Wes Huff Embarrassed Himself on Shawn Ryan

Reformed Baptist theologian and one of the sharpest voices defending historical reliability of the Bible and our Christian faith is actually admitting that there's some sort of moral law and a moral law needs a moral lawgiver. And so ultimately I talked to a lot of people who almost assume that taking God out of the picture solves the problem. I think it actually makes it more complicated.

God is in control and we could trust him even when things aren't going the way. He's either a liar and a con man. He's either a lunatic and he's crazy or he's the creator of the universe and he's Lord.

What's up everybody? Derek Lambert here. Welcome to Myth Vision. I'm going in on West Huff like I've never done before. However, I need to talk directly to Shawn Ryan for a second. Shawn, I'm the son of a retired master sergeant, Michael J. a Lambert. He spent 36 years in special operations, Ranger, special forces, the whole nine. I respect your service and I respect your hard work for the platform that you built. But I'm going to be very straight with you, brother. You got hustled. Honestly, bullshitted. Wes Huff sat across from you and ran the oldest con in apologetics. He sounds confident. He sounds smart. He drops names and dates and manuscripts and none of your audience has any way to check a single word of it or likely won't. So that's what I'm doing here. You see, Wes Huff has been doing the podcast circuit diary of a CEO, Joe Rogan, now you. And he's getting zero push back. Nobody's bringing the actual critical scholarship. So, if these platforms want to serve their audienc's unchecked apologetic propaganda or then I'm left with no choice but to bring the receipts. And let me tell you, I have a lot of receipts. Every section of this video, I play Wes's own words, then I bring the peer-reviewed scholarship, the primary sources, and the quotes from the actual experts. No strawman, no ambushes, just Wes Huff versus the Academy in common sense in my opinion. Let's see how that goes.

Reformed Baptist theologian and one of the sharpest voices defending historical reliability of the Bible and our Christian faith. You approach skeptics with clarity, grace, and rock solid evidence, making the case that the Bible isn't just a book of faith. It's the most scrutinized and preserved text in human history in the time frame it's claiming to be written. And when we use that exact same methodology and criteria for something like the Gospel of Judas, guess what? It reveals that the names, the places, the details outed as being written in 3rd century Egypt. And so you're like when you ask, well, what is the piece of evidence? I think I think it's a multi-valent web.

So, we're barely one minute into this interview, and Shawn is already reading from a script, almost certainly provided by Wes's team, declaring the Bible the most preserved text in human history. And Wes just sits there and lets it ride. This is one of the single most repeated apologetic talking points on Earth. And I'm so tired of watching smart people get suckered by it. Yes, the New Testament has roughly 5,800 surviving Greek manuscripts, more than any other ancient work. But here's what that actually means. We have 5,800 handwritten copies that disagree with each other hundreds of thousands of times. Bartman puts it right in misquing Jesus Harper 1 2005 book. We have only errorridden copies and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them evidently in thousands of ways. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Let me translate that for the audience. There are approximately 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament. There are between 300,000 and 400,000 textual variants across the manuscripts. And there are some estimates that increase that number. That means that there are roughly three disagreements for every single word. And we do not possess the original of a single New Testament book. Not one. Zero originals. Our earliest substantial manuscripts are from around 200 of the common era. over a century after the events. We aren't really certain what the originals have in them, though educated guesses are made by many scholars. But if someone changed anything early on before the manuscript or petristic evidence we have, we cannot be sure of anything. It's worth noting that experts like M. David Litwa and James Barker both suggest that so much changing of materials happened during this period in competition with other Christian groups. It literally was like the wild west. Many early Petristics clearly are using books that are not in our New Testament and would later be deemed heretical or not scripture. This is all before the canon. Compare that to let's say Mesopotamian Kuneaform tablets preserved in their original medium by the original scribes from thousands of years earlier. Even the Quran was standardized under Khalif Uman within roughly 20 years of Muhammad's death. Variant copies were destroyed to ensure uniformity and there has been an unbroken oral memorization tradition running parallel to the written text from very early on. The New Testament has none of that. No standardization, no parallel memorization chain, no authorized addition until later. So saying most preserved, that's something you say at a conference to maybe sell books or something. It's not something you say in a peer-reviewed journal. That's for sure. Arman asks the obvious question in the same book. If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don't have the very words of scripture? He has an excellent point.

But by the way, and this is a sidetrack, this whole issue reminds me of when Wes Huff messed up so badly he had to delete a video from the internet. For those of you who are ill-informed or don't know, he made a video trying to take down Neil Sinlac from Gnostic Informant on the ending of Mark. And he embarrassed himself because he clearly didn't understand the textual evidence. Mark's gospel originally ended at chapter 16:8. The women flee the tomb in terror and tell no one. That's it. No resurrection appearances, no great commission. The entire ending of Mark 16:9-20 was added by later scribes. This is the consensus of Bruce Mezer in his textual commentary on the Greek New Testament uh his second edition in 1994. And it's also of Adidel Yarbo Collins and her mark a commentary Hermana Fortress Press 2007 and of virtually every critical textual scholar alive. So Wes made a video trying to come after Neil Sinlac, Gnostic informant, for what he said on Danny Jones podcast about the longer ending of Mark with no resurrection appearances and Wes embarrassed himself on camera. Good thing we still have that footage. You call you got famous overnight for showing that Billy Carson was lying about the Sinai Bible. Here you are lying about the Sinai Bible, too. The top manuscript Wesley Huff uses for his argument that the gaps at the end signify that Mark should have the longer ending is in fact the fifth century manuscript codeex Alexandrinus that does have the longer ending. So Wesley Huff is actually throwing on the screen the manuscript with the longer ending not even realizing that he defeated his own argument. I want to let that land. Wes put on a manuscript on screen to prove his point. And it was the very manuscript that already contained the longer ending. He didn't even realize the codeex he was showing his audience was CEX Alexandrinus, which has the long ending with the visible gap. He used the evidence against himself and didn't know it. That's not a difference of opinion. That is an objective checkable mistake that anyone can verify. This is not just his opinion that I disagree with. This is an objective statement that you can go and check for yourself. Here on the screen right now, here is the codecus of the Acts, Luke, Matthew, Mark, John, Revelation. All the endings you just saw, all of them have a space at the end. >> Where are those long endings and short endings? >> Yeah. Not only that, Codex Vaticanis, Mark, Matthew, John, Corinthians, Acts, Revelation, Codex, Alexandrius, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Romans, Corinthians, Acts, Revelation. All of them have a space at the end. That is the smoking gun. Every single book in those cotices has a space at the end. Mark's space is not special. It is not a placeholder for a missing ending. It is how scribes formatted the end of every book. Wes saw a gap and built an entire argument on it without understanding what he was looking at. >> In the oldest manuscripts, he doesn't come back. It literally ends tragically with the women weeping at the tomb. >> And notice what Wes does here. He admits the oldest manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20. >> So, this is partly true, but mostly false. What is true is that the oldest copies of the Gospel of Mark do not include the verses after 16:8. 16 9-20 are absent from the earliest copies of Mark that we have. But that doesn't mean that Jesus's resurrection account is absent. In 16:6, two entire verses before the cut off of the earliest manuscripts. You still have the angel looking at the women who came to the tomb saying, "Do not be afraid. You're looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He is not here. He has risen." He concedes the point, but then he tries to rescue it by saying, "Well, the angel still says Jesus is risen in verse 6." Sure, Wes, the angel announces it, but there are no postresurrection appearances of Jesus in the original Mark. That was Neil's whole point. No one sees him. No one talks to him. The women flee in fear, in terror and tell no one, literally no one. That is how the earliest gospel ends. And the fact that later scribes felt the need to add 12 more verses tells you they thought that ending was a problem, too. And look, Wes got destroyed on this and he scrubbed the video from the internet. But that's not all, ladies and gentlemen. There are also other additions to the New Testament like John 7:53-811 with the woman caught in adultery that's not in the earliest manuscripts. First John 5:7-8, the Johannine comma, the clearest trinitarian proof text in the entire Bible, is a medieval Latin insertion not found in any Greek manuscript before the 14th century. These aren't typos. These are entire passages someone made up and shoved into the text.

But Wes doesn't just oversell preservation. He hides the fact that the tradition he's calling preserved is loaded with internal contradictions that tell fundamentally different stories. This is the part that really really grabs people. So let me lay it out for you. Who went to the tomb? Mark says Mary Magdalene. Mary the mother of James and Salomi. Mark 16:1. Matthew says Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. Matthew 28:1. Luke says Mary Magdalene Joanna Mary the mother of James and the other women. Luke 24:10. And John says Mary Magdalene went alone. John 20:1. Four gospels, four different answers to the simplest possible question. Who showed up? You can look at the graph on your screen to get a better understanding. Pause it if you'd like. What did they find? Mark says, "One young man sitting inside the tomb." Mark 16:5. Matthew says, "One angel who descended from heaven and rolled the stone away while they watched, causing an earthquake." In Matthew 28:23, Luke says, "Two men in gleaming clothes standing inside." Luke 24:4, John says, "Two angels sitting inside, one at the head and one at the foot." John 20:12. Is it one figure or two, a man or an angel, inside the tomb or outside the tomb, sitting or standing? The accounts can agree. And even from Mark to Matthew, Mark has the tomb already open. Matthew, the stone is still in place when they appear and the angel has to roll it away. Which is it? Stone covering the tomb, stone not covering the tomb. And that's just between Mark and Matthew. Feel free to pause the screen and check out the graph that we have so you could see some of the differences. Where did Jesus appear? In Matthew, Jesus appears to the disciples on a mountain in Galilee. Matthew 28:16-17. In Luke, Jesus explicitly tells the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and not leave. Luke 24:49. And he appears to them there. Luke's Jesus never goes to Galilee after the resurrection. Matthew's Jesus never appears in Jerusalem. These aren't minor details. They are mutually exclusive locations for the most important event in Christianity. Kind of a big deal, especially when you want us to buy and put our whole life's devotion into such a story. When did Jesus ascend? Luke 24 has Jesus ascending into heaven the same day as the resurrection, Easter Sunday. Luke 24:50-51. But the same author writing Acts says Jesus appeared to the disciples over a 40day period before ascending. Acts 13 and 1:9. The same author, two different timelines. And in Matthew, there is no ascension at all. The gospel just ends with Jesus on a mountain and disciples, some of them doubting and not even knowing what to make of it. What were Jesus's last words? In Mark, Jesus's last words on the cross are, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Mark 15:34. In Luke, it is, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." Luke 23:46. In John, it is finished. John 19:30. Three different final statements. Which one did he actually say? And here's one apologists almost never touch. They hate this. Was Jesus crucified on the day of Passover or on the day before? In the synoptic gospel traditions, Mark 14:12-16 and the parallels, the last supper is a Passover meal, meaning Jesus is crucified the day after Passover begins. In John 19:14, Jesus is crucified on the day of preparation for the Passover, meaning the Passover meal has not yet happened. John explicitly changes the timeline so that Jesus dies at the same hour the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the temple. Because John's theology represents Jesus as the lamb of God. It's a theological choice, not a historical report. They cannot both be right. Jesus cannot be crucified on the day before and the day of. As Airman writes in Jesus interrupted revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible. Harper 1 2009. The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture finally and ultimately until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been pinned. And as he puts it even more blunt regarding the resurrection accounts, some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled unless you want to do a lot of imaginative interpretive gymnastics of the kind fundamentalists love to do when reading the texts. So ladies and gentlemen, this is the most preserved text in history. This is the text with mindblowing fidelity. The gospels cannot agree on who went to the tomb, what they found there, where Jesus appeared, what his last words were, when he ascended, or even what day he was crucified. If four witnesses gave this testimony in a courtroom, the case would be thrown out. But Wes Huff calls it rock solid evidence. Wes, give me a break.

I I think the fact that we understand that evil is something speaks to the fact that there is an objective evil to be outbalanced by an objective good. Cuz in one sense, there's this understanding that if you subjectivize evil, then we can say we don't like those things that that they really, you know, shouldn't happen. But to say that that we need to stop them, that these are objectively evil is actually admitting that there's some sort of moral law. And a moral law needs a moral lawgiver. And so ultimately I talked to a lot of people who almost assume that taking God out of the picture solves the problem. I think it actually makes it more complicated. It makes it more complicated because now you're you've removed the objective standard by which to actually say something is truly objectively evil. And so when that time comes after the Exodus, they're going to the land. The people are bad. They're bad. They're evil. And so God judges them. And a lot of the time I will have, you know, skeptics, atheists, agnostics talk about, you know, if God is so good, why doesn't he do anything in the world? You know, why isn't he stopping evil?

