallacy of specificity in terms of language.

00:45:36.920 The early Christians are coming up with ideas. 0.94

00:45:40.320 Okay, the Father is described as Yahweh God, the Son is described as Yahweh God, and the Spirit

00:45:46.040 is described as Yahweh God.

00:45:47.480 We don't believe in three Yahwehs, right? 0.91

00:45:49.680 Only one Yahweh. 0.98

00:45:51.020 Here, Israel, the Lord is God.

00:45:52.440 The Lord is one God.

00:45:53.500 So how do we then parse this out in a way that is coherent, that is theologically and

00:45:59.680 philosophically valid?

00:46:01.820 And so that's what you get in terms of the Trinitarian conversations.

00:46:06.360 But I think it's all there.

00:46:07.920 One of my favorite ways of describing this is by the scholars Rob Bowman and Ed Kamazowski,

00:46:13.180 who actually just published an updated version of their book, Christ and His Critics, in that

00:46:18.460 they come up with this acronym HANDS, H-A-N-D-S, that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are

00:46:23.880 all given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat of God.

00:46:27.980 And if you go through, you can find all of those in describing God.

00:46:31.840 The Father is given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat.

00:46:34.280 The Son is given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat.

00:46:36.560 And the Spirit is given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat.

00:46:39.160 And those are things that are only given to God we see throughout the Old Testament.

00:46:43.940 And I would even argue that God is complex within His unity in the Old Testament too.

00:46:49.280 And that the ancient Jews would not have had a problem with this because you get passages

00:46:53.700 where Abraham is dialoguing by the Oaks of Mamre with Yahweh.

00:46:59.600 And then Yahweh goes on after the two other angels have gone down to Sodom and Gomorrah.

00:47:05.040 And then it says, I believe it's in Genesis 18 or 19, where it says,

00:47:08.740 Yahweh on earth rains fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven. 0.90

00:47:12.160 You're like, wait, hold on.

00:47:13.940 There aren't two Yahwehs. 0.97

00:47:15.120 So what's going on there?

00:47:16.600 And throughout the Old Testament, you have the presence of God in the Shekinah glory on

00:47:22.680 the ark.

00:47:23.260 And yet God is ruling and reigning in heaven.

00:47:25.500 So there's a tangible presence that is on earth.

00:47:29.020 And there is a presence that is ruling the universe in glory, we would say, as the Father,

00:47:34.800 right?

00:47:35.020 We could argue that that's like a pre-incarnate.

00:47:37.100 It's a Christography, right?

00:47:42.060 You have theophanies, you have Christophanies.

00:47:44.660 And so I think God within his complex unity is described all throughout the Bible, all of

00:47:54.480 the books of the Bible, Old and New Testaments.

00:47:56.160 But then it's found in its culmination in describing, right?

00:47:59.320 John 1.14, you know, the word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us.

00:48:03.520 But then John 1.18, that no one has ever seen God at any point in time.

00:48:08.480 And yet the one and only God, he has made him, who is in the bosom of the Father, he

00:48:14.380 has made him known.

00:48:15.600 He's exegeted him is actually the word in Greek.

00:48:17.800 He brings out who the Father is.

00:48:20.220 And so the Trinity is all there, right down to Jesus's baptism, where the Father, you

00:48:25.100 know, is heard from heaven, the Spirit descends, and then you have the Son being baptized.

00:48:28.920 And then we're told to then baptize in the onema, the singular noun name of the Father,

00:48:35.020 the Son, and the Spirit.

00:48:36.180 And so you have the one name, but then three persons are described.

00:48:39.900 And it doesn't really seem to matter if the word Trinity shows up, because you know

00:48:42.800 what else is not named in the Bible, it occurs to me?

00:48:46.240 The Bible.

00:48:47.100 The Bible is not named in the Bible.

00:48:48.700 Well, there's no list of canon in the Bible, and yet we all think that the Bible matters

00:48:53.140 to the faith, don't we?

00:48:55.060 Yeah, I think we, you know, these demands of specificity miss the point in that we can

00:49:01.340 come up with language.

00:49:02.640 I believe in the hypostatic union, and that doesn't mean that I'm going outside of the

00:49:08.140 Bible and that I'm limited to biblical language.

00:49:12.020 I think that's a rather foolish argument to, you know, constrain our ability to describe

00:49:18.000 what's going on in Scripture simply by Scripture.

00:49:21.260 That doesn't mean that Scripture isn't sufficient.

00:49:24.100 It just means that there are ways that we kind of come up with how we describe the truth

00:49:29.040 that's in there, but describe it in a way that is understood.

00:49:31.900 Now, okay, now on inclusion and exclusion from the Bible, what about the claim that the story

00:49:37.440 of the woman who's caught in adultery, who's about to be stoned, is not found in the earliest

00:49:43.640 copies of Scripture that we have?

00:49:45.840 Yeah, so that is actually true.

00:49:47.780 And I would say, you know, I have an article on my website called, My Favorite Verse in

00:49:52.120 the Bible That's Not in the Bible.

00:49:54.000 And that's this passage, right?

00:49:56.000 John 7, 53 through 8, 11.

00:49:58.500 It's known as the Pericope Adultery. 1.00

00:50:00.340 And it's not found in any of the manuscripts prior to the fifth century.

00:50:04.060 And the first time it appears is in a document called Codex Beza.

00:50:07.300 And it does, in a few important medieval manuscripts that contain the story, like there's

00:50:15.220 the 12th century minuscule one, the story is placed after the Gospel of John is finished.

00:50:20.260 And then the scribe in minuscule one has an explanatory note stating that the story isn't

00:50:25.360 found in any of the manuscripts that he has, and it's not in the possession of the references

00:50:30.400 of the Church Fathers.

00:50:31.620 And I think he mentions John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria.

00:50:34.720 But he says he's aware of this story, and he thinks it sounds like an authentic Jesus

00:50:38.660 story.

00:50:39.160 And there does seem to be precedents in a few quotations from the early Church Fathers.

00:50:42.560 So what do we think is going on here?

00:50:44.480 Well, I don't think John wrote it.

00:50:46.980 I think the language and the syntax and the way that it breaks up the text between the

00:50:51.180 end of chapter 7 and the beginning of chapter 8.

00:50:53.540 Now, remember those chapters and verse divisions are later kind of ascriptions to the text to make

00:50:59.420 it easier to read.

00:51:00.280 Nonetheless, I think it still breaks up the narrative.

00:51:02.400 However, I think what we see within that story that has early precedent within the early Jesus

00:51:08.860 community for some early Christian writers who appear to be quoting it is that it's probably

00:51:14.160 an authentic Jesus story.

00:51:15.380 It just wasn't written down by John.

00:51:16.880 And so in that sense, I treat it like I treat some of the patristics, the early Church Fathers.

00:51:21.620 I think it has value and it has meaning.

00:51:23.560 And even John himself says that he didn't write down everything that Jesus ever did.

00:51:27.860 And if he tried, you know, the sky itself, yeah, it wouldn't be a scroll long enough.

00:51:33.320 So I think we can see from the pattern of what rings true of an authentic Jesus narrative

00:51:40.600 that the story of the woman caught in adultery fits.

00:51:43.220 However, because I do not believe John wrote it, I would kind of hesitate in calling it inspired

00:51:49.060 scripture because I think what God inspired John to write is what was inspired for the gospel

00:51:56.160 of John.

00:51:56.520 However, I am fine with holding it as a story that rings true.

00:52:02.120 I don't actually think we lose anything of the character of Jesus in terms of his forgiving

00:52:07.840 of sins or his care or his humility in terms of that.

00:52:12.840 But it appears to be a beloved story that crops up very early within the second century,

00:52:17.720 but that we have kind of a spotty manuscript history of this particular text throughout the

00:52:24.440 manuscripts and scribes are always putting asterisks beside it and saying something's going on

00:52:29.680 here that we're not totally sure.

00:52:31.400 But scribes usually include things rather than take out things to be safe.

00:52:36.280 And so I think, you know, if I'm preaching at my church and I come over it, I'm going to

00:52:41.600 have a sermon that explains something like textual criticism, how we know what the original text

00:52:47.940 of scripture is and how, you know, these things kind of play out in history.

00:52:52.300 But Michael, I think this is very encouraging that we know exactly what is and isn't in scripture.