I want everyone to stop and absorb what Wes Huff just said. He looked into a camera and told you that God commanding the extermination of men, women, children, and even infants is an example of God stopping evil. The slaughter of babies is divine justice. And he said it casually like he was ordering coffee. This is the moral framework he wants to sell you. And it's horseshit. I'm going to be blunt. It's horshit. Westes believes God causes all things as a Calvinist, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, and he would believe God is hardening the hearts of those people in the land from repenting so he can keep his promise to Abraham about the land and descendants. You see, the Euthifro dilemma from Plato's dialogue written around 399 B.CE destroys this. Is something good because God says so? Or does God say so because it is good? If the first morality is God's arbitrary whim and baby killing becomes moral if God says so. If the second the good exists independently and God is unnecessary, there is no escape. Walter Sinnate Armstrong in morality without God. Oxford University Press 2009 puts it simply, "We don't need a divine lawgiver to ground morality any more than we need a divine mathematician to ground mathematics." Eric Wallenburgg in robust ethics, Oxford University Press, 2014, provides a rigorous philosophical framework for moral realism without any deity at all. Now, let's look at the moral laws of Wes's God. Now, go attack the Amalachites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them. Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. Now kill all the boys and kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Save the virgin girls for yourselves. That's not me making this up. That is a direct command from God in the Bible. And Wesley Huff is defending this as the foundation of morality. Now, Wes tries to justify all of this at around 2 hours 7 minutes 43 seconds by saying, "God gave the Amorites 400 years to repent, but the sins of the Amorites has not come to its full fruition. So, you're going to wait 400 years." And he wait, they wait 400 years for those people to repent. Think about that. The babies being killed weren't alive 400 years ago. They weren't alive 40 years ago. They were newborns. What were they repenting of? Being born in the wrong place? I mean, it's ridiculous. But let's take Wes seriously for a second. Let's look at this 400year patience idea. His own Bible destroys it. Deuteronomy 20:10-12. When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. Holy Can you imagine that happening to us and we would just start working for someone who invaded us? Anyway, so for far away cities, God says, "Offer a deal first." But for the Canaanite cities, different rules entirely. Deuteronomy 20:16-17. However, in the cities of the nations, the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them, the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Parizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Kill everything that breathes. No deal offered, no chance to surrender, no white flag accepted. So what were the 400 years for, Wes? There was never an option to repent. The door was locked from the start. And it gets worse. Joshua 11:20. For it was the Lord himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the Lord had commanded Moses. God made them fight. He reached in and hardened their hearts so they would go to war instead of surrendering. Why? So he could wipe them out completely. You cannot say God gave them time to change and then also admit that God personally made sure they wouldn't change. Deuteronomy 2:30, "But Sehon, king of Heshban, refused to let us pass through, for the Lord your God had made his spirit stubborn and his heart obstinate in order to give him into your hands." Same thing, totally different king. God made Sehon stubborn on purpose so there would be a reason to destroy him. That isn't patience. That's literally setup.

Now, here's where it gets really bad for Wes specifically because Wes is a Calvinist. For those who don't know, Calvinism teaches that humans are so broken by sin that no one can choose God on their own. God has to choose you first. God decided before the world even existed who would be saved and who wouldn't. And no one can repent. No one can turn to God unless God gives them the ability to do it. Don't take my word for it. Wes's own Bible says it. 2 Timothy 2:25. Opponents must be gently instructed in the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to the knowledge of the truth. Did you see that? God grants repentance. It's a gift. He either gives you or he doesn't. So, think about what Wes is actually arguing. He says the Canaanites had 400 years to repent, but his own theology says they couldn't repent unless God made them do it. Did God do that? No. According to Joshua 11:20, God did the exact opposite. He hardened them. So on Wes's own belief system, God decided these people would be destroyed. Never gave them the ability to repent. actively hardened their hearts to make sure they'd resist and then ordered their extermination, including babies. Holy As punishment for doing exactly what God made them do. That's not justice. That's a rigged game. And what about the children? Ezekiel 18:20, the soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. Deuteronomy 24:16, "Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children to be put to death for their parents. Each will die for their own sin." The Bible says right there, "You don't punish kids for what their parents did." But 1st Samuel 15:3 says, "Put to death men and women, children and infants." So which is it? Does God punish children for what previous generations did or doesn't he? Because the Bible says both, and Wes has one to pick. And then there's Numbers 31. We've read it already. Kill every boy. Kill every non-virgin woman, but the virgin girls, keep them for yourselves. Let's not dance around the obvious question. What were soldiers doing with young virgin girls they just orphaned by slaughtering their entire families? The Bible actually answers that question. Deuteronomy 21 10-14. When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails, and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. after she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. You killed her father, you killed her mother, you killed her brothers, you shave her head, you give her 30 days to cry, and then she's yours. That is the merciful version. And this is what Wesley Huff is holding up as the basis for morality. So let's lay it all out. Wes says God was patient and gave them 400 years. But Deuteronomy 20 says no peace still was offered to the Canaanites. Wes says they could have repented. But Joshua 11:20 says God hardened their hearts so they couldn't. Wes's own Calvinist theology says nobody repents unless God lets them. But God didn't let them. He blocked it. Wes's own Bible says, "You don't punish children for what their parents did, but God ordered babies killed." And Wes's own Bible says, "Keep the virgin girls for yourself." Wes, you can spend all day arguing your Bible manuscripts are reliable. And trust me, that is debated. But what good is a wellpreserved copied text when this is what it has to say? You see, Tom Stark eviscerates this unethical in his work, Is God a moral compromiser? 2011, and Hector Avalos documents how these texts fueled real world genocide in fighting words. The origins of religious violence, Prometheus 2005. This is not abstract philosophy. People used these passages to justify the slaughter of indigenous populations across the Americas. European colonizers cited the Canaanite conquest narratives as divine precedent for displacing and exterminating native peoples. And if you think this is ancient history, think again. On October 28th, 2023, as Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before IDF soldiers and quoted Deuteronomy 25:17. You must remember what Amalecch has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember >> he repeated the same reference in a letter to soldiers on November 3rd. For anyone who doesn't know, the biblical command regarding Amalecch is found in 1st Samuel 15:3. The same verse I just showed you before. put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. That is the passage the prime minister of Israel invoked while launching a military operation that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. And it wasn't just Netanyahu. Finance Minister Bazel, and I'm probably butchering names here, said, What?ch. The Israeli newspaper Herets described his comments as a call to genocide. Lud Knesset member Boaz Bismouth posted that the memory of Amalcch must be erased. National security minister bin posted on social media blot out the memory of Amalcch from under heaven. You shall not forget. Israeli soldiers were filmed in December 2023 dancing and singing to wipe off the seed of Amalcch. Defense Minister Yov Galant called Gazins human animals. South Africa cited these statements directly in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January of 2024. A peer-reviewed article published in Degrruder Brill by scholars examining this rhetoric concluded that the biblical Amalcch narrative has functioned as what they called a political theological archetype for constructing the Palestinian as an enemy deserving annihilation. And as the Jewish Currents article facing Amalecch points out, this is not exclusively a Jewish phenomenon. Europeans used the Amalcch passage, of course, as I've pointed out in murdering Native Americans. Hudas used it to justify massacring Totsis. It has also been deployed by Africaners, by Germans, and by colonial powers across the globe. You see, this is what happens when you tell people that God commands genocide and call it justice. These are not hypothetical consequences. These are bodies. These are real children being killed right now while politicians quote the same verses Wes Huff is defending as the objective moral standard of a loving God. And Wes sits across from a Navy sill or former Navy sill and tells him this is what divine justice looks like. That is not a moral framework. That is a theological horror show and it has a body count. Wake the up.

The punishment that was given to our first parents, Adam and Eve, when they ate of the fruit of the the tree of knowledge of good of evil, good and evil. And God said, "If you eat from this, you're going to die was that they did die. They didn't die right then and there, but there was a spiritual brokenness." Let me put it this way. So, when you read Genesis chapter 1, you see all these iterations. You know, God makes the sea and the fish and the land and and the the animals and and the trees and the plants and if you separate the fish from the water, right? It dies. God speaks to the water and it teams with life. But if you separate the fish from the water, it's going to die. The God speaks to the land and it brings forth vegetation and greenery. But if you remove the plant from the soil, it's going to die. Who does God speak to when he creates humans? He speaks to himself. What happens when we remove ourselves from our creator? We die.

Well, this is gorgeous poetry. Wes's beautiful homaly, standing ovation at the Reformed Baptist Convention. One problem. It has nothing to do with what the text of Genesis actually says. Let me read you what Genesis says since apparently you skipped it between sermons. God warns in Genesis 21:17. On the day you eat from it, you will surely die. They eat, they do not die. Then God panics in Genesis 3:22. The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and also take from the tree of life and eat and live forever. Read that. God is worried they will eat from the tree of life and live forever. That is why he expels them. Mortality comes from losing access to the magical tree, not from mystical relationship separation. Wes's analogy is Paul's theology in Romans 5:12 projected backward onto a text that does not say what Paul claims it says. This is preaching dressed up as scholarship. The actual text describes a magical tree that grants eternal life. A motif found throughout the ancient near east. In the epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh finds the plant of immortality and a serpent steals it. Same motif, same cultural world. Mark S. Smith, the priestly vision of Genesis 1, Fortress Press, 2010. Genesis 1, he says, reflects priestly source material from the Babylonian exile, drawing on Mesopotamian cosmology. Also, you really need to check out Dennis Vene and Scott Mcnite, Adam and the Genome, Brazos Press, 2017. Because the human population never dropped below approximately 10,000 individuals, no Adam and Eve bottleneck, as Wes Huff believes. In simple terms, there was never a time where one man and one woman were on this planet. There were always more than one man and woman on the planet, never down to only two humans. Period. And there's no historical fall. Wes's entire theological system depends on a literal first couple. And genetics demolished that. This is a fact. And Wes just ignores the evidence just as he did openly on a diary of a CEO.

Islam has an issue in that there are historical articulations of what's going on in the biblical stories that are just false. So the main one would be in uh uh in the Quran uh surah 147 um it denies the crucifixion. Uh so it it says that uh it has the Jews speaking and saying we crucified Jesus the son of Mary which is kind of an odd thing if the Jews believed he was the Messiah that they were crucifying him. Then it says that uh that he he he was not crucified nor was he killed but it was made to appear to them. And so there's a a face value denial of the crucifixion. Now >> they say that he was real. >> Yes. So Muslims believe in Jesus. In fact, Jesus is mentioned 25 times in the Quran. Uh far more than even Muhammad is mentioned in the Quran. The earliest source material for Jesus are the 27 books that we call the New Testament. Primarily the biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But there are other stories that that are apocryphal in nature that talk about say Jesus what Jesus was like as a child. So there's one called the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas. And the Arab infancy gospel of Thomas has a story about child Jesus. Now this is coming a long time after Jesus. Everyone who knew Jesus was dead by the time these stories were developing. But the biblical gospels are very sparse on what Jesus was like as a child. The Gospel of Luke has a very brief story of Jesus when he's 12 going to the temple with his family and teaching in the temple and Mary and Joseph forget him in Jerusalem and then have to go back. But so so there's a a an a body of literature that pops up that's basically talking about well what was Jesus like as a child? And so infancy narratives become kind of this very popular if you want to call them fanfiction. It's not really like a proper historical designation but kind of like that. And one of these is the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which has a story about Jesus making clay birds by a riverbank. And then some of the Jews get mad at him because it happens to be the Sabbath and he's working on the Sabbath. And so the story goes that he breathes on the birds, they turn into real birds, and the evidence flies away. This story ends up in the Quran. And we know that this is an apocryphal story. We know that it has no historical designation of actually being tied to the first century itinerate Jewish rabbi Jesus of Nazareth that that are in some places that shouldn't be in others. Uh Hmon who is from the book of Esther ends up in the Exodus story as the right-hand man to Pharaoh. Well, there are hundreds of years between the Persian story of Esther and the Egyptian story of Moses and Pharaoh. So there there's confusion and conflation that's going on. And I was at least when I was reading the Quran early on aware of the biblical narratives like Syria and Jordan. He's being exposed to Christians and Jews. And I mean the traditional narrative is that he was illiterate. So he's not reading these stories. He's hearing them orally. But because there's really no exposure to what we call the Old and the New Testaments and even then it's it's up for debate whether they existed in Arabic as Arabic existed in like 7th century Hiji script at that point in time anyways. But he would have been hearing these stories with no kind of discerning ability to differentiate between fables and campfire stories about these characters and what were the actual historically reliable.

I have been calling out Christian apologists on this exact double standard for years and Wes Huff might be the single worst offender I have ever seen. Everything he just said about the Quran applies directly to his own Bible. Not loosely, not kind of, directly. And I'm going to walk through this point by point so there's absolutely no ambiguity about how dishonest this is. Wes makes a huge deal about the Quran containing the story of child Jesus making clay birds and breathing life into them. He correctly identifies this as coming from the infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text written long after Jesus. He uses this to argue that whoever composed the Quran was drawing on unreliable non-cononical sources and therefore the Quran cannot be trusted. Fair enough. But the New Testament does the exact same thing. Let me lay this out clearly. The Epistle of Jude verses 14 and 15 directly quotes the book of one Enoch 1:9. This is not an illusion. This is not a vague echo. Jude explicitly names Enoch and presents the quote as a genuine prophecy. Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied about them. See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone. That is a direct quotation from one Enoch 1:9, a pseudopagraphical text that was not written by the biblical patriarch Enoch. It was composed centuries after the figure it claims to be written by. Jude treats it as a real prophecy from the real Enoch. That is exactly what Wes accuses the Quran of doing with the infancy Gospel of Thomas, using a late pseudocraphical source and treating it as if it is authentic. But see there is more. 2 Timothy 3:8 says, "Just as Janice and Jambers opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth." Who are Janice and Jambers? These names appear nowhere in the Old Testament, not in Exodus, not anywhere. They come from Jewish apocryphal tradition, specifically texts like the Tarum, Pseudo Jonathan, and other extra-biblical legends about the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses. The author of second Timothy is drawing on apocryphal tradition and embedding it into a canonical text as if it's established fact. Same thing Wes accuses the Quran of doing. And Jude does not just stop at quoting one Enoch. Jude verse 9 references a dispute between the Archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses. Where does that story come from? It comes from another pseudographical text called the assumption of Moses, also known as the testament of Moses. This story is not in the Old Testament. It is from a non-cononical Jewish text and Jude presents it as a real event. So let me be very clear, crystal clear. The canonical New Testament contains direct quotations from one Enoch presented as genuine prophecy, references to characters from apocryphal tradition presented as historical fact, and illusion to events from pseudapographical text presented as things that actually happened. If using apocryphal sources disqualifies the Quran, it disqualifies the New Testament by the exact same standard. Wes, I would imagine knows this. He just hopes you do not. Wes makes a big deal about the Quran placing Hmon, who appears in the book of Esther as a Persian court official, into the Exodus narrative alongside Pharaoh. He presents this as clear error, showing the Quran's author confuse two completely different time periods. But the New Testament makes the same kind of errors. Matthew 27:9 says, "Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled. They took the 30 pieces of silver, the price set on him by the people of Israel." One problem, that quotation does not come from Jeremiah. It comes from Zechariah 11 12-13. The author of Matthew attributed a quote to the wrong prophet. This is not a disputed interpretation. This is a plain factual error that every critical scholar acknowledges. Some apologists tried to explain it away by saying Matthew was referring to a broader prophetic tradition or that Jeremiah was listed first in the scroll collection. But these are excuses, not explanations. The text says Jeremiah. The quote is from Zechariah. It is wrong. Matthew 2:23 is even worse. And he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that he would be called a Nazarene. Go ahead, search the entire Old Testament. There is no prophecy anywhere that says the Messiah will be called a Nazarene. It does not exist. The author of Matthew invented a prophecy, attributed to the prophets as a group so he would not have the name of a specific source and built a theological claim on a text that is not there. By Wes's own standard for the Quran, this is a disqualifying error. Wes dismisses the Quran as the product of an illiterate caravanner who heard jumbled campfire stories from Christians and Jews and scrambled them together. He presents Muhammad as someone with no access to the actual texts and no ability to discern reliable sources from fables. But modern Quranic scholarship paints a completely different picture. Gabriel say Reynolds in the Quran and its biblical subtext Rutled 2010 demonstrates that the Quran is in sophisticated literary dialogue with earlier Jewish and Christian traditions. It is not garbling them. It is reinterpreting them, correcting them, and recontextualizing them according to its own theological program. Imran El Badawi in the Quran and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions, Rutled 2013, shows specifically that the Quran engages with Syriak Christian literary traditions at a deep structural level. This is not the work of someone who overheard stories at a campfire. This is a text that knows the earlier traditions and is deliberately reworking them. I mean, even if some of it is garbled, there's still scholarship to point out what I'm saying. And here's what Wes will never acknowledge. This is exactly what the New Testament does with the Old Testament. The Gospel authors constantly reinterpret, recontextualize, and outright change Old Testament passages to fit their theology about Jesus. Matthew rips Isaiah 7:14 out of its original context where it clearly refers to a young woman in Isaiah's own time and turns it into a virgin birth prophecy. Paul takes a passage from the Psalms and Isaiah that have nothing to do with a future Messiah and reinterprets them as predictions about Jesus. The New Testament authors are doing sophisticated literary reinterpretation of earlier traditions, recontextualization we like to call it. But when the Quran does the same thing, Wes calls it garbled campfire stories, the double standard is breathtaking, huh? And now the kicker. Wes versus himself on one Enoch. This is where the whole thing falls apart for Wes. And I want to make sure everyone understands why. Wes Huff repeatedly dismissed First Enoch on his platforms. He's called it pseudapographical. He has pointed out its flaws. He has argued it should not be considered scripture. He has used it as an example of a text that the early church correctly excluded from the canon because it was not authentic. But the canonical epistle of Jude, which is Wes's own Bible, which he considers the inherent word of God, directly quotes one Enoch and presents it as genuine prophecy of the patriarch Enoch. Jude does not say there is a tradition that Enoch said this. Jude says Enoch the 7th from Adam prophesied. That is a truth claim. Jude is asserting that Enoch really said this and the source is one Enoch 1:9. So Wes has exactly two options and neither of them is good for him. Option one, Jude is wrong about one Enoch being genuine prophecy from the real Enoch. If so, a canonical New Testament book contains a factual error and the doctrine of biblical inherency is dead. Option two, one Enoch really is genuine prophecy from the patriarch Enoch. If so, Wes has been wrong every time he dismissed it, and he needs to explain why a text that a canonical author treats as genuine scripture is not in his Bible. Pick one, Wes. You cannot trash one Enoch and defend Jude at the same time. The math does not work. Wes applies one set of standards to the Quran and a completely different set to his own Bible. He criticizes the Quran for using apocryphal sources while his own New Testament quotes one Enoch references the assumption of Moses and names characters from apocryphal tradition. He criticizes the Quran for getting historical details wrong. While Matthew attributes a quote to the wrong prophet and invents a prophecy that does not exist. He dismisses the Quran as garbled oral tradition while the New Testament authors do the exact same kind of literary reinterpretation with the Old Testament. And he trashes one Enoch while defending a canonical epistle that treats one Enoch as genuine word of a patriarch. I could go on and on to other errors in the Bible, historical blunders, but we'll leave it there. And this is not scholarship. This is propaganda with a double standard so wide you could fit a truck through it and it only works because his audience has never been told what is actually in their New Testament.

Yeah. So I was um just before my 12th birthday I was diagnosed with a condition called acute transverse myelitis. And so I had the flu and my body's immune system in sort of a freak accident response attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord, the myelin sheath, instead of attacking the flu. And so what that caused is inflammation on the base of my spinal cord, which severed the communication between my legs and my brain. And so the diagnosis um I I literally woke up from a nap and couldn't feel my legs. And so >> Wow. You remember this? >> Oh, yeah. Very vividly. Yeah. Yeah. Um the diagnosis was that I would most likely be a parapillegic for the rest of my life. So recovery wasn't impossible, but it was, you know, you're going to dig in for the long haul kind of deal. um especially because transverse myelitis as a condition how it's been described to me by medical professionals is that the recovery rate has a correlation to the quickness of the actual paralysis. So because mine was instant, the conclusion was that the recovery was going to be long and it was going to be hard. And um the short story is that 1 month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs on February 8th, I woke up, got out of my uh bed, and walked over to my wheelchair. How did you know to get up? So, it was kind of instinctual. Um it's a Yeah. How did I know to get up? I mean, for one month, you were paralyzed. For one month, I was completely paralyzed. No feeling from the waist down. Yeah. And um I don't know how long it was that I sat in my wheelchair until I realized that I I what I'd done, but I knew something was different. And I It could have been 5 minutes, could have been 45 minutes. I couldn't actually tell you how long it was. But eventually I looked down and I wiggled my toe and that kind of broke me out of the spell and I ran upstairs and got my parents. You You ran upstairs? Yeah.

I want to be clear about something before I say a word. What Wes went through was terrifying. Waking up paralyzed, not knowing if you'll ever walk again. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. His recovery is genuinely worth celebrating. But celebrating a recovery and calling it a miracle are two different things. Wes had acute transverse myelitis. It's a neurological condition where the immune system attacks the spinal cord causing sudden paralysis. It sounds catastrophic and it is. But here's what Wes doesn't mention. Acute transverse myelitis has a well doumented recovery profile. Roughly onethird of patients recover fully or nearly fully. Another third recover partially and another third see little improvement. These numbers have been consistent across multiple studies for decades. Wes's recovery, while on the more dramatic end, falls squarely within known medical outcomes. It happens without prayer. It happens to atheists, Hindus, Muslims, and people who've never heard the name Jesus. Now, Wes tells the story as though the

Doctors were shocked, and maybe they were surprised by how quickly he bounced back. But the doctors being surprised is not evidence of divine intervention. Doctors are surprised all the time. The human body does unexpected things. That's not a gap where God lives. That's just medicine being an imperfect science. The leap from "doctors were surprised" to "God did it" is an argument from ignorance. And it's been recognized as a logical fallacy since Aristotle. I don't know how my car engine works exactly either. But that doesn't mean elves are under the hood.

Okay. To wrestle with, okay, "I believe you healed me, but what about that guy? Like, why, why did you choose?" It's almost like a survivor's guilt. "What about them? Why? Why are they still in their particular predicament?" I don't, I don't have an answer to that. And, and that's, that's a hard one to reconcile. But I have enough to rest on that I know that God is good. I know that the Christian worldview is true. And I know that despite what my maybe fleeting or subjective insecurities are about those things.

I hope you watched that clip carefully. Wes admits he met quadriplegics and others with similar conditions who were never healed. He says he has no answer for why God healed him and not them. And he seems genuinely troubled by it. I really do believe him. I think that weighs on him in some way. But Wes, with all due respect, you do have an answer. Your theology gives you one. You just won't say it out loud because you know how it sounds, or at least you've thought about it.

"You know, we, we God is in control and we can trust him even when things aren't going the way."

God is in control. Wes said it himself. So, let's talk about what that actually means inside his belief system because most of Wes's audience has no idea what Calvinist theology really teaches. Wes is a Calvinist. In Calvinist theology, God doesn't just allow things to happen. He ordains them. He decrees them. He plans them before the foundation of the world. And this isn't me putting words in Wes's mouth. This is the official doctrinal statement of the reformed tradition. He subscribes to Westminster Confession of Faith 3.1: "God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass."

Whatsoever comes to pass. Not some things. Everything. Every event, every outcome, every case of suffering ordained, planned, decreed before any of it happened. And Wes's own Bible puts it even more bluntly. Romans 9:21-22: "Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath, prepared for destruction before birth, not because of anything they did, because that was the plan."

So, here's what Wes's theology actually requires him to believe about his own healing story. God specifically chose to heal Wesley Huff. And God specifically chose not to heal the quadriplegics Wes met in that hospital. Not because they lacked faith. Not because they didn't pray hard enough. Not because they deserved it. Because God, before creation itself, decided their suffering would glorify him. Their paralysis was the plan. It was always the plan. Children dying of bone cancer? Planned. Babies born with organs outside their bodies? Ordained. Quadriplegics lying in hospital beds for decades begging God for the same healing Wes got? God heard every single prayer. And the answer was no. Because their suffering was the point. It was designed to display his power and his glory. And Wes says he has no answer for why he was healed and they weren't. But Wes, your theology has a very clear answer. God wanted them to [clears throat] suffer. That was the decree. You just can't bring yourself to say it out loud because you know what it sounds like. It sounds monstrous because it is.

I know this theology from the inside. I was a Calvinist. I held these doctrines, the five points of Calvinism. I tried to make them beautiful the way Wes tries to make them beautiful. And I'm telling you, when you actually follow the logic to its end, it's one of the sickest things a human being can believe about the universe. That every act of suffering, every tortured child, every genocidal massacre, every moment of unthinkable agony in human history was specifically planned and purposefully executed by a being who calls himself love. He didn't just sit back and watch. That would already be damning enough. Any parent who watched their toddler running into traffic and just stood there would be a monster. But Calvinist theology goes further. God didn't just watch. He ordained it. He made it happen on purpose for his glory.

But this is the part that should really bother Wes's audience. Most of the Christians watching this don't believe what Wes believes. Most Christians imagine a God who genuinely loves every single person and wants everyone to be saved. That's what they sing about in church. That's the God on their bumper stickers. But that is not the God of reformed theology. Wes's God does not love everyone. Wes's God does not want everyone saved. And you see, Calvinists will pull out what they call the "common grace" card. The idea that God shows some general kindness to all people through sunshine, rain, and the basic functions of life. But that's a participation trophy from a God who already decided most of humanity was going to burn forever. And the Calvinists who actually know their scriptures know this because their own Bible says it. Romans 9:13: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." And that hatred, Paul says, was decided before either of them was born, before either of them had done anything good or bad. It was based entirely on God's election. God's choice, not theirs. Psalm 5:5: "The arrogant cannot stand in your presence. You hate all who do wrong." That's God. He doesn't just hate the sin. He hates the sinners. And on Calvinist theology, he made them that way. He formed them as vessels of wrath, prepared for destruction, and then hates them for being exactly what he made them to be.

And if you think that's just an Old Testament problem, listen to what Jesus himself says about the people who aren't chosen. Matthew 25:41: "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'" Eternal fire prepared in advance, not as a correction, not as rehab, as a destination that was built before anyone arrived. And on Calvinist theology, the people sent there were always going to be sent there. That was the plan before they drew their first breath. Matthew 25:46: "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." Eternal punishment, not temporary, not remedial, forever for people who, on Wes's theology, never had the ability to choose differently.