00:52:58.980 The only reason why people even doubt the story of the woman caught in adultery is because we are

00:53:03.900 able with such a high degree of confidence to be able to pinpoint what is and isn't scripture

00:53:09.360 or what kind of has a question mark over it.

00:53:11.500 And the vast majority of these are one or two words long.

00:53:16.360 And if you're curious about them, modern English translations have citation notes at the bottom

00:53:21.940 of the page that will tell you what's going on.

00:53:24.000 If you open up to the, you know, John chapter seven or the beginning of chapter eight, your

00:53:31.320 Bible is going to have a citation note there that's going to explain what's going on.

00:53:35.720 So we're honest with the text.

00:53:38.620 And as someone who studies manuscripts and the text, I have an incredible level of encouragement

00:53:44.160 and confidence to know exactly what is and isn't authentic, even if there are some question

00:53:49.300 marks around certain texts, because we have such a rich manuscript tradition within the history

00:53:55.400 of Christianity.

00:53:55.900 Does this cause any problems for you over, say, the inerrancy of scripture?

00:53:59.620 Because for me, as a mackerel snapping papist, I do not exalt private judgment all that high.

00:54:07.140 And where there is a conflict between my private judgment and the magisterium of the church,

00:54:10.900 I defer to the magisterium.

00:54:12.460 You know, listen, I'm not being falsely modest.

00:54:14.460 I'm not the dumbest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the world.

00:54:17.760 And so if, you know, going back to the Council of Rome, as we were discussing earlier, and

00:54:22.260 then all the way up through the Council of Trent, if the church tells me this is the Bible

00:54:26.480 and I can know with certainty that this is the inerrant word of God, I say, okay, I don't

00:54:30.760 need to worry about it anymore.

00:54:32.660 You, delving, you know, professionally into all of these, the minutiae of the minutiae of

00:54:38.460 all of the textual questions that arise in ancient manuscripts, does, when you come across

00:54:44.780 something like the woman who is caught in adultery that doesn't necessarily appear until

00:54:49.980 centuries later, does that ever shake your confidence in principle in the inerrancy of

00:54:56.200 scripture?

00:54:57.700 It doesn't because that which I believe is inspired and inerrant is that which was originally

00:55:02.420 written.

00:55:03.060 And I believe that we can, we can get down to what that is and isn't.

00:55:06.720 I think that we have such a rich tradition that the tenacity of the scribes all the way 1.00

00:55:12.100 out throughout history is able then in 2025 to have me be able to say, I have an incredible

00:55:19.960 level of evidence on my side to ascribe this as what it is.

00:55:24.200 Now, I think you likewise, Michael, can take an ecclesiastical position and say that, you

00:55:29.020 know, there's a rich church tradition that has accepted this.

00:55:32.600 And there are even some Protestants that would take that position as well.

00:55:35.560 And ascribe, say, it's not necessarily what John wrote.

00:55:38.460 There's a reception history that is included within that conversation.

00:55:41.980 Now, I take a differing opinion on that, but I understand that.

00:55:45.340 And I think that if that's the position you're going to take, you also have a lot to go on

00:55:50.100 with that in terms of it being attributed very early on within the early Jesus community

00:55:55.880 with individuals who are then likewise quoting it as something that is authentic about who

00:56:01.520 Jesus is.

00:56:02.600 So where I would say I'm interested in what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote as opposed

00:56:07.080 to scribes later on, I still think both you and I, even though we might take different

00:56:11.680 methodologies to ascribe what is inspiration, both have a lot of evidence on our side for

00:56:17.920 the positions that we take to actually have confidence.

00:56:20.520 Right, right.

00:56:20.960 And I love your point too, which is even if you don't take it as a matter of magisterial

00:56:26.160 authority on any matter of your faith, we know so much about these texts, so the phrase

00:56:34.540 you use, the tenacity of these scribes, that you really can't question a lot of this stuff.

00:56:41.520 It's kind of, if you look into it, you're going to get the right answer.

00:56:44.920 I have a little rapid fire round because we could be chatting for hours, but this pops

00:56:50.660 up every now and again, mostly on like Twitter.

00:56:54.260 I'm not saying this pops up in the scholarly community, but does the Bible teach that the

00:56:59.780 earth is flat?

00:57:01.680 I know, I don't think it does.