Look at John 10:26: "But you do not believe because you are not my sheep." Read that carefully. Jesus doesn't say, "You're not my sheep because you don't believe." He says, "You don't believe because you are not my sheep." The category came first. You were sorted before you made a choice. And if you're not one of his sheep, you were never going to be. On Calvinist theology, you were manufactured as a non-sheep, built for the slaughter. Matthew 7:23: "Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers.'" Never. Not, "I used to know you and you walked away." Never. There was never a relationship. There was never a chance. These people thought they were serving God. They prophesied in his name. They cast out demons in his name. And Jesus says, "I never knew you." On Calvinist theology, that's because they were never chosen. They were doing everything right, and it was never going to matter. Matthew 3:12: "His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire." Matthew 13:40-42: "As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Chaff, weeds. Think about those metaphors. Chaff doesn't choose to be chaff. A weed doesn't decide to be a weed. That's what it was from the moment it sprouted. And on Calvinist theology, that's exactly the point. God grew the wheat and the weeds side by side, knowing the whole time which was which because he decided which was which before the field was even planted. And at harvest time, the weeds burn, not because they failed some test, because burning was their entire purpose. They exist to be fuel. Matthew 22:14: "For many are called, but few are chosen." Many are called. The invitation goes out broadly, but few are chosen. On Calvinist theology, the call is a formality. The real decision was made in eternity past. Most people hearing the gospel were never meant to respond to it. They're hearing an invitation to a party they were blacklisted from before the universe existed.

So, let's come back to the healing. Wes can't explain why God healed him and not the next person in the bed, but his theology can. And Jesus's own words spell it out. God made some pots for the shelf and some pots for the furnace. Some seeds are wheat and some are weeds. Some are sheep and some aren't. Wes thinks he was wheat. Wes thinks he was a sheep. The quadriplegic in the next room might be chaff. Might be a weed. Was never one of his sheep, probably. And that was decided before either of them existed. The quadriplegic's lifetime of suffering. That was the plan. The child dying of cancer in the pancreatic ward down the hall. That was the plan. And at the end of all of it, after the lifetime of agony that God specifically designed, those same people get thrown into the blazing furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Not because they chose wrong, because they were weeds, because they were chaff, because Jesus never knew them and was never going to. That's the theology. That's what "God is in control" actually means when you follow it all the way. And these aren't obscure verses I'm pulling from the margins. These are red letters. These are words of Jesus. The same Jesus that Wes says is the foundation of love and morality is the one who looked at most of humanity and said, "You're chaff and you're going to burn."

We've drifted from the healing question, but that's the point. You can't separate Wes's miracle claim from Wes's theology. In his worldview, God does whatever he wants. And human beings are just clay, just weeds, just chaff on the threshing floor. Some clay gets healed on camera and writes a testimony. Some clay suffers in silence for 50 years and dies. And then the clay that suffered gets thrown into eternal fire. And both outcomes, the healing and the suffering, were the plan all along. If that makes your stomach turn, good. It should. You have a moral compass because this is the God of Wesley Huff. The God Wesley Huff worships. And guess what? He wants you to worship him too.

[music]

Even like, the most skeptical of biblical scholars, they can say, "We can basically know nothing about the details of Jesus's life. We can say that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate because we have so many intersecting sources, Christian and non-Christian alike."

I agree with Wes on one thing. I think Jesus was crucified. Most critical scholars think it happened. But the crucifixion is simultaneously the strongest historical claim Christians have, and at the same time, the most damaging fact for their entire theology. Because the moment you take the crucifixion seriously as history, you have to ask the question Wes is too blind to see seriously: Why was Jesus crucified? And the answer destroys the image of Jesus that Wes is selling.

First, let me show you what we actually have. Paul, writing around 54 CE, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, says Jesus was buried and was raised. That is it. No Pontius Pilate, no trial, no empty tomb, no women, no narrative at all, just a bare theological claim. And Paul never met Jesus during his lifetime. He says in Galatians 1:12 that he received his gospel by revelation from Jesus Christ, not from human testimony. Mark, writing sometime after 70 CE, 40-plus years after the event, constructs the first crucifixion narrative. Trial before the Sanhedrin, appearance before Pilate, Barabbas, the mocking, the crucifixion, the burial. This is our first and only independent narrative source.

Now, here's where Wes's "multiple sources" claim falls apart. Matthew and Luke both copy Mark extensively. Under the two-source hypothesis, which seems to remain currently the majority position, barely, both independently used Mark plus a hypothetical saying source called Q. But even under that model, their crucifixion narratives are not independent of Mark. They are expansions and revisions of Mark's account. And under the Farrer hypothesis, championed by Austin Farrer, Michael Goulder, and more recently by Mark Goodacre, Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University, in the case against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Trinity Press International, 2002), it is even worse for Wes. Under Farrer, there is no Q. Matthew copied Mark. Luke copied both Mark and Matthew. The entire synoptic tradition is a single chain of literary dependency. One source and two layers of editing. Not three witnesses. Not two witnesses with a common source. One voice, and it echoes. Either way, two-source hypothesis or Farrer hypothesis, the result is the same. We do not have four independent crucifixion accounts. We have Mark, two revised editions of Mark, and John writing decades later with his own massive theological agenda, moving the crucifixion to a different day. So Jesus dies at the hour the Passover lambs are slaughtered. That's a theological choice, not independent corroboration.

And the non-Christian sources are even thinner. Tacitus, writing around 116 CE, mentions "Christus" executed under Pilate. That is 85 years later with no cited source, almost certainly repeating what Christians themselves were saying. Josephus's Testimonium Flavianum is universally acknowledged as tampered with by Christian scribes. John Meyer concedes in *A Marginal Jew, Volume 1* (Doubleday, 1991) that "the passage as it stands cannot be what Josephus wrote." Other scholars argue it is entirely fabricated. Pliny the Younger mentions Christians worshiping Christ as a god but says nothing about a crucifixion. Suetonius mentions "Crestus" with no biographical details. That is so many intersecting sources? One letter from Paul with no narrative. One gospel from Mark, two copies of Mark, one theologically rewritten gospel we call John, which is dependent on the synoptic tradition according to Doctors James Barker, Mark Goodacre, and Dr. Hugo Mendieta. One Roman historian 85 years later, one tampered Jewish passage. Two passing references with zero crucifixion details. And Wes packages this as an avalanche. It's at best a trickle. And he is banking on Shawn, the former Navy SEAL, to never be checking this. And at this rate, you can bank on Shawn never doing that. That's the magic trick.

Apologists need the crucifixion to be historical so they can use it as a launching pad for the resurrection. I agree. The crucifixion probably happened. But they only want you looking at this one hand: the innocent lamb dying for your sins. The other hand holds the real reason Jesus was crucified, and it is devastating. Crucifixion was a political punishment. Rome did not crucify people for blasphemy or theological disputes. Rome crucified people for threats to Roman order: slaves in revolt, pirates, and above all, seditionists. Martin Hengel documents this extensively in *Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross* (Fortress Press, 1977). Crucifixion was state terror, a public message: "This is what happens when you challenge Rome." When we say Jesus was crucified, we are saying Rome identified him as a political threat and executed him accordingly. That is a political fact, not a theological statement.

The charge on the cross tells you everything. All four Gospels agree the charge was "King of the Jews." Mark 15:26, Matthew 27:37, Luke 23:38, John 19:19. Critical scholars widely accept this as historical because it is embarrassing to the later Christian movement. The early Christians were not claiming Jesus was a political king. They had no reason to invent a political charge. The fact that all four Gospels preserve it, despite it being theologically inconvenient, strongly suggests it is authentic. Scholars call this the "criterion of embarrassment." "King of the Jews" is sedition. A claim to royal authority in a Roman province. That is why Pilate cared. Pilate did not give a damn about Jewish religious debates. He kept order. If he ordered crucifixion with this charge, it is because he saw Jesus as a political threat.

And Jesus was crucified between insurrectionists. Mark 15:27 says Jesus was crucified between two. Lesser English Bibles translate this as "thieves" or "robbers." But even that sanitizes the word. Josephus uses *lestes* throughout his writings to describe armed rebels and insurgents fighting Rome, as S.G.F. Brandon documents in *Jesus and the Zealots* (Manchester University Press, 1967). *Lestes* in this period meant insurrectionist, not pickpockets. Jesus was crucified in the company of political rebels because Rome categorized him as one. And Mark explicitly mentions an insurrection.

Here's [snorts] something most Christians have never been told. In several early manuscripts of Matthew 27:16-17, Barabbas has a first name. His first name is Jesus. It's Jesus Barabbas. Origen noted in the 3rd century that he found this reading in many copies and was clearly uncomfortable with it. And the name Barabbas itself is Aramaic: "Bar Abba," meaning "son of the father." So the crowd is choosing between two men named Jesus. One is Jesus, son of the father. The other is Jesus of Nazareth, the one his followers called the Son of God, the Son of the Father. Most textual scholars think the full name is the original reading because scribes had every reason to remove Jesus's name from a violent criminal, but no reason to add it. Is the more embarrassing reading more original? Even Wes would agree with that principle. I mean, they use the criterion of embarrassment all the time. Well, maybe Matthew did his usual and doubled Jesus, like he does with the donkeys and the demoniacs. Those episodes, they double up compared to Mark. But now look at what Mark preserves that Matthew cuts. Now you can look at this graph. Mark 15:6-7 (on the left, roughly 70 or later). Matthew on the right (27:5-16, 80s or later, uh, probably later based on the critical scholars I've been reading). Let's go to Mark: "Now at the festival, Pilate used to release a prisoner for them. Anyone for whom?" they asked. "A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder during the insurrection." What does Mark preserve? Insurrection, murder, revolt. Now, Matthew: "Now at the festival, the governor was accustomed to release a prisoner for the crowd. Anyone whom they wanted. At that time they had a notorious prisoner called Jesus Barabbas." And that's in the earliest manuscripts. What Matthew cuts? All political context erased.

Why does this matter? In Mark, Jesus is arrested during an active insurrection and crucified in place of a rebel convicted of murder. The titulus reads "King of the Jews," a political crime. Rome was not crucifying people for theology. It was putting down a revolt. Matthew erased the insurrection. That eraser is the evidence. So get this: Mark 15:7 says Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. That word *stasis* means political revolt. There is an active insurrection happening in Mark's narrative. Whether or not Barabbas is historical, the narrative context is unmistakable. Jesus was arrested and executed during political unrest. Rome was not handing out crucifixions for theology. Crucifixion was a punishment for enemies of the state. Rome was putting down a revolt, and Jesus ended up on a cross with a sign above his head reading "King of the Jews." That's not a religious title. That's a political crime. That's sedition.

When Matthew rewrites this scene, he guts it. The insurrection disappears. The murder disappears. The rebels disappear. Barabbas becomes a generic notorious prisoner with no political context. As Dale Allison and W.D. Davies observe in their *International Critical Commentary*, "Matthew is performing damage control. He doesn't want his readers doing the math." Because if Barabbas was an insurrectionist and Jesus was crucified on the same charge by the same governor on the same day, then Rome didn't see a difference between the two of them. Matthew knows how bad that looks. That's why the insurrection disappears. And ironically, it's Matthew, the gospel that tried hardest to sanitize the scene, that accidentally preserved the most explosive detail of all: the man's name was Jesus, son of the father, and the crowd chose him.

There's also the temple action, which was the trigger. All four Gospels record Jesus overturning tables in the temple. Mark 11:15-17, Matthew 21:12-13, Luke 19:45-46, and John 2:13-16. The temple was not just a religious site. It was the economic and political center of Jewish life, run by a priestly aristocracy that maintained power through cooperation with Rome. An attack on temple operations was an attack on the Roman-sanctioned power structure. E.P. Sanders argues in *Jesus and Judaism* (Fortress Press, 1985) that this temple action was the primary trigger for Jesus's arrest and execution. This is implying the movement was not peaceful. Despite decades of theological whitewashing, the Gospels preserve traces of a radical, confrontational movement.

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one." At the Garden of Gethsemane, a follower draws a sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant. Mark 14:47 and John 18:10. Jesus's inner circle was armed. One of the twelve is called Simon the Zealot. Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13. That's a term associated with radical anti-Roman nationalism. The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem in Mark 11:1-10. Crowds hailing someone as king during Passover, the festival celebrating liberation from foreign oppression, was an act loaded with revolutionary symbolism. Josephus tells us Rome stationed extra troops in Jerusalem during Passover precisely because it was a flashpoint for nationalist revolt.

Then there's also the ethnocentrism Wes hides. "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs." Jesus said this to a Gentile woman begging him to heal her daughter. He compared her to a dog. In the first-century Jewish context, that was an ethnic slur. "Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel." Jesus restricts his mission to ethnic Israel and forbids his disciples from approaching non-Jews. The later Christian universalism was championed by Paul after Jesus's death and directly contradicts what the historical Jesus appears to have taught. Brandon argued in *Jesus and the Zealots* that the Gospels were written after the Jewish revolt of 66-70 CE, when association with Jewish insurrection became dangerous for Christians. The Gospel authors systematically reframed Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher and shifted blame for his execution from Rome to the Jewish authorities to make Christianity palatable to a Roman audience. Reza Aslan develops this in his book *Zealot* (Random House, 2013). And Michael G. Jacobus argues in his book *First Century Radical* (Maple Publishers, 2026, but it was originally published in 2008), drawing on his training in biblical Greek and classical Hebrew at St. Andrews and Oxford, that Jesus and his associates were part of what Josephus calls the "fourth philosophy," a radical anti-Roman insurgent ideology.

Why does this destroy Wes's position? Wes wants the crucifixion to be historical so he can argue for the resurrection. But the moment you take it seriously as history, you have to reckon with why it happened: the charge on the cross, the method of execution, the insurrectionists he died alongside (he is in between two of them), the revolt happening in the background, the temple confrontation, the armed followers, the nationalist rhetoric, the ethnic exclusivism. All of it points in one direction: Jesus was executed by Rome as a seditious political threat. The bitter irony is exquisite. The very thing Wes celebrates is the single strongest piece of evidence that the historical Jesus was nothing like the Christ he preaches. The cross is not a symbol of divine love. Historically, it is a symbol of Roman state violence applied to a man the empire classified as a criminal. Wes turns an execution into salvation magic. History says it was a political killing.