00:57:05.100 I think you have a language of perspective that goes on within the ancient world in terms

00:57:13.020 of like talking about the four corners of the world or the four principal winds or the

00:57:17.600 pillars that uphold the earth or God using the earth as a footstool.

00:57:21.640 I don't think because we're operating with phenomenological language that that then means

00:57:27.400 we have to take a hyper-literalistic interpretation.

00:57:30.260 In the same way that if you, Michael, you know, prior to the program were telling me about amazing

00:57:36.060 sunrise you saw and how beautiful it was, I wouldn't go, are you kidding me? 1.00

00:57:40.820 Michael, you're an idiot. 1.00

00:57:41.740 The sun does not rise. 1.00

00:57:42.880 It doesn't rise.

00:57:44.160 The earth is going around the sun.

00:57:46.640 The sun isn't going around the earth. 1.00

00:57:48.100 Are you an idiot? 1.00

00:57:48.980 Don't you know it? 1.00

00:57:50.580 Are you a heliocentrist or, you know, what's going on?

00:57:53.420 Come on.

00:57:54.040 You know, we use phenomenological language to describe things.

00:57:59.760 And I think scripture in particular is largely, it's a looking from the earth up to God in

00:58:09.740 terms of understanding.

00:58:10.860 That doesn't negate that it is divinely inspired.

00:58:13.840 But you look at something.

00:58:15.060 Here's a good way of putting it.

00:58:16.020 Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are looking at who Jesus is from the earth up.

00:58:20.620 And they're emphasizing certain things, which are emphasizing humanity.

00:58:23.680 John is looking from heaven down.

00:58:25.960 And that's why he starts with, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and

00:58:29.080 the word was God.

00:58:29.840 And talks about the Logos being, you know, the creator of all things.

00:58:34.520 And nothing that has been made was not made without him.

00:58:37.460 And so, but we have parts of scripture that are looking from the ground up.

00:58:42.520 And that doesn't compromise its inspiration.

00:58:45.360 But it does mean that it's using language that we understand within our human context,

00:58:52.260 whether that's the ancient Near East, or it's Greco-Roman antiquity, or, you know, how we

00:58:59.140 often talk about things like sunrises or sunsets today.

00:59:02.740 That doesn't mean we're making a statement about cosmology when we're talking about a

00:59:07.640 sunrise.

00:59:08.320 Right, right.

00:59:08.700 So I think we need to be clear.

00:59:09.980 What is being said and communicated?

00:59:12.180 Because some things are prescriptive in that they tell us what to do.

00:59:15.840 Some things are descriptive in that they're telling us what is happening.

00:59:18.680 And some things are emotive.

00:59:20.620 The Psalms and Proverbs are communicating something that is not necessarily meant to be, you know,

00:59:26.380 the same thing as Leviticus, or the same thing as 1 and 2 Kings.

00:59:31.660 So it's a matter of really understanding the genre and then extrapolating that in a way

00:59:37.960 that makes sense of ancient literature that is being written by ancients, but though it

00:59:44.080 is not written to us, it is written for us.

00:59:47.880 And so understanding who it is written to allows us to be able to understand us today

00:59:52.140 and apply it to our lives.

00:59:53.080 You know, there's a good line from Cardinal Baronius on the topic of geocentrism and heliocentrism,

00:59:57.780 which is that the scripture tells us how to get to heaven, not necessarily how the heavens

01:00:02.940 go.

01:00:03.500 Even there was one time a guy came up to me and said, Michael, you really like Dante.

01:00:07.460 And I said, I do really like Dante.

01:00:09.340 And he says, well, do you accept Dante's cosmology?

01:00:12.480 I said, well, you'll have to be a little more specific.

01:00:14.660 What do you mean by Dante's cosmology?

01:00:16.000 He says, well, do you believe the earth is flat?

01:00:17.980 And I thought, wait a second.

01:00:18.640 Now, not only I think are you misreading the Bible here, you're misreading Dante because

01:00:24.960 Dante understands the earth as a sphere.

01:00:27.420 And in Dante's cosmology, Satan falls, goes through the earth, and causes Mount Purgatory

01:00:35.720 to emerge on the other side.

01:00:37.780 So even if you're taking it on like a beautiful medieval poem, most people have known for very

01:00:44.840 long, since antiquity, that the world is round.

01:00:47.220 I'm going to be pilloried in the comments for suggesting that the world is not flat.

01:00:50.820 Next one, the Bible says that dinosaurs did not exist.

01:00:55.400 If you believe in dinosaurs, you cannot be a Christian. 0.99

01:00:58.680 Well, it doesn't say that they don't exist.

01:01:00.620 It just doesn't talk about them at all, right?

01:01:02.220 So absence of evidence is an evidence of absence.

01:01:04.980 And so just because the Bible is not talking about something very specifically, it doesn't

01:01:09.920 mean that it didn't exist.

01:01:11.060 And I think if this is a question about, you know, the age of the earth, then that's kind

01:01:16.380 of a different discussion as it comes to what we're looking at within the pages of scripture.

01:01:22.160 But there are lots of, say, other creatures that the Bible doesn't talk about, that even

01:01:26.980 if you take a young earth perspective, a creationist perspective, and say that the Bible

01:01:31.080 is only, you know, that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and that's how the Bible kind 0.86

01:01:36.020 of communicates it, then I don't think you necessarily have to have the Bible talk about

01:01:42.540 dinosaurs specifically.

01:01:44.700 So I don't really find that an overly convincing argument.

01:01:48.340 The Bible isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of everything that has ever happened or

01:01:51.680 been done.

01:01:52.580 The Bible tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know.

01:01:55.540 And maybe we want to know about dinosaurs, but that is not the purpose of the Bible.

01:01:59.260 Also, it occurs to me that the modern people now, they're trying to argue that dinosaurs

01:02:03.300 were basically just chickens, and they had feathers and everything.

01:02:06.000 And there is at least one chicken in the Bible that caught crows, obviously.

01:02:09.000 So I don't know, maybe there's a little evidence, even for the modern people and the Darwinists.

01:02:14.900 Anyway, who knows?

01:02:16.040 Final one, final on the rapid fire.

01:02:18.940 I really hate, I really, really hate this one. 0.97

01:02:21.060 Most of these don't bother me because they're just kind of silly or whatever.

01:02:23.620 This one really actually bothers me, and it's popularized even in Hollywood movies, that

01:02:28.880 our Lord was married, and in fact, married to Mary Magdalene.

01:02:34.980 You find that anywhere in the Bible?

01:02:38.000 No, it's not in the Bible.

01:02:39.780 It's kind of a hodgepodge.

01:02:41.420 There was a book written called Holy Blood and Holy Grail that kind of first surmised this

01:02:46.180 theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

01:02:49.220 There's also kind of a Nicholas Notrovich, who we were talking about previously, who came

01:02:53.080 up with a theory that Jesus went to India.

01:02:54.560 Some of his followers in the form of like Amadiyah Muslims who don't believe that Jesus

01:02:59.400 was crucified and that he took off to India and he lived and he died there, that he got

01:03:02.980 married and he had children.

01:03:04.820 There's kind of a narrative there as well.

01:03:08.540 Most often in circles that I'm in, you have kind of the connection points between the Gospel

01:03:14.160 of Philip, which talks about Mary in a very kind of almost romantic way with Jesus.

01:03:19.700 And then there was that discovery a few years back by Karen King at Harvard University, the

01:03:25.440 famous Gospel of Jesus' Wife manuscript, which was outed as a clear case forgery.

01:03:32.080 It was the individual who forged it, although he did use authentic material from the fourth

01:03:38.040 century.

01:03:38.920 He made a bit of a mistake in that some of the wording that he was borrowing from the Gospel

01:03:44.440 of Thomas, he was using an online PDF version called Grondin's Interlinear of the text.

01:03:52.800 And there was a typist error in this PDF document of this transcription of the Gospel of Thomas,

01:03:59.360 and he includes it in his forgery.

01:04:02.320 And so we are able to actually pinpoint and say, hold on a minute, mistakes in PDFs don't

01:04:07.800 usually make themselves into ancient manuscripts.

01:04:09.580 Are you sure it was not an ancient PDF?

01:04:12.320 You know, maybe first or second century?

01:04:13.780 Yeah, it's a PDF papyrus document for, I don't know, the folio.

01:04:21.100 Folio.

01:04:21.860 Yeah.

01:04:23.100 So, yeah.