Christians want the crucifixion to be historical when it builds a case for the resurrection, but theological when it comes to the reason it happened. You cannot have it both ways. If the crucifixion is historical, the historical context matters. And the historical context is that a Jewish insurgent was executed by the state for sedition. That is the most important event in Christianity. And Wes will never tell Shawn Ryan that part of the story.

[music]

I referenced before, he said, "Christianity, if true, is of infinitely importance. If it's not true, it's of no importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." And he's famous for the whole "liar, lunatic, or Lord" kind of trilemma.

Mhm.

If you look at what Jesus did and what he said about himself, he's either a liar and a con man. He's either a lunatic and he's crazy, or he's the creator of the universe and he's Lord. Now, we could also add one more: legend. We could say, well, he's just, you know, he's just a good figure. He's just a good person to pattern our lives after. I, I don't actually think Jesus gives you the room to to look at him like that because Jesus didn't just say, "Here's a philosophy to live by." He said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. And if you don't believe that I am invoking the divine name from the Old Testament, then you will die in your sins." You know, he doesn't give us the room to just say, "You're a good example." You know, I said this on Rogan where I said, you know, if Jesus is just a pattern, then you don't need a savior because you can do it yourself. You just need an example. If it's, if Jesus is only an example to live by, then all you need to do is, you know, tie up your boots a little tighter and do better. But the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross wasn't because Jesus came to show us how to live. It was to live the life we couldn't live. And on that basis, like I said before, you're saved by works, but it's Jesus's work.

C.S. Lewis's trilemma: liar, lunatic, or Lord. This is the zombie argument of Christian apologetics. It has been killed so many times by so many scholars that it should be decomposing in a ditch by now. And yet here is Wes Huff performing CPR on it for Shawn Ryan's audience like it's still breathing. So let me explain in the clearest possible terms why this argument does not work, what the actual evidence points to instead, and why there's a real ancient example that proves it. The trilemma only works if Jesus actually said those things. But he didn't. The entire argument rests on the assumption, one assumption: that the divine claims attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are things the historical Jesus actually said. Wes quotes John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." And he treats that like it's a historical fact. We have a recording of Jesus saying it. Then he says, "Well, either he was lying, he was crazy, or he really is God. Pick one." But there's a massive problem. The quote comes from the Gospel of John. John was written around 90 to 110, roughly consensus among critical scholars, or even later by some of the critical scholars that I've interviewed in the past. Roughly 60 to 80 years after Jesus died. It is the last gospel written. It is the most theologically developed. And the divine claims it attributes to Jesus do not appear in any of the earlier Gospels. Not one of them.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are the big divine claims from John: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." "Before Abraham was born, I am." "I and the Father are one." "I am the resurrection and the life." "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." Now open up the Gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel written around 70 AD or later. Search it. Jesus never says any of these things. Not one. He does not say, "I am God." He does not say, "I and the Father are one." He does not say, "No one comes to the Father except through me." Open Matthew. Open Luke. Same thing. These explicit claims to divinity only show up in the last gospel, the one written furthest from the events by the community with the most advanced theology.

Many Christians will identify in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, things that Jesus does that Yahweh does in the Old Testament. Or you might could look to Moses and Elijah and see them perform certain deeds on behalf of Yahweh, as if he's the name-bearer of Yahweh on earth. That is a different claim from the more explicit, direct divine claims you might find in John. So that is not four witnesses independently confirming the same story. That is a theology evolving over time, with each author cranking the dial higher. Bart Ehrman traces this entire trajectory in *How Jesus Became God* (HarperOne, 2014): "The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee." In Mark, Jesus is a human being who is adopted or designated as God's son at his baptism. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus becomes God's son at his miraculous virgin birth. By the time you get to John, Jesus is the pre-existent divine Word who existed before the creation itself. Each gospel makes Jesus more divine than the last. That is not history being reported. That is legend being constructed, and you can watch it happen in real time across the documents.

The same escalation happens with the resurrection stories. Mark, the earliest gospel, ends at 16:8 with an empty tomb, zero appearances of the risen Jesus, and women who flee in terror and tell no one. Matthew adds a mountaintop appearance in Galilee with some doubting, and the women actually tell. They run and tell the disciples. Luke adds extended visits in Jerusalem where Jesus eats with the disciples. John adds even more appearances, including the doubting Thomas scene. And the author of Luke, writing Acts, stretches the timeline to 40 days of post-resurrection appearances before Jesus physically ascends into the clouds. Each decade the story grows. Each author adds more. That is textbook legendary development.

So when Wes quotes John 14:6 and says, "Jesus said this, so you have to deal with it," the honest response is, "No, the author of John said it decades after Jesus was dead through the mouth of a literary character based on a historical person." The historical Jesus almost certainly never made these claims. And if he never said them, the trilemma has nothing to work with. You cannot evaluate a claim as a lie, a delusion, or a divine truth if the person never made the claim in the first place.

The Gospel authors invented speeches for Jesus. This is documented. This is not just about John. The synoptic authors did it too. And I can show you specific examples that scholars have identified. Mark 10:45: "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." That is Pauline theology. The idea that Jesus's death was a substitutionary payment for sin placed directly on Jesus's lips. This theological framework comes from Paul's letters, which were circulating before Mark was written. Mark takes Paul's theology and puts it into the mouth of the historical Jesus as if Jesus himself taught it. He almost certainly did not. This isn't the place to get into deeper weeds of showing Mark's dependence on Paul's letters, but there's a lot of scholarship backing up what I'm saying.

Mark's three passion predictions in Mark 8:31, 9:31, and 10:33-34 are even more revealing. In these passages, Jesus predicts his own death and resurrection in stunning detail. He will be delivered to the chief priests, condemned, handed to the Gentiles, mocked, spit upon, flogged, killed, and after three days he will rise. These predictions are so specific that they are textbook examples of what scholars call *vaticinia ex eventu*, a Latin phrase that means "prophecy after the events." The author already knew how the story ended and wrote predictions that matched the ending perfectly. William Reed, or William Rita, I'm not sure how to properly pronounce the scholar's name, demonstrated this in *The Messianic Secret* (originally published in 1901, but there were English translations by James Clark & Company, 1971), showing that Mark has a deliberate theological program shaping the entire narrative. Mark is not recording what Jesus said. Mark is writing theology and putting it in Jesus's mouth.

Matthew 28:19: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." This is the Great Commission, and it is almost certainly invented. The Trinitarian formula, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, reflects later church theology, not anything a first-century Jewish preacher would have said. And it directly contradicts what the same gospel records Jesus saying earlier in Matthew 10:5-6: "Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans." The historical Jesus restricted his mission to ethnic Israel. The command to baptize all nations is the post-Pauline church's theology placed on Jesus's lips after the fact. The same gospel has Jesus saying opposite things because different layers of theology were added at different times. Robin Faith Walsh makes this broader point in *The Origins of Early Christian Literature* (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

The Gospel authors were educated Greco-Roman writers participating in elite literary culture. They were not simply scribes faithfully transcribing what illiterate peasant eyewitnesses told them. They were authors with literary training who composed narratives, crafted speeches, and put words in their protagonist's mouth to serve their theological purposes. This was standard practice. The ancient historian Thucydides openly admits in his *History of the Peloponnesian War* (1.22) that he composed speeches for historical figures based on what he thought was appropriate for them to say in the circumstances. The Gospel authors did the same thing. Dale Allison, one of the most respected historical Jesus scholars alive and a believing Christian, writes in *The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus* (Eerdmans, 2009) that the Gospels are theological documents, not stenographic records, and that extracting the historical Jesus from them requires methods the trilemma completely ignores.

*Peregrinus Proteus*, the ancient parallel Wes cannot answer. This one's huge. Now, let me give Wes a historical example that shows exactly how legend works with a real documented case. Peregrinus Proteus. Our source is Lucian of Samosata, writing in *The Death of Peregrinus* around 165 CE. Lucian was a satirist, but he was also present for the events he describes, which makes this actually an interesting and unusually valuable account. Peregrinus was, by Lucian's account, a criminal. He was accused of strangling his own father. He was run out of his own hometown. He reinvented himself as a philosopher and for a time became a leader in Christian communities, where the Christians revered him, visited him in prison, and treated him as a holy man. Eventually, and I'm skipping some of the information that you should go read it for yourself, he left Christianity, became a Cynic philosopher, thought it was a much better philosophy than Christianity, and traveled the Roman world causing controversy.

Here's how he died. He lit himself on fire at the Olympic Games. Not in some back alley, but at the Olympics, one of the most attended public events in the entire ancient world. He announced he was going to do it, built the pyre, and burned alive in front of a massive crowd. Lucian was there. He watched it happen. And here's what happened next. Almost immediately, a man claimed he had personally witnessed a vulture ascending from the flames toward heaven. Lucian encountered this man on the road and heard the testimony firsthand. Within a very short time, Peregrinus's followers began attributing miracles and divine oracles to him. They erected a statue. They worshiped him as a god. A criminal accused of killing his own father was transformed into a deity by devoted followers with eyewitnesses claiming of seeing him in a heavenly ascent at a public event within days of the death.

Now apply Wes's trilemma. Was Peregrinus a liar, a lunatic, or is he Lord? Nobody asks that question because the answer is obvious: devoted followers turned dead humans into gods. They did it with Peregrinus at the Olympics. They did it with Romulus, the founder of Rome, whose body disappeared after death and who was subsequently seen alive by a man named Julius Proculus, who swore an oath that Romulus told him he was now a god. They did it with Apollonius of Tyana, a wandering philosopher whose followers attributed miracles, supernatural wisdom, and a mysterious disappearance to him. And they did it with Roman emperors through the formal ceremony of *apotheosis*, where a senator would be paid to publicly swear he had witnessed the emperor's soul ascending to heaven from the funeral pyre. This was not that rare. This was actually normal in the ancient Mediterranean world. Turning remarkable dead humans into gods was standard cultural practice. Richard C. Miller documents this pattern extensively in his book *Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity* (Routledge, 2015), showing that the Gospel resurrection and ascension narratives use the exact structural patterns of what he calls "translation fables," stock literary conventions used across Greco-Roman culture to signal that a hero had been taken up to the divine realm. M. David Litwak catalogs the parallels and how the Gospels became history in *Jesus and Mediterranean Myths* (Yale University Press, 2019), showing that the Gospel authors were writing within a well-established literary tradition of turning dead men into gods.

Now, the part Wes really does not want you to hear. Lunatic is on the table, too. Wes dismisses lunatic as absurd, just like Lewis did. Lewis compared it to a man who thinks he's a poached egg. He picked the most cartoonish version of insanity so the audience would laugh it off and jump straight to Lord. But that is not what the first-century evidence shows. The historical Jesus was not a poached egg. He was something far more recognizable and far more troubling. Albert Schweitzer, well-known scholar, argued in *The Quest for the Historical Jesus* (1906) that Jesus was a radical Jewish apocalyptic prophet who sincerely believed God was about to supernaturally intervene in history, overthrow the existing world order, and establish a divine kingdom on earth within his generation. Jesus expected it to happen so imminently that he told his own disciples, "Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." That is a clear, falsifiable prediction, and it failed. His entire generation died. The kingdom did not come. The world order was not overthrown. Rome continued to rule for centuries. Bart Ehrman develops this further in *Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium* (Oxford University Press, 1999), arguing that every apocalyptic expectation attributed to Jesus was wrong. Even Dale Allison, a believing Christian, concedes in *Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet* (Fortress Press, 1998) that Jesus held apocalyptic expectations that were simply not fulfilled.

So within the trilemma's own framework, the historical Jesus was not a liar. He clearly believed what he was saying. And he was not Lord because everything he predicted was wrong. Which leaves us lunatic. And Lewis only made that option sound absurd by comparing it to a poached egg instead of comparing it to what it actually looks like in the real world: a charismatic, apocalyptic zealot who sincerely believed he was God's anointed agent, who believed God would overthrow Rome within his generation, who acted on those beliefs aggressively enough to get himself executed by the state, and whose every major prediction failed. That is not poached egg insanity, but it is, by an honest secular assessment, delusional. And it is not even unusual. Josephus documents a whole string of men exactly like this in first-century Palestine. Charismatic, catastrophically wrong. From the Zealot leaders at Masada to David Koresh in Waco, history is full of men who genuinely believed God had chosen them, who acted on that belief with total conviction, and who were dead wrong. Jesus fits that pattern. Lewis never considered this because Lewis never engaged with a historical Jesus. He only engaged with the literary character from the Gospel of John. Thaddaeus, who led followers to the Jordan River, promising to part the waters like Moses. The Egyptian prophet who led thousands to the Mount of Olives, promising the walls of Jerusalem would collapse at his command. Various unnamed messianic pretenders, all of whom led followers into confrontation with Rome, expecting divine rescue that never arrived. Nobody applies the trilemma to any of them.

Where the trilemma actually lands. Well, here's the honest answer to Wes's question, and it is a two-part answer because there are two different Jesuses in play. And Wes keeps pretending they are the same person. For the theological Christ of the Gospel of John, the one who says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, and before Abraham was, I am," the answer is legend. That character was constructed over decades by authors who progressively elevated a human Jewish preacher into a pre-existent divine being. You can watch it happen across the documents. The "I am" statements are not history. They are theological writing material 60 to 70, 80 years, if you will, after the fact.

For the historical Jesus, the radical apocalyptic zealot who predicted the imminent kingdom of God and got himself crucified for sedition, the answer is a sincere religious extremist who was profoundly wrong about reality. Not a poached egg, not a con man, a true believer whose beliefs turned out to be false. That is the lunatic option, honestly understood. Lunatic and legend. Those are the two options the evidence supports. Lewis never considered either of them, honestly. And Wes Huff is running the same trick on Shawn Ryan's audience 70 years later, hoping nobody in the room knows enough history to call it out. The trilemma is not a checkmate. It's a card trick. And it only works if you never look at the actual history.

[music]

of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Most people in the time of Jesus, uh, were speaking and reading Greek if they were able to read, because that was the lingua franca, the language of the day. And so about 200 years prior to Jesus, a bunch of the books, particularly the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were translated from the Hebrew into the Greek. And then as time went on, more and more books were translated of the Old Testament into Greek. Um, so that started about the 3rd century BC. It didn't really finish until the 1st century AD. But our Hebrew copies of most of the Old Testament were from the Middle Ages for a long, long time.

Wow. And what the Dead Sea Scrolls did is, all of a sudden, we have pre-Great Psalm scroll or the Great Isaiah scroll with copies of what's called the Masoretic text, which is the text of the Hebrew Bible from the Middle Ages, copied by these scroll, these, uh, um, scribes, the Masoretes. And they're surprisingly similar, shockingly similar. Some of them are, are exact. Not all of them are. Um, but it, the testimony of the fidelity between the time when we get something like the Leningrad Codex in the Middle Ages to something like the Dead Sea Scrolls is a huge gap. And yet you, you have now evidence of this faithful copying process over the centuries of scribes to the point where you can follow them, you know, to the letter.

You see, on the Joe Rogan show, Wes claimed the Dead Sea Scrolls, Great Isaiah Scroll, is word for word identical to the Masoretic text. Word for word identical. Rogan, who has no way to check this, has since repeated it on other podcasts where millions of listeners heard it, and it is flatly demonstrably false. This is the kind of claim that goes and gets you laughed out of a seminar at a graduate seminar or a lecture hall. And Wes said it on one of the biggest podcasts on Earth. Even here on the Shawn Ryan show, he dials it back to "surprisingly similar" and "some are exact." That sounds more careful. It is still cherry-picked to the point of being a little dishonest, in my opinion.

Let me show you what the Dead Sea Scrolls actually revealed, because it's a lot messier than what Wes wants you to think. Emanuel Tov is the chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He's the single most authoritative voice on these manuscripts. In the book *Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible* (Fortress Press, 3rd Edition, 2012), Tov categorized all of the biblical manuscripts found at Qumran. Here is what he found: Only 25%, or about 25%, of them align with the proto-Masoretic tradition, which is the text family that eventually became the standard Hebrew Bible. About 5% align with the Septuagint, the Greek translation, which often differs significantly from the Masoretic text. About 5% align with the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is another text tradition. And a significant portion represent what Tov calls "non-aligned" or "independent textual traditions" that do not match any known text family at all.

So, let me make this simple and translate that for everyone who is not a textual scholar. The Dead Sea Scrolls did not prove there was one Bible. They proved there were multiple Bibles. Different Jewish communities in the Second Temple period were reading different versions of the same books. And these were not minor spelling differences. Ladies and gentlemen, the book of Jeremiah, for example, found at Qumran is roughly 13% shorter than the

Jeremiah in your Bible today. Think about that. That means entire sections, entire paragraphs of content that are in the Masoretic text are simply not there in the Qumran version. This is not a variant spelling of a name. This is an entirely different edition of the book. It's like finding a director's cut of a movie that is 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical release. Which version is the word of God? Wes never addresses this because it doesn't sell, to be honest.

The book of Samuel at Qumran frequently agrees with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text, which means that in many cases the Masoretic text, much later, the very text most English Old Testaments are based on, is not the oldest or most reliable witness. Eugene Ulrich, one of the foremost Dead Sea Scroll scholars alive, argues in *The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible* (Eerdmans, 1999) that the concept of a single authoritative biblical text is anachronistic for the Second Temple period. The scrolls demonstrate textual plurality, not textual uniformity. There was no single Bible in the time of Jesus. There were multiple text traditions circulating simultaneously, and different communities treated different versions as authoritative. Dr. Ian Young, who I recently had an interview with and discussed this very issue on Myth Vision, he emphasizes that many of these biblical texts were still fluid into the Common Era. There was no solidified canon, no single fixed text. And he even shows differences between the Masoretic material later on, but that's a different topic.

So Wes cherry-picks the Great Isaiah Scroll, which does show remarkable similarity to the medieval Masoretic text of Isaiah. Obviously not word for word, and presents that one manuscript as if it represents the entire collection. It does not. It is the exception, not the rule. The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century precisely because they revealed how diverse and fluid the biblical tradition actually was. And here's where Wes's framing really, really falls apart. Wes presents this preservation of textual tradition in almost miraculous language. Joe Rogan took it as a miracle, as if God himself was guiding the hands of the scribes across the centuries. But if faithful copying over time is evidence of divine intervention, then Wes has a serious problem because other traditions did it better, in my opinion.

Start with the Quran. The Quran was standardized under Caliph Uthman within roughly 20 years of Muhammad's death. Variant copies were ordered destroyed, if you will, to endorse uniformity. And of course, they went out of their way to try and do that. And there has been an unbroken oral memorization tradition running parallel to the written text from the very beginnings, if you will, with the Huffaz. They're individuals who memorize the entire Quran, forming a living chain of transmission that literally continues to this day. The New Testament doesn't have any of that. No standardization, no parallel memorization chain, no authorized edition. I'm not saying this is what Wes is saying, but if Wes's argument is that careful preservation points to divine origin, the Quran beats his Bible by every metric he is using. But Wes would never call that miraculous. He would call it human effort. And it's funny how standards change depending on whose book we're talking about.

But the Quran is not even the most impressive example, in my opinion. The Mesopotamian cuneiform tradition makes the biblical manuscript tradition look like a baby. Sumerian literary compositions from the 3rd millennium BCE. Texts like the Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh from around 2100 BCE were still being copied by Babylonian scribes in the 1st millennium BCE. That's roughly 1,500 to 2,000 years of continuous scribal transmission. The Epic of Gilgamesh itself has versions spanning from the Old Babylonian period around 1800 BCE through the Standard Babylonian edition compiled by Sin-leqi-unninni around 1200 to 1000 BCE, through the copies found in Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh around 650 BCE. That's over a thousand years of literary transmission. And we possess the actual physical tablets, not copies of copies of copies on perishable papyrus and parchment. The original clay tablets in the original medium written by the original scribes. We can hold them in our hands. Nobody calls that a miracle. It is what scribes do.

Then you have the Egyptian tradition that is equally staggering. The Pyramid Texts, carved into the walls of royal tombs around 2400 to 2300 BCE, represent the oldest substantial body of religious literature on earth. Those traditions evolved into the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom around 2100 to 1650 BCE, which in turn evolved into the Book of the Dead from around 1550 BCE onward. The Book of the Dead continued to be copied and used for roughly 1,500 years. That is an unbroken religious literary tradition spanning millennia. That's a long time. And it was preserved in the original medium on the original materials. Nobody lights candles over that and calls it evidence of divine authorship. It is what literate civilizations do with texts they consider sacred.

But then there's also the Rigveda, the oldest sacred text of Hinduism. The Rigveda, composed sometime between 1500 to 1200 BCE, and was transmitted orally with extraordinary precision for roughly 2,000 to 3,000 years before being written down. Hindu Brahman priests developed sophisticated memorization techniques, including systems that required students to memorize the text forward, backward, and in interlocking patterns to ensure accuracy across generations. The result is a level of oral preservation fidelity that scholars consider remarkable across a span of time that dwarfs the entire biblical manuscript tradition. If Wes wants to frame scribal preservation as miraculous, he needs to explain why the Hindu oral tradition is not even more miraculous by his own standard. He will not. Because the moment he applies this logic consistently, it proves every religious sacred text, not just his. And do you think Joe Rogan would call that a miracle? The cuneiform a miracle, the Babylonian stuff a miracle? Or is he couched in a Christian culture and aimed at a Christian world? I think that's more important in understanding what's going on there.

The point is simple and it needs to land clearly for everyone watching. Cultures preserve their important texts. They have been doing it for thousands of years across every continent and every major civilization. Mesopotamian scribes did it for 2,000 years on clay tablets, longer than 2,000 years. Egyptian priests did it for 1,500 years on tomb walls and papyrus. Hindu Brahmins did it for 3,000 years through oral memorization alone and then eventually wrote it down. Muslim scholars standardized the Quran within a generation of Muhammad's death and maintained it with parallel written and oral chains ever since. And Jewish scribes carefully copied the Hebrew scriptures across centuries, producing the manuscripts we found at Qumran. The biblical scribal tradition is interesting. It is historically valuable. It is absolutely worth studying. But it is not special. It is not unique. It is not evidence of divine intervention. It is evidence that ancient Jewish and Christian scribes did exactly what Mesopotamian scribes, Egyptian priests, Hindu Brahmins, and Muslim scholars did. They copied and transmitted the texts their communities considered sacred. Some of them did it carefully. Some of them made mistakes. Some of them made deliberate changes. This is the human story of textual transmission. So dressing it up in miraculous language as Wes kind of does, that's not scholarship. And if you don't think I'm accurate about that, then why does Joe Rogan run around feeling like it is a miracle? So what Wes is doing isn't scholarship, in my opinion. It's salesmanship. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, far from proving Wes's point, actually prove how messy, how diverse, and how very human that process really was.

When we're talking about the canon of scripture, what books are or aren't included in our Bible, what the early church is doing, first of all, they have a direct connection and association with the early Jesus community. So there's a chain of custody in that there are individuals who are disciples of the disciples of Jesus. So you have guys like, so the dagger I gave you is named after Irenaeus. Irenaeus is part of a community where they're called the Apostolic Fathers, where their own teachers are the Apostles. So in one sense, the earliest Jesus community has a direct line of communication with people who knew Jesus. They're always mentioned in connection of saying they have no connection to the actual Apostles. We know what are the documents that have connection to the Apostles. It's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Gospel of Thomas doesn't, it's it's it's a forgery. It's false. Thomas was dead by the time it was written. So we have early Christians talking about this stuff. And in in going back to your um original question, like when we have these conversations on canon, Wes presents canon formation like it was a smooth process. Apostles wrote books. Churches memorized them. Chain of custody clean. Case closed. This is a fairy tale. And Wes knows it or doesn't want to believe it.

The Gospels circulated anonymously. Titles were added later. Ehrman demonstrates that in *Jesus Before the Gospels* (HarperOne, 2016). Ehrman acknowledges it in *New Testament Theology* (2008). The Gospel of Matthew was almost certainly not written by the Apostle Matthew. We have videos coming soon you're going to want to see that shows this. Matthew copies 90% of Mark's content, often word for word in Greek. If Matthew was an eyewitness, why would he plagiarize a non-eyewitness? You don't copy someone else's account if you were actually there. That makes zero sense. Wes dismisses the Gospel of Thomas because Thomas was dead when it was written. By that standard, Matthew was dead when his gospel was written. Second Peter is almost universally regarded as pseudepigraphical. The Pastorals are majority regarded as forgeries. Ehrman in his book *Forged* (HarperOne, 2011). Forgery in an apostle's name was common, not rare. Multiple books in Wes's own Bible were written by people pretending to be someone they were not. But when Thomas does it, oh no, it's disqualifying. When Wes's Bible does it, it is inherent. The double standard is staggering. But see, Wes doesn't believe what I'm telling you. So, put it bluntly, let's hear what he has to say.

"Many Christians today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared on the scene one day soon after the death of Jesus. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The Muratorian Fragment includes the Apocalypse of Peter but it excludes Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter. Eusebius in the 4th century still lists disputed books. The first list matching our 27 New Testament books, Athanasius's 39th Festival Letter, 367 CE, over 300 years after Jesus. The Ethiopian Church includes 1 Enoch to this day. For example, Lee Martin McDonald, *The Biblical Canon* (Hendrickson, 3rd ed., 2007) and David Dunan, *Constantine's Bible* (Fortress, 2007), says something like, 'The process was messy, politically driven, and took centuries.'"

Wes's chain of custody is designed to sound like a police evidence locker. The reality was a centuries-long power struggle, and Wes packages this whole thing as a clean handoff, and it wasn't.

[music]

It's in all four Gospels. In John, it's a little bit different. He says, "My Father is working... until now, and I am also working." But if you kind of put that in the framework of Jesus's historical context and you look at some of the articulations of ancient Jewish understanding of what the Sabbath is, when Jesus says, "I am the Lord of the Sabbath," there's an aspect of what he's saying that is, "I'm the only one who's allowed to work on this day." And and he's what he's really claiming, I mean, the Jews get very mad at him for it, is, "You saw that sunrise in the morning? That was me. I'm the Lord of the Sabbath." So, you know, being accused of picking some heads of grain with his disciples and eating on on on Saturday, you know, he's like, "Listen, I'm in control of all of this." And so, that goes over our heads because we don't have a framework for it. Jesus's claims to be God are not him saying, "I am God. Worship me." It's said in a much more Jewish accent than that.

This is one of the most audacious moves Wes makes, and most people will miss it because it sounds so powerful. He takes the synoptic passage where Jesus says, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath," and turns it into Jesus claiming to be the creator of the universe. "That sunrise this morning, that was me." The audience eats it up, and it's completely anachronistic. Wes is reading like the theology of John, written in the '90s to the 100s, to even later, back into Mark, written around 70 CE or later. Uh, in John, Jesus is the pre-existent Word through whom all things were made. Mark never says that. Mark never says Jesus created the world. In Mark, Jesus is adopted as God's Son at his baptism. The pre-existence Christology does not exist in Mark's framework. In Mark 2:23-28, the phrase "Son of Man" in Aramaic, *bar 'enash*, can simply mean a human being. Maurice Casey argues in *The Solution to the Son of Man Problem* (T&T Clark, 2007) that the original Aramaic was likely a general statement about human authority over Sabbath. Mark himself includes this interpretation in verse 27: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." It's obvious the trajectory from "humans have authority over Sabbath practice" to "Jesus made the sunrise" is not exegesis. It is eisegesis, reading later theology back into an earlier text. Ehrman traces this in *How Jesus Became God* (HarperOne, 2014). Earliest Christologies were adoptionist. Pre-existent theology came decades later. Wes's reading is a sermon dressed as scholarship, and it only works on an audience that has never read Mark without John's theology layered on top, or to an audience that doesn't actually read these texts critically.

"But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised up with him and seated he has seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ. And he says that you are saved. So for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of yourselves; it is not the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, so that we would walk in them."

So, in other words, there's nothing you can do or I can do that is going to please God. This is one of Wes's signature moves, and I want everyone to understand exactly what he just did. He read a passage from Ephesians to prove that Christians are saved by faith alone, not by works. It sounds beautiful. It sounds authoritative. He read it like it settled the question. But there are two massive problems with what he just did. And he knows about both of them, if he knows anything about critical scholarship.

Problem one: The passage he quoted was probably not written by Paul. The majority of critical New Testament scholars regard Ephesians as pseudepigraphical, meaning someone wrote it and put Paul's name on it. That is a polite scholarly way of saying it is a forgery. Margaret Macdonald lays out the evidence in *Colossians and Ephesians* (Liturgical Press, 2000). The vocabulary is different from Paul's undisputed letters. The sentence structure is different. The theology is different. The view of the church is different. Bart Ehrman walks through all of this in his book *Forged* (HarperOne, 2011), we mentioned earlier. This is not a fringe position. This is the majority conclusion of the scholars who actually study these texts for a living. Wes is out of his lane. So when Wes reads Ephesians 2:8-9 to Shawn Ryan and presents it as what Paul taught, he is most likely quoting a text that was written by someone pretending to be Paul, possibly a generation after Paul was dead. Shocking that that is the foundation of his entire salvation theology, a probable forgery.

The problem, too, is his own Bible contradicts him, and he just skips over it. Even if we set aside the Ephesians problem, Wes has a much bigger issue sitting right inside his own New Testament because the Bible does not speak with one voice on this question. It argues with itself. And Wes only read you the side he agrees with. Here's what Paul himself says in Romans, a letter that everyone agrees for the most part. There might be a few people on planet Earth that Paul actually wrote. "He will repay according to each one's deeds. To those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life." (Romans 2:6-8). Read that again. God will repay according to each one's deeds; to those who do good, eternal life. That is Paul. Undisputed Paul. The same Paul Wes claims teaches faith alone. But Wes did not read you that verse, did he? Of course not, because it doesn't fit the sermon he's giving.

And then there is James. James 2:24 could not be possibly any clearer. "A person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Not by faith alone." Those are not my words. That is a direct quote from a canonical book of the New Testament. A book that is in Wes Huff's Bible. A book that explicitly by name rejects the very doctrine Wes just preached to Shawn Ryan. But you want to know how big this problem really is? Martin Luther, the founder of the entire Protestant tradition Wes claims to stand in, recognized this contradiction immediately. Luther called the Epistle of James "an epistle of straw." He wanted it thrown out of the Bible because it contradicted his theology of justification by faith alone. Let that land. The man who started the Reformation, the man Wes spent 20 minutes praising in his interview, wanted to remove a book from the Bible because it disagreed with him. He placed it in the back of the Bible, of course. But if the founder of your own movement thought this book was a problem, maybe it is a problem.

And the deeper issue, the entire framework is built on a misunderstanding. Wes presents Paul's theology as if it were correcting a Judaism that taught you could earn your way into heaven by piling up good deeds. That is the standard Reformation reading. Judaism equals works righteousness. Paul comes along and says, "No, it's grace through faith. Problem solved." It's a clean, simple story, and modern scholarship has spent 50 years demolishing it. E.P. Sanders demonstrated in *Paul and Palestinian Judaism* (Fortress Press, 1977) that Second Temple Jews did not believe they were earning salvation through works. The covenant was entered by God's grace. Obedience to the law was the expected response inside the covenant, not the price of admission. Sanders called this "covenantal nomism," and it destroyed the foundational assumption of everything Luther built and everything Wes is preaching. Jews were not trying to earn salvation. Paul was not correcting a works-based religion. The entire faith versus works dichotomy is based on a caricature of Judaism that does not match what Jews actually believed.

J.D.G. Dunn built on this in *The Theology of the Apostle Paul* (Eerdmans, 1998), arguing that when Paul attacks "works of the law," he's talking about Jewish ethnic identity markers like circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath observance, the things that separated Jews from Gentiles. Paul's argument was about the inclusion of Gentiles into the people of God, not about whether doing good things matters. John Barclay has pushed this further in *Paul and the Gift* (Eerdmans, 2015), reshaping the entire conversation around how grace functions in Paul's thought. The scholarly debate continues, but the bottom line is this: The simplistic formula Wes just preached, "saved by faith alone, not by works," depends on a 500-year-old misreading of Paul that was built on a caricature of Judaism. Modern Pauline scholarship has torn that caricature apart. Wes is preaching Reformation theology from 1517 as if the last 50 years of academic research do not exist. And he is doing it by reading you a passage from a probable forgery while ignoring the parts of his own Bible that explicitly contradict him. Think about that. That is not scholarship. That is a sermon. And Shawn Ryan deserved to hear the difference. Honestly, so many people are being duped, in my opinion.

[music]

"It didn't have to be Gautama Siddhartha who who who came up with those things. It could have been anybody. And likewise in Islam, it could have been anybody. It didn't have to be Muhammad. The God of Islam could have chosen any person to be the prophet that he revealed his truth to. But it does have to be Jesus. It cannot be anybody else. And there's a historical grounding of the Christian faith that the tomb is either empty or it's not. And if it's empty, now CS Lewis, who I referenced before, he said, 'Christianity, if true, is of infinitely importance. If it's not true, is of no importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.'"

Wes frames this as a binary. The tomb is either empty or it is not. And he wants you to think the only two options are: the tomb was empty because Jesus rose from the dead, or the tomb was not empty and Christianity is false. But that is a false binary. There is a third option that Wes never mentions, and it is the one that the evidence actually supports: the empty tomb story was invented. It is a literary creation by the author of Mark, modeled on a well-known storytelling pattern from the ancient world. And it was never meant to be read as a historical report. Let me walk you through the evidence for this. And I'm going to spell it out with concrete examples so you can see exactly how this kind of thing works.

The empty tomb pattern was everywhere in the ancient world. The idea that a great man dies, his body goes missing, and this proves he has been taken up to the gods was one of the most common story patterns in Greek and Roman culture. It was not unique to Jesus. It was not even unusual. It was actually the stock literary convention that ancient audiences would have recognized immediately. The same way a modern audience recognizes a rom-com setup or a superhero origin story. Richard C. Miller, in a peer-reviewed article in the *Journal of Biblical Literature* (129, 2010, 759-776) and expanded in his book *Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity* (Routledge, 2015), calls these "translation fables," stories where heroes' bodies disappear as a sign that he has been translated to the divine realm. Let me give you the actual examples so you can see the pattern for yourself. But you really should go get his book because he covers 78 examples of this.

Romulus, the founder of Rome. According to Plutarch, writing in his *Life of Romulus* (which is in the late 1st, early 2nd century CE), Romulus was surrounded by a sudden darkness or storm. When it cleared, he was gone. His body was never found, and some people said the senators had torn him apart. But the version that took hold was that he had been taken up to heaven and become the god Quirinus. A man named Julius Proculus then came forward and swore on oath that Romulus had appeared to him after his disappearance and told him he was now a god. So we have a great leader dies or disappears. The body is missing. A witness claims to have seen him alive afterward, and he is declared divine. Does that sound familiar to you?

Heracles, or in the Roman world, Hercules. According to multiple ancient sources, including Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and Apollodorus, after Heracles climbed onto his own funeral pyre and was burned, his body could not be found among the ashes. His companions searched the pyre and found no bones, no remains. The conclusion: he had been taken up to Olympus to live among the gods. Missing body from the place of death. No remains found. Conclusion: divine translation. There's also stories where Heracles dies and resurrects, but that's for another video.

Then we have Aristeas of Proconnesus. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE in his *Histories* (Book 4.14-15), tells us that Aristeas dropped dead in a fuller's shop. When people went to retrieve the body, it had vanished. He was later reportedly seen alive in a distant city. The body disappears. He appears alive elsewhere. He's understood to have gone undergone a divine experience.

Then we have Cleomedes of Astypalaea. Plutarch (*Romulus* 28) and Pausanias (6.9.6-8) relate that Cleomedes went mad. Pulled down a pillar in a school, killing 60 children, then hid in a stone chest. When the townspeople pried it open, the body was gone. The oracle at Delphi subsequently declared him a hero deserving of divine honors. Body vanishes from a sealed container, declared divine.

Iamblichus, *Protrepticus* (8.67-69), records a tradition that after Empedocles threw himself into Mount Etna, one of his bronze sandals was thrown back up by the volcano, but his body was never found. Disappearance interpreted as divine translation.

Then we have Roman emperors and apotheosis. When a Roman emperor died and was cremated, it was standard practice for an eyewitness, usually a senator, to publicly swear under oath that he had seen the emperor's soul ascending to heaven from the funeral pyre. Cassius Dio (*Dio* 56.46) records this for Augustus. Herodian records it for Septimius Severus (4.2). This was not a fringe belief. It was an official state ceremony. A senator would be paid to testify that he witnessed the ascent. The body is consumed. An eyewitness claims to see the figure ascending. Divine status is conferred. This is the political and cultural context in which the Gospels were written. Just go read Justin Martyr in his *First Apology*, where he also identifies these tropes.

But do you see the pattern? A great figure dies. The body disappears or cannot be found. Someone claims to have seen him alive or ascending. He is declared divine. This is not one isolated parallel. This is a cultural template that was used over and over across centuries throughout the entire Mediterranean world. Richard C. Miller documents dozens of these. David Litwa catalogs the parallels in *How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and the Mediterranean Myths* (Yale University Press, 2019). He demonstrates the gospel authors were writing within this well-established literary tradition. He's echoing what Richard C. Miller was saying. Now, with this in mind, go read Mark's empty tomb story again with these parallels in mind. A great figure dies. Women go to the place where the body was laid. The body is gone. A figure in white announces, "He has risen." The witnesses flee. Mark's audience, steeped in the Greco-Roman literary culture, would have recognized this pattern immediately. They did not need to be told what it meant. A missing body meant divine translation. The author of Mark was not reporting a historical event. He was telling his audience, using a literary convention they already understood, that Jesus had been exalted to the divine realm.

We have to keep in mind that crucified criminals did not get honorable burials. Even setting aside the literary parallels, there is a basic historical problem with the tomb story that apologists almost never address. It was the public humiliation designed to strip the victim of all dignity, including dignity in death. Roman practice, as documented by multiple ancient sources, was to leave crucified bodies on the cross to rot and be eaten by birds and dogs. That was the point. That was the terror. You do not just die. Your body is desecrated. John Dominic Crossan argues in *Who Killed Jesus?* (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) that the historical Jesus was almost certainly not given an honorable burial in a rich man's private tomb. That is not what happened to crucified criminals. Bart Ehrman develops this in *How Jesus Became God* (HarperOne, 2014), noting that the Romans had no motivation to hand the body of a convicted seditionist to his followers for a dignified burial. Ehrman points out that even in cases where bodies were taken down from crosses, they were typically thrown into common graves or shallow pits, not placed in expansive rock-cut tombs. The entire burial by Joseph of Arimathea narrative starts to look suspicious the moment you examine it. Joseph of Arimathea appears out of nowhere in Mark's narrative. He is not mentioned at any earlier point in any gospel. He is described as a member of the Sanhedrin, the very body that, according to Mark, just condemned Jesus to death. And yet he is supposedly sympathetic enough to go to Pilate and ask for the body. Pilate, who just had Jesus executed as a seditionist, simply hands the body over to a council member. The whole scene reads like a narrative invention designed to solve a theological problem. If Jesus rose from the tomb, someone needs to put him in a tomb first. Joseph of Arimathea is the plot device that gets the body into the tomb so the empty tomb story can work.

You see, the real interesting thing is Paul never mentions the empty tomb. Our earliest source, Paul, writing in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 around 54 CE, says Jesus was buried and was raised. He does not mention a tomb. He does not mention Joseph of Arimathea. He does not mention women finding the tomb empty. He does not mention a stone rolled away. He does not mention an angel or a young man in white. None of it. If the empty tomb story were a well-known historical fact circulating in the early Christian community, it is extraordinary that Paul, who is writing to prove that Jesus was raised from the dead, never once mentions it. He lists appearance claims: Jesus appeared to Cephas, then to the 12, then to 500, then to James, then to all the apostles, then to Paul himself, but no empty tomb.

And even if there was, just hypothetically speaking, let's say there was an empty tomb. There is a mundane explanation that a lot of people miss. For the sake of argument, suppose there was a tomb. Suppose Joseph of Arimathea was a real person, a real person who did place Jesus's body in a tomb before sundown on Friday. Even granting all of that, there is a completely natural explanation for the tomb being found empty on Sunday morning. Dr. James Tabor, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, well, he's retired now. He argues in *The Jesus Dynasty* (Simon & Schuster, 2006) that Jewish burial practices required that a body be placed somewhere before sundown to observe the Sabbath, but that this initial placement was often temporary. The final burial, especially for executed criminals, would take place after the Sabbath in a permanent location. Under this scenario, Joseph of Arimathea places Jesus in a nearby tomb as a temporary measure before sundown on Friday. After the Sabbath, the body is relocated to a permanent burial site, possibly a common criminal's grave. The women arrive at the temporary tomb early Sunday morning and find it empty. They do not know about the relocation. None of the apostles know where the body was moved. The empty tomb is not a miracle. It is a misunderstanding. The body was simply moved, and nobody told them. This isn't wild speculation. This is based on documented Jewish burial customs, and it accounts for every element of the story without requiring a single supernatural event.

But see, Mark's ending tells you everything. And finally, look at how Mark, the earliest gospel, actually ends this story. Mark 16:8: "The women see the empty tomb. They're told Jesus has risen, and they flee in terror and tell no one." That is the end. No resurrection appearances, no Jesus showing up to the disciples. No Great Commission, no ascension, just an empty tomb, frightened women, and silence. The later gospels add the appearances, add the meetings with the disciples, and add the ascension, but the earliest version of the story has none of that. Think about what that means. The first time anyone wrote down the empty tomb story, they ended it with witnesses who told nobody. That's not how you write a historical report. That's how you write a literary conclusion. The author of Mark is explaining to his audience why they have never heard this story before. The women told no one. It is a narrative device to account for the silence. It is an origin story for a tradition that did not exist before Mark invented it.

"The tomb is either empty or it is not." Wes loves that line. But the real question is one he will never ask on camera: Did this story ever actually happen at all? The literary parallels say no. The burial practices say probably not. Paul's silence says he never heard of it. And Mark's own ending says the witnesses told nobody. That is not a historical event. That is a story, a powerful one, one that eventually changed the world, but a story nonetheless.

"Is that when you look at the claims of Christianity and ultimately like them centering on who Jesus is, there are so many crossover interlocking areas of inquiry and evidence, you know, and I I went to university because I had full intention of going into the police force."

"What?"

"Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to be I wanted to be a police."

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to be a police detective and God had other plans and I kind of went off."

"Now, unbeknownst to me, historiography and detective work are not all that..."

"I was just going to say that."

[clears throat]

"But in police work, especially with something like uh like an investigation on a murder, say, you want a number of lines of evidence that vary on how good or not good they are, right? Because it makes a cumulative case. Some evidence is a lot better than other evidence, but when you put it all together, it makes that cumulative case to point to the evidence of a specific thing happening. And this is where I think people people often miss the boat in that we don't just believe the God of the Bible arbitrarily. It's not like I picked Yahweh, but I could have picked Zeus. You know, I believe that there's evidence that ultimately points to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview. So, when you have someone like Richard Jerves who says, 'You there are 30,000 religions out there. You really think yours is true?' In my mind, sometimes I think that's like standing in front of a judge and saying, 'There are 30,000 people in this town. You really think this guy's the guy who did it?' Well, it depends what the evidence is, right? It [clears throat] depends whether the evidence is pointing in the direction of that person being the culprit. And so it's not just arbitrary. We didn't just pick a random person and put them on trial. There's evidence that actually points to whether that person is guilty or not. And actually, there could be good evidence and bad evidence, and the judge could throw out some evidence as being inconsequential or weak, but it's all of that evidence together."

I love that Wes uses a detective analogy because the moment you take it seriously, it destroys his case. In a murder case, you need independent evidence not produced by interested parties. You need physical corroboration. You need contemporaneous witnesses. What does Wes have? Anonymous theological narratives by movement insiders written 40 to 70 years later or even more? One letter from a man who says he got his information through a vision. Come on. "I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ." Paul got his gospel from a vision. In a courtroom, that is hearsay at best and hallucination at worst. No detective would put that witness on the stand.

Let's keep it real. The non-Christian sources are late and derivative. Tacitus writes 85 years later, repeating what Christians told him. Likely Josephus is tampered with. Pliny and Suetonius provide zero crucifixion details. There is zero archaeological evidence, zero physical evidence. Maybe there's archaeological evidence people were crucified, but Jesus himself, come on. Zero neutral contemporary witnesses. Not one person who was not a follower wrote a single word about Jesus during his lifetime. If a detective brought this to a prosecutor and said, "My evidence is four anonymous accounts 40 to 70 years later by the fan club, one letter from a man who got his info from a vision, and two Roman historians 85 years later repeating what the fan club told them," the prosecutor would tell him to come back with actual evidence. That is the cumulative case.

Wes says with 30,000 religions, it depends on the evidence. Fine. Muslims have testimonial evidence. Mormons have miracle claims, even better, I think, than Christians. Hindus have spiritual experiences. Every religion has the same categories of evidence Wes cites. The only difference is which tradition you were raised in. Hector Avalos, *The End of Biblical Studies* (Prometheus, 2007). Apologetics, he says, applies credibility to the Bible that would be rejected in any other field. And Robert Price, in *The Case Against the Case for Christ* (American Atheist Press, 2010), the same methodology that proves Christianity proves Mormonism with equal force. If your evidence standard cannot distinguish your religion from every other religion on earth, it is not an evidence standard. It is a loyalty test.

It's uh going back to the Protestant Reformation. So individuals like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Melanchthon, who were there, were there were proto-reformers, there were individuals prior to that, like John Hus and um John Wycliffe. Um, and what that period of time is in the Protestant Reformation was it was a number of individuals who were looking at the church around them and they were saying, you know, there have been these traditions that have developed, these accretions over time, and we need to get back to the gospel. We need to get back to primitive Christianity. There was a lot of things that had taken place in the Middle Ages. A lot of corruption within the church hierarchy. Um, there were a number of popes who had basically bought themselves into the position of the papacy, and you had um uh children out of wedlock and all these sorts of things. It was a little bit of a of a crazy time. And there was what kind of spawned that the the in uh the what we typically mark as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation is uh 1517 when Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door, the chapel door of the um castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. So that's kind of this placeholder marker as the beginning of the Reformation. Uh in in in a historical sense, what Luther did wasn't actually all that odd. You know, nowadays, uh the equivalent of going to a football game now in uh Wittenberg, Germany in the 16th century was that one theologian would put up their debate challenge on the door and another theologian would take it up and they'd go to the pub and they would debate. They'd go back and forth. And so in a very practical sense, Luther wasn't doing like this wasn't an act of vandalism by nailing something to a door. And he actually could have very well pasted it, but the nailing and the hammer makes a a good image.

>> Um,

>> but what he was doing was he was challenging the church and particularly the Pope's authority to forgive sins in what are referred to as indulgences. So there's this idea and I'll try not to go into too much detail about like the treasury of merit, but the idea is that you can by giving money to the church buy forgiveness of sins to get yourselves so many years off of purgatory.

So in this particular time, there was a lot of corruption in that they were trying to rebuild St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. And one of the ways they did this was that they sent these individuals out who were basically salesmen. And there was a saying, "When a when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs." And the idea was that, you know, you give your money and you can get either your family members who have passed away or maybe you in the future time off of purgatory. And [snorts] so Luther is looking at this and he's seeing people being taken advantage of. At this point, he is uh he's a professor. He's teaching at the seminary. Um, but he's also a minister. He's a priest in the church in in Wittenberg. And he sees this and he he's seeing this as people who don't really have the means to give being taken advantage of for the purpose of rebuilding St. St. Peter's um in Rome. And so he writes up these theses and uh part and parcel to it is that he's saying, if the Pope has the authority to forgive sins, why doesn't he just do it? If he can pull people out of purgatory by the grace and loving kindness that he possesses, why doesn't he just do it? Why do you have to pay him? Now, that's an kind of an oversimplification of the 95 articulations of what he puts, but that's a big part of it. And this gets him in trouble. It gets him in trouble because he's really pushing against um

>> It's making sense.

>> Yeah, I think that's part of it. And also, he was at a very advantageous time. The printing press had just taken off. So, it's not that there were other there weren't other people who were challenging the Pope's authority or the magisterium's ability, but because people then take his writings and they print them and through technology are able to get this out and it's just, you know, it catches wildfire. Now, all of a sudden, Luther's teachings are all over Europe. And so the availability of the technological advancement aids the the change and the questioning and all of these things. Well, so Luther is kind of championed with starting some of this and then that that proceeds into more and more and even the questioning of okay, at the time, the Bible is primarily read in Latin. It's not widely available in the vernacular of the people. And so Luther endeavors to translate the Bible into German, into the language that people can read. And this is also seen as controversial because the laity are not uh seen as being able to properly interpret the word of God. You need kind of the intermediaries of the priests and and the the powers that be to tell you exactly what's going on. And so these individuals are called the reformers. They're reforming the church to go back.

M

>> so there are these things. It's like a tree and moss has grown all over it. And Luther is looking at this and he's saying there's a tree in there and it's a good tree and it's a healthy tree and it's a beautiful tree. Let's just shave all that moss off. All of these traditions that we've developed.

Look, I can say this. I live 15 minutes from Disney World. Wes gives Shawn the Disney version of the Reformation. Luther was a heroic monk who stood up against a corrupt church, nailed his 95 Theses to a door, and restored the pure gospel. Nice story, buddy. Also profoundly incomplete. What Wes does not mention: Luther was a vicious anti-Semite. His 1543 treatise *On the Jews and Their Lies* called for burning synagogues, destroying Jewish homes, confiscating Jewish property, and forcing Jews into labor. Thomas Kaufmann documents in *Luther's Jews* (Oxford UP, 2017) that the Nazis directly cited Luther as theological justification. Julius Streicher, I hope I'm pronouncing his name properly, invoked Luther at the Nuremberg trials. Martin Luther's legacy includes a direct line to the Holocaust. Wes praised this man for 20 minutes and mentioned none of it.

Luther also sided with the princes during the Peasants' War and urged them to smite, slay, and stab the rebels. An estimated 100,000 peasants were killed. The Wars of Religion that followed devastated Europe for over a century. The Thirty Years' War alone killed an estimated 8 million people. But sure, it was about getting back to the pure gospel. See, Dierk Michaelis, and I'm probably butchering the name, *The Reformation: A History* (Viking, 2003) for the massive political context Wes ignores. But to the heart of it, *Sola Scriptura*, scripture alone, is self-refuting. The Bible never says the Bible is the sole authority. The canon, which books are even in the Bible, was determined by church councils and tradition over centuries. The authorities *sola scriptura* rejects are the authorities that gave Wes his Bible. You cannot use the Bible to prove the Bible is the sole authority when the Bible's contents were decided by church tradition. Keith Mattson concedes in *The Shape of Sola Scriptura* (Canon Press, 2001) even within the reformed tradition there is deep disagreement about what it means. It is a slogan, not a real doctrine.

[music]

Honestly, here's where I land. Wes is smart. A good bullshitter, but smart. Wes is polished. Looks nice and shiny. And Wes is feeding people a version of Christianity that cannot survive contact with the evidence, especially when you're actually being critical like you would any other faith you don't already buy into. He told Shawn the Bible is the most preserved text in history. It has 300,000+ variants, an added ending to Mark. He personally botched and four Gospels that cannot agree on who went to the tomb, what Jesus's last words were, or what day he was crucified. He told Shawn about so many non-Christian sources. There are three, and they are all late and derivative. He deployed the CS Lewis Trilemma, which died academically decades ago, and dismissed the legend while standing in a world where a convicted murderer named Peregrinus was deified by eyewitnesses at the Olympics by the next day. So many problems. He celebrated the crucifixion as salvation while hiding that it is the evidence Jesus was a political criminal executed for insurrection. He defended infant slaughter as divine justice. And his own Calvinist theology says God planned every child's cancer for his glory. Shawn asked honest questions. He deserved honest answers. But he got a sales pitch.

Myth Vision exists. We're here for the full picture. We bring the scholars. We bring the primary sources. We bring the peer-reviewed research from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Brill, Sheffield, Phoenix, Fortress, Routledge, and every major academic press and publishing company. So, I want to say this blunt: If your faith survives contact with the evidence, this evidence, it's a faith worth having. If it does not, then it was never real to begin with. I'm Derek Lambert, son of a special forces soldier, host of Mythvision podcast. Subscribe, share this everywhere, and somebody send this to Shawn Ryan because he deserves to hear the other side. And I know Wes Huff will not give it to him. Never forget, we are Myth Vision.