01:04:24.160 So usually people who want in the more conspiratorial side, they'll combine these texts of there's

01:04:30.260 an interpolation in the text of the Gospel of Philip, where it says that that Jesus loved

01:04:36.800 to kiss her on the mouth, but her and mouth are kind of in holes in the manuscript.

01:04:43.280 And so they amalgamate those, and they kind of put this together and put Mary's name in

01:04:48.400 there.

01:04:48.660 And then when the Gospel of Jesus' wife came out, this was used as part of this kind of

01:04:52.820 multivalent argument that, you know, this is also evidence that Jesus was married.

01:04:57.160 There's no historical evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or anyone else otherwise.

01:05:01.840 He was a single celibate individual who was crucified in and around the time of 33 AD.

01:05:08.800 And that's all she wrote.

01:05:10.900 That's what we know.

01:05:11.860 And so in terms of anything else, it is either conspiracy or speculation, and it's not historically

01:05:18.560 reliable.

01:05:19.060 Wes, I really like on that phrase, that's all she wrote, I really like that whenever any 0.99

01:05:24.880 of these stupid ideas come up, I can turn to you. 0.99

01:05:28.280 I'm not saying that you can do it with perfect AI robotic precision, but you seem to know just 1.00

01:05:34.940 about all she wrote about these topics.

01:05:37.520 You seem to have compiled into your mind basically all of the manuscripts.

01:05:42.160 Well, I appreciate that.

01:05:44.440 My wife is sick of listening to me talk about this stuff. 1.00

01:05:46.760 So as long as people like you are still calling me, then I will have an outlet to be able to,

01:05:51.680 because we have a no Greek at the table rule.

01:05:54.100 Who doesn't?

01:05:54.920 Who doesn't?

01:05:55.340 I know.

01:05:55.740 We all do.

01:05:56.540 We're all there.

01:05:58.060 But I appreciate that.

01:05:59.560 I can indeed tell you that there are topics.

01:06:02.220 I'm a Canadian who doesn't watch hockey, so don't ask me hockey questions.

01:06:06.260 Let my country down on that one.

01:06:08.420 But if it's to do with ancient manuscripts or historiography or linguistics, I do my best

01:06:15.420 because I'm just that type of nerd.

01:06:17.580 No, it's really marvelous.

01:06:18.840 That's good.

01:06:19.160 And maybe I'll institute that rule at my own dinner table, the no Greek at the table, which 1.00

01:06:24.280 will be just a terrible problem on soufflaki night if I want a little ouzo after my dinner.

01:06:30.020 But, you know, c'est la vie.

01:06:32.200 I think it's probably right.

01:06:33.920 You know, you keep your scholarship in the scholarly realm and something you've done that's really

01:06:38.240 wonderful.

01:06:38.840 You bring that scholarly realm out to the public to correct so many errors on the Internet and

01:06:44.700 elsewhere.

01:06:45.400 So, Wes, thank you very much for coming on.

01:06:47.380 Everyone should go, obviously, follow Wes if you haven't already.

01:06:50.320 And you should go watch that previous Smackdown that Wes did online, which was great.

01:06:54.960 Wes, I really hope that we can have you back very soon.

01:06:57.640 I know you're busy and you're producing children.

01:07:00.460 Well, your wife is producing children, but you're involved in it too.

01:07:02.680 So, the next time we can get you on to talk more ancient Christianity and debunk more 0.94

01:07:08.460 nonsense, I very much look forward to it.

01:07:11.760 I do too.

01:07:12.640 All right.

01:07:12.900 Thanks, sir.

01:07:13.240 This Men's Mental Health Month, CAMH is confronting a silent crisis.

01:07:22.280 Did you know men account for 75% of all suicide deaths in Canada?

01:07:25.920 Many struggle alone, held back by stigma.

01:07:28.480 But there is hope.

01:07:29.660 CAMH is on the front lines pioneering breakthroughs and expanding access to compassionate support.

01:07:34.520 Your donation fuels this vital work so no father, son, brother, or family is left behind.

01:07:39.160 To join us in building better mental health care for men across Canada, visit camh.ca

01:07:43.960 slash support men.

01:07:45.380 That's C-A-M-H dot C-A slash support men.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 26, 2025

Wes Huff DEBUNKS Top 10 Bible Lies with Michael Knowles

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript