Evangelical Apologist Wes Huff Just Got Exposed

What's up, friends? How are we doing? Welcome in. Um, yeah, this song is an absolute banger. I, I love it. I'm going to keep using it.

Hey, happy Wednesday. Um, so, a couple housekeeping things. I told you guys when I started building this channel that I wanted to go live more, and then I stopped going live. And that was because it was really hard for me to find a time at night that worked consistently. Things, my schedule's always changing between the kids and the wife and just, you know, normal life stuff. So, I'm going to try to do my best to keep Wednesdays around this time open in my schedule to go live. Via, it could be a response video. It could be a guest, and I'm trying to build that side of this content up more. I like live a ton. I love live conversations. I love doing live response videos. So, that is my goal. So, that's just kind of the update on that.

Hey, if you're watching this right now, if you can give this video a like, that would be great. This is only on YouTube. I'm not streaming anywhere else.

Um, today we're going to get into, uh, Wes Huff in a video I found of another YouTuber pretty much taking him to task for not being really that truthful in the claims that he makes. And we'll get into that in a second.

One other piece of housekeeping I wanted to bring up. And please understand, there is never any pressure to do this. But I am an independent creator. I do this work full-time, trying to make ends meet and trying to do all the content, the deep dive on Greg Lori and Harvest Church, the deep dive on the New Episcopic Reformation. All the videos that I make are completely paywall free, and they're on YouTube and Subsec, etc. If you want to support the work I'm doing, there's a link in the description of this live or of this video. If you could consider becoming a supporter to help me out, it'd be a huge help. Any bit helps. Five bucks a month helps. Ten bucks a month helps. It all helps to just make ends meet on the back end of my personal family life, and so I can keep doing more and more of these videos.

Okay, so that being said, friends, that being said, um, I, I saw this video a little while ago now, um, by a YouTuber. I can't believe I'm blanking on his names. I love his stuff. So, I'm going to find it real quick. Um, it was by Myth Vision Podcast, who's actually, actually, is also doing a lot of content on this kind of stuff. I love his work. I discovered him, I don't know, I discovered him maybe a couple months ago, and I saw this video he did methodically going through Wes Huff's stuff and kind of exposing it.

Now, the reason why I'm doing this video is because a lot of us who grew up in evangelicalism were kind of sold, I would argue, a very misleading understanding of what true Christianity or what the, or what the Bible is. And maybe there's someone watching this who is still kind of in that world but has questions. So, I'm hoping this video helps you understand why so much of the mainstream academic biblical scholarship world doesn't really take evangelicalism super seriously. And this video, I think, is going to blow all of our minds. Um, and I want to go through it with you. That's really, that's, it's just that simple. It's just that simple. That's what I want to do today.

So, we'll go through this. Yes. Uh, Evan, I do take Taco Bell gift cards, too. That's hilarious.

So, we will go through this kind of piece by piece. I'm not, I'm going to try and let this really breathe and kind of give my commentary whenever I can without interrupting too much, because frankly, I agree with this content creator a ton, and he knows a much more about this stuff than I do. So, I want to let him educate you. Um, but you know how this goes. I always interrupt. At some point, I'm going to pause and give my, my thoughts.

So, all right. Are we ready? Let's get into this. I'm, I'm looking forward to it. I think it's in, I think it's really going to help you, um, understand the slight of hand that the evangelical apologetics industry routinely pulls on its adherence and why it should not be taken super seriously. Let's get into it.

Wesley Huff is the hottest name in Christian apologetics right now. Let's keep it real. Joe Rogan, Pierce Morgan, Diary of a CEO, Andrew Schultz. Millions and millions of people are hearing him make the case the Bible is historically reliable, accurately copied, and ultimately true. We've already tackled some of the other appearances like A Diary of CEO and Shawn Ryan Show. And he's good at what he does. He really is, at least for certain people. He portrays himself as likable. He acts confident. And many think he does not sound like a televangelist. I beg to differ.

But here's the thing. I like this guy. When you check his claims against the peer-reviewed work that every major research university assigns, a very different picture shows up. And that's what we're going to talk about today. I am going to walk through this church presentation with you. I, I imagine he did in Canada somewhere, clip by clip, and show you exactly where the problems are.

>> And keeping it real, Wes is the number one most viral Christian apologist in the world right now. That's a huge reason to do Wes Huff videos for those who are counter apologists, for those who are trying to get good information out there to the masses. Wes Huff is the Heracles of current Christian apologetics. I'm the poisoned tunic of Nessus sent by the centaur. So, let's watch this together.

>> Here we go. I like this guy. I'm a fan.

>> Need to talk about what we mean when we use the word "Bible."

See, that sounds great. That sounds like someone who is about to give you the full picture. So, let's see where he takes it.

>> Wesley Huff is a PhD candidate in New Testament at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, masters in theological studies from Tindell University, bachelor's in sociology from York University, vice president of Apologetics Canada.

Two things to note. First, Wycliffe College is a confessional evangelical seminary. It operates within a theological framework that starts with the conclusion that the Bible is the word of God. That's fine for ministry, >> but it's not how critical scholarship works. Critical scholars follow the evidence even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable.

>> I, I, I want to mention one thing. I, I, why is my song playing? >> Huge difference. That's weird. >> Second, his degrees. >> Hold on. Pause. That, that, I'm not sure why my music came back on. I'll, I'll do it this way.

Um, one thing I like that, that, that Myth Vision says here is that he makes it a separation that, look, if for ministry, if you want to claim the Bible is the word of God, like, have at it. Like, he's not attacking someone's faith. But he's simply saying if you're going to enter the arena of scholarship, then we're going to hold this to a different standard because scholarship is about different things. It doesn't start with the presupposition that the Bible is the inherent word of God. And therefore, now we have to prove it. And I like how he separates that because it's not anti-relligion or anti-Christian to scrutinize either apologists or the Bible. I love that about this person so far.

>> Sociology undergrad, seminary, masters, PhD in progress. He is not yet a doctor, and his area is textual criticism, which is genuinely relevant to parts of this talk. But a lot of what he covers, archaeology, genre theory, canon history, onomastics, goes well beyond his specialization. And it shows.

>> I like this. Here we go.

>> Because the Bible isn't one book as much as it's 66 books. 66 books written over a period of 1600 years on three different continents by close to 40 different authors in three different languages.

Stop. This is the very first claim he makes, and it's already doing something sneaky. He said 66 books. If you grew up Protestant, that just sounds like a fact, but it is not a neutral fact. It is a theological position. The Protestant Bible has 66 books. The Roman Catholic Bible has 73. The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible has 81. The Greek Orthodox cannon includes books like Third Mcabes. Martin Luther himself, the reformer, wanted to remove James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation from the New Testament. So, he stuck them in an appendix in the back.

>> 66 books. >> 66 books. Which 66, Wesley? Because Christians could not agree on that number for centuries. Athanasius of Alexandria did not write his famous list of 27 New Testament books until 367 of the Common Era, over 300 years after Jesus. And even that was not universally accepted. Right from the opening sentence, Huff is smuggling in a Protestant conclusion and presenting it as a basic definition.

Okay, this is what I call conclusion inflation. >> Pause. Man, my controls are not working. Um, I love this because if you grew up like I did, friends, you were given the same thing, right? The Bible is this. Then they give you the Protestant version. But the reality, like, like, um, this YouTuber says, I think his name is Adam, but I might be, I might be wrong, is that that's, there are different Bibles, and different traditions in Christianity hold to different views of those Bibles. I love that because in evangelicalism, you are not given that perspective. You are given that this Bible, I have it on my shelf somewhere here, could be under there, some stuff, is the English Protestant one, anyway, is the inherent, inspired word of God. And that's just not, again, factually the case, unless you're a Protestant and hold to that belief. That's not objective, though. It's very much a subjective claim, and there are other Bibles and other Christian traditions that would beg to differ. And I like that he's mentioning this. It's really important.

>> You start with something that sounds like a simple fact and quietly build an argument on top of it. Hoping nobody notices the foundation is a theological assumption. But it is not just the number that is wrong. Listen to this part again. >> 66 books written over a period of 1600 years. 1600 years. 1600 years. That sounds incredibly impressive, right? A single cohesive collection of books written over 16 centuries. Here's the problem. That number is also just flat-out wrong. Unless you accept the most extreme conservative traditional dating for every single book. The only way you get 1600 years is if you believe Moses personally wrote the first five books of the Bible around 1400 BCE and Revelation was written around 95 CE. That gives you roughly 1500 years, and apologists round up to 1600 because bigger numbers sound better.

But here's the thing. Critical scholars do not believe Moses wrote the pentet. The documentary hypothesis, first developed in the 19th century and refined ever since, they've gotten better with it, shows that Genesis through Deuteronomy is a composite of multiple sources written at different times. Now, I want to be balanced about the dating because there is a genuine range of scholarly opinion here. Some scholars working within the documentary hypothesis framework, supplementary hypothesis as well, date the earliest source strands to around the 10th or 9th centuries BCE. Dr. Richard Elliot Freeman laid this out for general audience in "Who Wrote the Bible?" public.

One thing I want to point out here is my song keeps on playing, and I'm really annoyed by that. So, we're going to mute that so it doesn't keep doing that. One thing I want to point out here is notice how complicated this world of biblical scholarship is. People don't all agree. There's a range of beliefs around when the Bible was written, over how many years. But Wes, as an apologist would, makes these very factual, black and white claims about, about what the Bible is. There's no nuance. There's no even, you know, um, there's no even, even presentation of, hey, to be clear, other people might see this differently. There's other room, other places in scholarship that would disagree with me, but I would hold to this view of the Bible being written over X amount of years. Instead, it's, here's the facts. The Bible is this many books written over this many years with, you know, he's going to keep going over authors and stuff, but it's just really important to recognize that the, the Bible and Christianity is really complicated and often times does not agree internally. And whenever someone says this is a biblical worldview, or this is what the Bible clearly teaches, or this is what the Bible is or isn't, or this is what salvation is or isn't, just know that they mean according to my tradition that I'm a part of. That's really important to recognize here by Harper 1.

>> Dr. Joel Ben at Yell Divinity School covers the composite nature of the pentitute in "The Composition of the Pentitute," published by Yell University Press in 2012. Under this model, the final editing of the Pentatube happened during or after the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. But other scholars push the dates even later. A significant number of researchers now argue that much of the Hebrew Bible, including texts that were traditionally considered early, may have been composed or heavily redacted in the Persian period, the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, or even into the Hellenistic period, the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. Scholars like Dr. Philip Davies, Dr. Niels Peter Lumpkkey, and Dr. Thomas Thompson, Thomas Lompson as we know him, have argued that many of the narratives about ancient Israel are literary productions of much later periods than traditionally assumed.

And I like that this guy gives sources. Like, one thing about this video that I really liked was that it's obviously well researched. He's giving you the books. He's giving you the scholars. He's giving you his primary sources. That's really important. And again, friends, as someone who has had the privilege of interviewing many biblical scholars on The New Evangelicals podcast, you should go check that out, that podcast. It's fantastic. So many good episodes. The more you listen to them, the more they're going to use words like "estimated" or "approximate" or "we don't all agree on this" or, you know, "my belief is," instead of these, these static, objective claims of what something is or isn't, because we're talking about ancient history, and we don't have much to go on. We don't have any of the original manuscripts. So, we're doing our best to reconstruct what we think happened back then. That doesn't mean that it actually did. Now, scholars have their methods, and they have their reasons for why, why they're maybe more confident than other positions, but it's complicated. If there's one thing to get from this video, the Bible and the Christian faith is complicated. It's not simple. It's not black and white.

>> Here's where it gets >> Derek, thank you for the name, Derek. My, my apologies. >> Really interesting. Dr. Ian Young at the University of Sydney, along with Dr. Robert Rosettco and Dr. Martin Arenssburg, published a landmark two-volume study called "Linguistic Dating of the Biblical Texts" through rutled. Their argument is devastating for anyone who claims we can confidently date biblical text to specific centuries based on the Hebrew language alone. Young and Rosettco showed that what scholars have traditionally called Early Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew may not actually be successive chronological stages of the language. They may be coexisting styles that were available to authors throughout the biblical period. If that is correct, then the primary linguistic tool scholars have used to date Old Testament texts to specific centuries is far less reliable than previously assumed.

>> And here is the thing that really puts all of this in perspective. >> And I think this is the most important point for everyone watching. Our earliest physical manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible is the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to roughly the 3rd century BCE through the 1st century CE. That is the oldest physical evidence we have. Before Kuman, we have almost nothing. And what did the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal? Not one stable, fixed text. They revealed fluidity. Multiple versions of the same books circulating at the same time. Some Kuman manuscripts of Jeremiah are significantly shorter than others. Some manuscripts of Samuel agree with the Greek Septuagent against the later Maseretic text. The Kuman Library did not contain one Bible. It contained a living, evolving textual tradition with real variation. Dr. Emanuel Tove, the leading Dead Sea Scroll scholar in the world, has documented this extensively in "Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible," published by Fortress Press.

Now, think about what that means. If the text is already fluid and diverse in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, and if we have zero physical evidence of any manuscripts from before that period, then when we try to rewind 500, 600, 700 years before Kuman, we genuinely do not know what this material looked like. We are making educated guesses based on internal analysis. >> Good guesses, informed guesses, but guesses nonetheless. We cannot pretend we have certainty about texts we do not physically possess, especially when fluidity is what we see when they first show up.

So, let me give you the honest picture. Some traditions in the Hebrew Bible may go back to the 10th or 9th century BCE. Some scholars think even that is too early. The physical manuscripts only go back to around the 3rd century BCE. And what those manuscripts show is not a frozen, perfect, preserved text, but a living tradition in motion. That is the reality. It is fascinating, but it does not look anything like 1600 years of consistent transmission. >> 66.

Do you guys, do you guys understand that? Look, I'm going to boil it down really simple. Essentially, what Derek is arguing is that what we, the evidence that we do have, does not show a static Bible or a static ancient collection of texts. There were editors, and there were, there's movement, and they're ripping off of each other in different texts of the same books, or same manuscripts don't all add up, or that they, they don't all match up to be the same exact thing. So, it, it kind of flies in the face of this version of inherency that many of us were given, that the Bible is perfect and is flawless and is, you know, God's word never changes. No, like the Bible that we have today looks very different than the earliest text that we have in a lot of different ways. And there's different translations that even add on to that. And then, of course, there's a, there's a whole issue of translation itself from, from Hebrew or Greek or Latin to English, right? So, I like how Derek explains it. I like how he gets so many sources, and it kind of flies in the face of Wes Huff, who is this massive apologist touring the world making these claims that actually, dude, for someone who claims to be, you know, um, college educated and going for his PhD, you're either misrepresenting the data that is pretty commonly accepted, or you just don't know. Either way, you're not being, you're not being like, um, maybe not, I'm not sure of accurate word, but you're not being fair in the claims that you're making, which I, again, I really, really appreciate, uh, Derek kind of going through.

>> Written over a period of 1600 years. Not 1600, Wesley. Somewhere between 700 and 1100, depending on which scholars you follow. And the honest answer is, we are not sure because the physical evidence does not go back far enough to settle the question.

All right, now play that last part one more time.

>> By close to 40 different authors.

40 authors. We do not know who wrote most of these books. The Pentatuk is anonymous. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are anonymous. The Gospels are anonymous. Many of Paul's letters are considered synonymous, meaning someone wrote them under Paul's name after he died. We're not dealing with 40 known authors. We're dealing with a collection of mostly anonymous texts whose authorship has been debated for centuries. I mean, did Abraham write his own saga? Was he sitting in his tent journaling about that one time God told him to sacrifice his son?

All right, let me play the whole thing one more time. Because now that you know the facts, listen to how confident he sounds.

>> Because the Bible isn't one book as much as it's 66 books. 66 books written over a period of 1600 years on three different continents by close to 40 different authors in three different languages.

There are two major languages, Greek and Hebrew, and one minor language. Every number in that sentence is either wrong or misleading. And it's the first thing out of his mouth. That should tell you something about the level of precision we are dealing with for the rest of this talk.

You guys following so far? I had to do this live because I wanted to show you this video in hopes that as you're going through your faith process, maybe you're deconstructing, maybe you're not sure what to believe. I'm trying to give you guys like really wellressearched pieces of content to help you understand fact from fiction. And again, even Derek is fair that we just don't know some of this stuff. So, to claim emphatically that the Bible is this thing when we know that that isn't the case isn't right. But again, Wes speaks to millions of people, including secular folks. And so, their only introduction to biblical Christianity or to the true Christian faith is Wes Huff's scholarship, so to speak. And it's just not super sturdy so far.

By the way, um, if you want to support this channel, super chats mean a lot. I do read all super chats. Usually, usually I, I have a little banner up here saying that, but I guess I forgot about it today. I can see if I can find it on here. I don't know. Um, but I'll see what I can do about that. But yeah, um, oh, wait. Here we go. Is this the one? Boop. There we go. There we go. All super chats get read live.

All right, friends. Let's keep going. Thanks for being here. I love this stuff. This is kind of how I nerd out, and I want to do it with you. So glad you're here with me. Let's hear his framework.

>> However, we also need to define what we're talking about when we use the word "true." How are we defining the word "true"? And what I want to do this evening is I want to go through a couple of definitions that we would use in order to define how we would use that word and break it apart to instill confidence in us when we talk about the Bible, when we look at the Bible, when we're either doing daily devotions or we're doing study or even just investigating the Bible if it's not something that you necessarily do. And those three definitions that I'm going to be working with are: in accordance with fact and/or reality, communicating accurately, and conveying honestly.

>> Okay, really quick, just my perspective on this before we get to Dererick's response. I don't know how you apply these three things to the Bible or the Protestant Bible. Given that we have none of the original manuscripts, given that we don't live in ancient, in the ancient world, how do we find out if the claims in the Bible are fact and correspond to reality? How do we know that? How do we know that? How do we know that they're conveying honesty? We are relying on copies of copies of copies, and we don't even have the first manuscripts, or the copies of those copies, or copies of those copies, or the translation process. How do we know that scholars today are translating the, the, um, the manuscripts that we do have accurately? Again, even, even from the jump, these three things don't seem to line up with like what we know about the Bible today. And maybe that's because, friends, trying to put this modernist, scientific method approach on the Bible is a fool's errand because maybe, just maybe, the Bible and its contents are not after those kinds of things. Maybe we're just applying the wrong filter. We'll see what Dererick has to say.

>> All right, those three categories sound reasonable. Does the Bible match facts? Does it communicate accurately? Is it honest? Fine. Let's see what evidence he brings. Pay attention to how he uses Luke's prologue because this is where the slight of hand happens. >> Luke, one of the gospel authors, wrote a biography of Jesus that we refer to as the Gospel of Luke. And in it, he outlines his purpose statement. Right at the beginning, he says, "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilos, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught." So, Luke has a nice prologue. >> He says he investigated everything carefully and is writing an orderly account. Okay. Now listen to the conclusion Huff draws from that.

>> And Luke uses a word there that we translate as "account" or "narrative" to describe his book. This is a word that other ancient Greco Roman historians use, other writers to describe how they themselves write history. In fact, there are two very important ancient historians, Josephus and Lucian, who use this word to describe how they should write proper historical documents.

Do you see the move? Luke uses a word that some historians also used. Therefore, according to Huff, Luke is writing reliable history. Wesley is smuggling reliability in through the back door.

And I want to slow down here because this is one of the most important sections of the video. He's collapsing three completely separate questions into one. And if you do not catch it, the whole argument sounds airtight. It does.

>> Question number one, does Luke's prologue use historioggraphical conventions? Maybe. There is a real scholarly debate about this, and the answer is not as clean as Huff pretends. Dr. Love Day Alexander, a classicist at the University of Sheffield, published a full Cambridge University Press monograph on this prologue called "The Preface of Luke's Gospel" in 1993. Must read. Alexander showed that Luke's prologue is actually more similar to the introductions found in scientific and technical manuals. Things like medical treatises, herbal remedy guides, engineering handbooks, and dream interpretation manuals, than to the grand prologues of historians like Thusidities or Palibius. Now, Alexander herself did not say Luke is definitely not writing history. She said the prologue itself does not prove he is because these kinds of prefaces were used across many different genres. On the other side, Dr. Zachary Dawson has argued that Luke's preface does show features conventional to prefaces of historioggraphical writing. And Dr. Shauna Adams published a peer-reviewed response to Alexander in the Journal of Greor Roman Christianity and Judaism in 2006, making a similar case.

>> They're all fighting over it, guys. Hopefully, you see it by now. In scholarship, they're all arguing. Someone says this, someone says, "Well, no, I think it's more of this." They write articles, they write peer-reviewed articles, and they engage the debate. So far, what you haven't heard from Derek is a lot of, you know, absolute or certainty, or this is what it actually is. He acknowledges that even in the scholarship, people don't all agree on these things. That should tell you something right away whenever someone tries to tell you that, that the Bible is clear.

>> There is a real back and forth here. The point is, even scholars who think the prologue has historioggraphical features do not claim it proves Luke is accurate. It is a literary convention, not a truth guarantee. Question two, >> it's a statement. How do you prove that statement? You need more evidence than just the statement itself. That's a, that's circular reasoning. >> What is the genre of Luke Axe? This is where it gets really messy for Huff because this question is genuinely unsettled in current scholarship. It's not a clean "Luke equals history" situation. Not even close. Let me show you the range. Dr. Charles Talbert famously reopened the biography versus history question for Luke Axe. Maryanne Palmer Bonds in her book, "The Past as Legacy," argued that Luke Axe functions as a pros adaptation of heroic epic, a founding narrative for the Christian movement modeled on Virgil Zenid, like Dr. Dennis R. Macdonald would probably echo that sentiment. Dr. Richard Pervo in "The Mystery of Acts," published by Polebridge Press in 2008, argued axe is best understood as an ancient historical novel, comparing its narrative patterns to Greek novels like Cheritans Call, which was written around 50 CE. I probably butchered the name there. I always do. But it features real historical figures like the Syracuse and general Hermaces and the Persian king Ardis Xerxes in a completely fictional love story. Dr. Daniel Lynwood Smith and Dr. Zachary Costlos, I hope I said his name properly, have argued that Luke Axe is better read as a narrative influenced by a wide range of Greek pros forms rather than representing one genre in particular.

>> Yeah. I mean, so one explanation or one thing that the book of Luke Acts is doing is it's taking real people and putting them in fictional scenarios, which, by the way, we do all the time. The movie "300" about the Spartans from back in the day, right, is a very fictional story about real people in a real country. So, that doesn't mean that that, that's exactly what's going on, but it's a plausible opinion to take into consideration, which, again, I like how Derek seems very fair here, where he's giving a pretty wide range of where scholarship tends to land on a spectrum, which should only demonstrate that as we, as Wes makes these claims of, of, of, and comes across so certain and so factual, he's just not being honest about what's going on underneath, underneath all of this.

>> Dr. Shelley Matthews, whom I've interviewed before, reads acts as an orderly account designed to reassure elite readers and tame the Jesus movement socially, not merely to record facts. And even scholars who do call it history, like Dr. Daniel Margaret, who says Luke wanted to create a history, and Dr. Gregory Sterling, who classifies it as apologetic historioggraphy, are careful to note that ancient historioggraphy was selective, rhetorical, apologetic, and identity-forming. It is not modern critical history. >> It's not journalism. It is a shaped narrative with an agenda.

>> So, hold on, hear that. That's really important. Even the scholars or the ones that he cited who believe that Luke is functioning as historical, a historical piece in the ancient world, they don't tell history the way that we think about history. It's not journalism. It's not just the facts. There is an agenda. That's why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all portray Jesus slightly differently because there's different agendas behind it. Matthew paints Jesus as almost a new Moses figure. The gospel of Mark opens up with "the gospel of Jesus," which is a direct middle finger to "the gospel of Caesar" because the word "gospel," good news, actually come came from the empire of Rome and Caesar, and Mark is taking it and flipping it on its head. There's different agendas here. So, the stories that they tell could very well be embellished or be, quote unquote, mythological or fabricated to paint Jesus as a certain person. That's not, that doesn't mean that that, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are lying. They're, those authors are just telling the story in their cultural context. How society tells stories. That's important.

>> Wes Huff cites one word from Luke's prologue and tells his audience, "This is how historians wrote." He's acting like the genre question is settled. It is not. Biography, collected biography, epic, novelistic pros, apologetic historioggraphy, and mixed Greek narrative have all been seriously argued by credentialed scholars at major research universities. Citing one word like "account" does not win the case. It barely starts it.

>> Question three, and this is the one that matters most. Even if you grant historioggraphical genre, does that establish reliability? Right? And this is where Huff's entire argument collapses. Ancient historioggraphy was not modern critical history. Ancient historians invented speeches and put them in people's mouths. The great Thusidities admits he did this. Ancient historians shaped events to serve theological, political, or moral agendas.

Look, I'm not saying I'm the smartest person in the room. I'm not college educated. Okay? I'm not a scholar. But did I not tell you that? Did I not tell you that? Okay, I know a thing or two. Five years in, six years in doing this work, I picked up a few things. That's one of them.

Friends, if you're just joining, welcome in. We're watching a video responding and dismantling Wes Huff. He's an evangelical apologist who does a lot of work in the evangelical world, trying to give people a sense of certainty that their understanding of the Bible and the gospel is factually true. This, um, this YouTuber runs a podcast called Myth Vision, uh, YouTube channel. His name is Derek. He does great work. Make sure to go subscribe to his channel. If you're just getting in, please make sure to give this video a like. It would mean so much. All super chats get read live, and they help feed my family. So, thank you for the super chats.

>> Let's keep going. They selected and omitted material based on what story they wanted to tell. They wrote to persuade, not to provide a neutral record. Even Gregory Sterling, who defends the historioggraphy classification for Luke Acts, defines its functions as "shaping the past to define the present." >> There you go. >> That is not a description of neutral reporting, >> right? >> That's a description of advocacy.

So, here's the summary. Wesley is collapsing three questions into one. Does Luke use some historioggraphical signals? Probably, though that is debated. Does that settle the genre? No. The genre is still contested across at least five or six serious proposals. And does a historioggraphical genre prove reliability? No. Because ancient history writing was selective, rhetorical, and agenda-driven by design.

>> Historians Josephus and Lucian who use this word to describe how they should write proper historical documents. Wesley citing a shared vocabulary word does not prove Luke is a reliable historian any more than a con artist using legal language proves he is a lawyer. The word is a convention. The reliability has to be tested on its own terms, and we can test it right now. Because if Luke is the careful historian Huff says he is, his historical claim should hold up. So, let's test the biggest one. Luke chapter 2, verses 1 and two. This is Luke's most famous historical claim. He says Caesar Augustus ordered a census of the entire Roman world. That this census happened while Corinius was governor of Syria, and that Joseph had to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

At least three problems. First, there was no empire-wide census under Augustus. That's not how Roman censuses worked. They were provincial, not global. Second, Corinius did not become governor of Syria until 6 of the Common Era. If Jesus was born under Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE, that is a 10-year gap. Third, Roman censuses taxed you where you lived and worked, that place. There's no evidence anywhere in any Roman administrative record of a policy requiring travel to ancestral hometowns. That would be administrative chaos. Dr. Raymond Brown, a Catholic priest and member of the Pontipical Biblical Commission, concluded in "The Birth of the Messiah" that Luke's census is historically implausible and was constructed as a literary device to get Jesus from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

To be clear, that doesn't mean the author or authors of Luke Acts are lying. They are doing what they do. I think that that's the biggest point I want to hammer home here is that I think for a lot of us, we are still kind of fundamentalists. We either think like, gee, why is this still playing? I don't know what to do with that. I'm so sorry, guys. I got to fix it on the back end. Um, um, where was I with this? Uh, right. A lot of us who grew up in fundamentalism or even just live in America are stuck in binary land. Either something is true or false. If it's false, someone is lying to you or something like that. Do not think about it in, don't think about about the Bible or the gospel accounts like that because these authors are doing what they're doing intentionally. They're not trying to deceive. They're just telling history or telling stories how they tell stories. That doesn't mean your faith is ruined. That doesn't mean that that you can't be a Christian anymore. It just means that maybe you were given a, the wrong lens to look at the Bible through. Because if you start applying this modernist objective truth, objective moral, you know, did these things really happen, lens to the Bible, it's not going to work because the Bible isn't claiming to be a modern book. That's just so important for you all to recognize.

All right, let's keep going here. Hopefully, this song doesn't play. Okay, no song. That's good.

>> to fulfill Micah 5:2. And Brown was not a skeptic. He was a devout Catholic scholar. This is a mainstream position. So, the same Luke whose prologue Huff just used to prove historical reliability, that same Luke writes a census the majority of critical scholars consider historically impossible. In the next chapter, Wesley, if Luke is a careful investigator, you just told everyone he is. How do you explain the census? Of course, they have several apologetics for this, but Huff never brings up the census.

>> I want to point out, that's a great point from Derek. Apologists have answers to all of these things. I mean, Bartman, any scholar will tell you how the birth stories of Jesus don't line up in the four, in the gospel accounts, uh, of, of, uh, Mark and Luke, or is it Matthew and Luke? Either one. Um, but apologists have their workarounds or their answers, but they always fall flat. Again, there's a reason why modern biblical scholarship does not look to evangelical apologists to get their information from because every time it's examined, it's found to be either misleading or they overemphasize their case or they don't tell the full story because they have a presupposition. What is the presupposition from, for evangelical Christians like, like you and me, that, that grew up in that world? This is true. You can know exactly where, where you're going to go when you die. Jesus definitely was this person that did these things. The Bible is inherent and perfect. It has no flaws in it. Well, if those are your presuppositions, then obviously if there's a contradiction or a flaw, you're going to try to find a, you're going to try and find a way to smooth out that perceived contradiction. That's how this works. Instead, watch what he does. He pivots to a different kind of evidence entirely.

>> to demonstrate that his narrative is placed within an actual time and location. In the first three verses of Luke 3, we are not only given seven historical characters that mark out the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist, but within these three verses alone are 22 historical references to locations and people that have been verified by archaeology and ancient literary sources outside of the Bible. This places Luke's account within a historical framework, making sure his readers know he's not merely making up a story, but pinpointing when and where these events actually took place in history. And the gospel authors do this in multiple different ways with names, locations, as well as with accurate plant and animal life related to the areas within the narratives they are describing.

>> 22 verified references. Luke names governors, and they check out. So, the Bible is historically reliable. This is true, but irrelevant. Yes, Luke names real Roman officials, but knowing Pontius Pilate exists does not prove that a man walked on water. Knowing that Galilee is a real place does not prove someone rose from the dead. And this was completely standard in the ancient world. Ancient fiction regularly used real settings and real people. Cheritans Callo, as I mentioned earlier, written around 50 of the Common Era, which is the same period as some of Paul's letters, features real historical figures in a fictional love story. Xenopon of Ephesus, writing in the 2nd century, set his novel "The Ephesian Tale" in real cities with real temples. The entire genre of ancient Greek novel was built on this technique. Take real places, real rulers, real geography, and wrap a fictional or heavily embellished narrative around them.

But here is the example that should keep Wesley H. >> It's called, that's called Hollywood, right? We do this, we do, we do this with real stories all the time. You see it, "based on a true story" or "loosely based on a true story." This is, again, this is, this is just how humans are sometimes, right? We all tell stories. We all embellish stories to make our point when we're telling history. This is not a negative thing. It's just how it is, and it doesn't jive for apologists because their claims are all about certainty and objective truth, and that's just not the right lens, in my opinion, anyway. Up at night, and I want everyone watching to really pay attention to this one. Appalonius of Tyiana, a real historical person born around 15 CE. Roughly contemporary with Jesus. He was a Pythagorean philosopher who traveled the Roman Empire. And we have a biography written about him by Pho Stratus around 220 CE, called "The Life of Appalonius of Tyiana." This biography is set in real places, real cities you can find on a map. It names real Roman emperors: Nero, Vespasian, Titus, Domission. Appalonius visits real temples, interacts with real political figures, and travels through real provinces of the Roman Empire. The historical and geographical details check out, just like Huff says Luke's details check out. And here's what Appalonius supposedly did according to Pho Stratus. He healed the sick. He cast out demons. He raised a girl from the dead. He appeared to his followers after his death. He ascended to heaven. Sound familiar?

>> Does that sound familiar? Again, these are the things that I didn't know about until I even saw this video. I'm like, "Wait, that sounds really familiar to the story of Jesus." Interesting.

>> I have a genuine question for you. Pho Stratus names real emperors. He names real cities. He places Appalonius in verifiable historical settings. The geographical details check out. By your own standard, by the exact standard you just applied to Luke, should we believe that Appalonius raised a girl from the dead? Should we believe he appeared to his followers after his death? Should we believe he ascended to heaven? Because if real settings and real rulers validate the miracle claims in Luke, they validate the miracle claims in Pho Stratus, too. And if you say no, Appalonius's miracles are legendary embellishments attached to a real historical figure in real historical settings, then congratulations. You have just described exactly what critical scholars say about the gospels.

Do you hear that? Did you catch that? Now, again, your faith doesn't have to be shattered because of this revelation. It doesn't have to be at all. There are ways to square this. I mean, many people who are not Christian fundamentalists understand these things and still believe that Jesus is who he says he is because that's the faith part. And also, maybe the belief isn't about if it actually happened or not, but it's about creating a better future where heaven is on earth, where, where God's rule of mercy and justice is actually realized, and we live in peace and harmony with our neighbors, right? But for the evangelical, like, like, like 20 yearear-old Tim hearing this would be like, "Wait, my whole worldview is based on it being factually true." And so, if it's not factually true, or if I don't know, what do I do with that? Because you're so conditioned to believe it's this way or nothing else. It's either this way for salvation, or you're going to burn in hell forever. Once you pull this thread, the whole thing unravels.

>> But I already know what you're going to do. You're going to say, "Those accounts by Pho Stratus are separated too far for me to trust them. And did anyone die for those beliefs?" And the list goes on and on. But you cannot have this standard work for your text and not for everyone else's. That is not scholarship. That is special pleading. And there's still decades between the written literature we're talking about in the New Testament and the events it supposedly describes. So, getting place names and political titles right is what any competent ancient writer would do. It tells you the author had knowledge of the region. It does not validate the supernatural claims woven into the narrative. That is conclusion inflation. As we talked about, a small accurate detail gets inflated into proof that the whole text is trustworthy. And if this standard worked, it would validate the Book of Mormon, which names real places. It would validate the Quran, which references real historical figures. Does Huff think those texts are inspired divinely? No. Of course not.

>> Right? >> So, why does the standard only work when it's his book?

>> Honestly, that's a great point. >> It's a great point, friends. And it should be taken into consideration, right? Again, let's just be honest. It's not about trying to, um, get people to lose their faith. It's about being honest with what we're talking about, what we're dealing with. Frankly, I think the Bible is in its own way, I would argue, for me personally, divine. The wisdom inside of that, of that collection of books is like, "Wow, this is so helpful." But you can find wisdom in other ancient books, too. That's okay. We can acknowledge both. And friends, if you're just joining, make sure to give this video a like. Oh, look. Someone did it for me. Thank.

You, Christina. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. That means so much. And don't forget to subscribe to Mythvision's uh YouTube channel as well. I really like his stuff a lot. This video is really great, and I know as a creator how many hours of work goes into videos like this. This is not simple stuff. It takes a lot of writing, a lot of time, a lot of editing. So, make sure to go give him a a subscription or a sub as well. And I appreciate you all being here. This is a lot of fun for me. This is kind of a way when I go live that I can talk about things that maybe wouldn't make sense for like a long, like deep dive because it's not really what my channel focuses on. It's more my channel is more about Christian nationalism and all that stuff, but this is adjacent to it and very important to the foundational building blocks of the modern evangelical world that has given us Christian nationalism. So, I like doing these lives. They're a lot of fun.

Now, watch the trick Wesley pulls. He compares Luke to the Roman historian Tacitus and says Tacitus got Pilate's title wrong while Luke got it right.

"Let's do this."

And one of those ancient writers specifically was a guy named Tacitus. Tacitus, when he writes an ancient document that is outlining different ancient individuals, makes a couple of specific errors. Specifically, he writes that Christians derive their name from a man called Christristus. And when he uses that term Chris, he actually mistakes that for a personal name rather than a title. But secondly, and this has to this relates specifically to what we're referring to here in our conversation, is that he gives the wrong title to Pontius Pilate. He says that Pontius Pilate is the procurator, not which is the wrong title for what Pontius Pilate was. Pontius Pilate was not commissioned as the procurator. He was commissioned as the governor of Judea. And we know that because we have archaeological evidence that points to that. Where Tacitus gets this wrong. We can look at something like the Pilate inscription stone, which is found in Caesarea Maritima in Israel, where it specifically says that the governor of this area, Pontius Pilate, made a dedication for this specific project.

No, that is not what happened. Three corrections again. Number one, Tacitus writing around 116 CE calls Pilate a procurator in Arnold's 1544. That is the word in the passage, and it is the wrong, later, technical title. The inscription from Caesarea Maritima, the Pilate stone, gives Pilate's actual office as prefect of Judea. Cambridge's church history journal is blunt about this: "Praefectus Judaeae was Pilate's official title, and the familiar ascription procurator in Tacitus is an anachronism." So yes, Tacitus uses the wrong, later, technical label.

Number two, Luke does not call Pilate prefect. This is the part Huff does not tell you. In Luke 3:1, Luke uses generic governing language. The Greek is *hegemonutos* from the root *hegemon*, which just means governing or being governor. It's not the technical Greek equivalent of *praefectus*. It's not the technical Greek equivalent of *procurator*. It is a broad, general term for a ruler or governor that covers multiple offices. Scholars have pointed this out for decades. Neither Matthew nor Luke uses a precise administrative title for Pilate. They both use the more general *hegemon*.

Number three, that means Luke did not get the right title. He simply avoided the wrong one. And those are very different things, Wes. Think about it this way. If I call someone a government official, I have not identified whether he is a senator, a governor, a prefect, or a tax commissioner. I've just stayed vague enough not to be falsified. That's not precision. That is survival by generality. And that is exactly what Luke does with Pilate. So, here's the actual scoreboard. Tacitus uses the wrong, later title. Luke does not use the right, technical title. Luke uses a generic term. That's not Luke beating Tacitus. That is Wesley overselling vague language as precision.

"And Luke gets the right title for Pontius Pilate."

Wesley is turning non-specific language into proof of accuracy.

"That's not how this works, dude."

And there is more. A major stream of critical scholarship argues that Luke-Acts knew Josephus. Dr. Steve Mason, one of the world's leading Josephus scholars, who retired from the University of Groningen, has pressed that case forcefully. Mason published a full chapter in *Josephus and the New Testament*, now in its second edition form in Hendrickson, and a major updated study in 2022, Peter's volume titled, "Was Josephus a Source for Luke-Acts?" He wrote a documentary actually that we're going to have published sometime soon. So stay tuned for that deep dive showing you the evidence. Now, I want to be fair. Mason is careful. I think too careful, but very, very humble in his assessments. He does not say he can prove it beyond doubt. But he does say that if Luke did not know Josephus, we are left with what he calls a "nearly incredible series of coincidences." And a recent Brill-hosted study reviewing Mason's 2023 work concluded that the hypothesis that Luke-Acts reworked episodes from Josephus appears to explain the evidence better than any alternative. So when Christian apologists say, "Look, Luke gets these details right," the response may very well be simple: "Yes, because Luke may be drawing on Josephus and other available literary materials, not writing from firsthand knowledge." And Dr. Richard Pervo has pressed similar conclusions. If Luke was using Josephus's *Antiquities*, published around 93 CE, then Luke-Acts was written after 93 CE, which is decades later than Huff's timeline suggests.

Yeah. So, a big thing that apologists do is they try to make the gospel accounts seem like either they're firsthand accounts by witnesses or they happened very soon after Jesus ascended, you know, maybe within a decade or two. But, and again, I'm not an expert, but from what I understand, a lot of them, the scholarship is like it places these texts later. I mean, decades later, 30, 40, 50 years, sometimes 60. And you think about, I mean, I'm 37. Um, I can't remember what I did two days ago, let alone a decade ago. And so, keep that in mind. Again, I'm not saying that we can't, in uh, you know, view these things as helpful to what Jesus did or didn't say. I'm just saying if you're going to call them emphatically true texts that tell the, what Tim Mackey says is, is, is the camcorder footage of what happened, it's just really hard to demonstrate that's the case. And Derek so far has done a really good job showing that the broad scholarship does not affirm this position that Luke was a firsthand, you know, eyewitness, uh, uh, eyewitness of Jesus and the miracle, so to speak.

"Not Luke beating Tacitus, Wesley. That is you overselling vague language as precision and hoping nobody checks."

"Come on."

Are you guys hanging in there? I know this is deep stuff. I know this is like kind of nerdy, but honestly, it's really important. It's if you're going to understand white Christian nationalism, you have to understand the evangelical apologist world because they give the theological framework that sets an evangelical mind on certainty that then they build everything else on. And we're kind of going at the root. And it's not sexy. It's not, you know, it's not bombastic, but it's really important you understand how this world works and what's actually going on underneath of it. So, if you're enjoying the video, please feel free to give this video a like. It would mean so much. Thank you.

"Give Huff credit here. The archaeology he's about to describe is genuinely impressive. This is real stuff. But watch what he does with it."

If you go to the British Museum today, you can enter a room that includes a wall relief from Sennacherib, king of Assyria's throne room that is 2,700 years old. The room originally included a floor-to-ceiling carving 40 feet tall that depicted the Assyrian conquest of Lachish. And this is the second most important city after Jerusalem. And in this, what it articulates is this sacking of Lachish and how he went into Israel and brutally besieged the city of Jerusalem. And this is described all throughout this wall relief in a similar way, confirming what we read about in 2 Kings, but from the perspective of the individuals who were attacking. And specifically, it has a picture of Sennacherib, a carving of the king. He's sitting on his throne, and the people, the conquered people of Israel, are coming before him, and they're laying out the spoils of the war. And this is described in this kind of brutal pictography of the event that we read about in 2 Kings. And right above Sennacherib's head, as I said before, it says, "Sennacherib, king of the universe, king of Assyria, sits on a throne, and the spoils of Lachish are piled before him." Another thing that was found in that throne room was what's referred to as the Taylor Prism. And among the war campaigns listed on the various sides of it, we also read about King Hezekiah, king of Judah, who was not subservient to Sennacherib and his authority and was besieged.

"Yes, the Lachish relief is in the British Museum right now. Room 10B, a massive, 2,700-year-old wall carving from Sennacherib's throne room. Real artifact, real military campaign. Specifically, it says that Sennacherib shut Hezekiah up like a bird in his royal city of Jerusalem. Also real, the Taylor Prism. Sennacherib boasts about besieging Jerusalem and shutting Hezekiah up like a bird in a cage. Real inscription. So we have a real king attacking real cities. Nobody disputes that. True."

Now watch the leap. We're not reading about something. When we read these narratives in the Bible, it's made up. It's not fairy tales. It's not exaggeration. True, but irrelevant. Here's why. 2 Kings 19:35: "That night, the angel of the Lord went out and put to death 185,000 in the Assyrian camp." Did Sennacherib's inscriptions mention that? No. The Taylor Prism says the opposite. Sennacherib boasts about his conquest. But here is the part that really destroys Huff's framing. This kind of claim, "My God destroyed the enemy army," is not unique to the Bible. It is standard operating procedure in ancient Near Eastern royal propaganda. Don't believe me? Let me show you.

The Mesha Stele, also called the Moabite Stone, dates to around 840 BCE. King Mesha of Moab inscribes a victory monument to his god, Chemosh. And listen to how he describes his military victories. He says, "Chemosh was angry with his land, which is why Israel had oppressed Moab. But then Chemosh returned and gave Mesha victory." Mesha claims to have slaughtered entire Israelite populations and dragged the vessels of Yahweh, Israel's God, before Chemosh as trophies. This is the exact same rhetorical pattern as 2 Kings. Our god intervened militarily and destroyed the enemy.

The Merneptah Stele from around 128 BCE is an Egyptian victory monument. Pharaoh Merneptah claims to have annihilated Israel. "Israel is laid waste. Its seed is no more." Obviously, that was not true. Israel continued to exist for centuries, but the rhetoric is the same. Divine Pharaoh destroys the enemy completely. And Sennacherib's own inscriptions follow the same pattern in reverse. He credits Ashur, the chief Assyrian god, with his military victories. Every ancient Near Eastern king did this. You credit your national deity for your military success. And you describe the enemy's destruction in cosmic, supernatural terms. Did you catch that?

Now, I don't want to boil down the Hebrew Bible just to this, but a lot of it is military propaganda. I don't mean that I don't mean that in a negative sense. It is what you did in the ancient world, and you still do today. Right now, we have a man named Pete Hegseth who's insisting that God is on our side as we are just smiting the horrible Iranian regime, who is horrible, uh, because they were weeks away from getting another weapon of mass destruction, allegedly, which we've been hearing for decades now, right? It's propaganda. That is propaganda about how our God is more powerful than their God. We do the same thing here. Again, doesn't mean that we can't look to wisdom in the Bible. Doesn't mean that Christians have to throw the Bible away. We just have to be honest about what it is and what's going on. These claims that we read about about, you know, God and the supernatural slaughtering of people. A lot of these nations or these peoples did, only they credited their God. So, if you're going to if you're going to say, "Well, obviously what happened, you know, the Assyrian description isn't factually true because look at how ridiculous it is." You can't then say, "But look, it was supernatural that God, that God closed the Red Sea on the Egyptians." Why are you privileging one and saying one's factual and the other isn't when they're all making the same claim, and none of us were there at all? And again, we have none of the original manuscripts. We have none of that. How do we know? I think that that's a very fair assessment.

"When 2 Kings says, 'An angel killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night,' it is doing exactly what every other ancient Near Eastern inscription does: giving the credit to its national deity. The Moabites did it for Chemosh. The Egyptians did it for Pharaoh. The Assyrians did it for Ashur. The Israelites did it for Yahweh. This is a genre, not a miracle report."

And here's something else Huff skips. Herodotus, the Greek historian, records a tradition about the same Assyrian military setback. And his version involves mice eating through the army's bowstrings and quiver straps. *Histories*, Book Two, section 141. Modern scholars interpret the mice motif as a possible allusion to plague because mice are associated with pestilence in the ancient world. So what we may actually have is a real historical military setback, maybe disease in the Assyrian camp, that got retold in different cultures with different divine explanations. Mice for the Greeks, an angel for the Israelites, Chemosh for the Moabites. I mean, real event, natural cause, theological overlay added afterward, which we do still all the time, right? I mean, the the the the dumb examples are when you see evangelicals online being like, you know, "I was having a really down day and then someone bought me a cup of coffee for free and I said, you know, God, thank you for that blessing." Right? That's it. There's a fact, then there's a theological overlay. We do this all the time in evangelicalism. We do it. People do it all the time in their own religions. They look back and see how God did this thing, right? God moved this thing. God made this thing possible. God sent the finances. Whatever it might be, God healed me. Okay. Well, the fact is that the medicine healed you, and then there's a theological overlay of you attributing attributing that to God. Nothing has really changed with how humans tell stories. Okay? That doesn't mean it's like factually true. Like somehow we can go back and prove that God, whoever this God is, magically healed this person. In fact, whenever we see these faith healers online, we usually laugh because we know that they're peddling BS, right? So, just keep that into take that into consideration. For some reason, as evangelicals, we were given a very like um fantastical, enchanted understanding of the Bible when in reality, I just don't think that's what's going on. I don't think that a serpent really spoke. I think that the author or authors of that story are trying to tell a deeper meaning about the condition of humanity. I don't think the point is, did the serpent really speak or not. I don't think that that's important at all for the point of the story. It's just, it's, it's a plot device used to further the narrative.

Please give this video a like if you're here. Just hit the like button. It costs you nothing. Just move your finger. You can do it. Boop. Boop. It'd be so helpful. It recommends the more likes a video gets, the more it gets recommended out to YouTube and to new people. So, it'd mean a lot to me if you could just smash the like button. I appreciate you. Let's keep going.

That is how ancient literature works. Be consistent. Wesley, you told your audience it's not exaggeration. 2 Kings says an angel killed 185,000 soldiers in one night. If that same claim appeared on the Mesha Stele about Chemosh, would you believe it?

"Doubt it."

Good points. All good points.

Now, we get to the argument that sounds the most impressive. If you have not looked into it, this one will convince you. Listen carefully to how he sets it up. Names in the Bible are actually really key when it comes to placing specifically the biblical gospels, although not limited to the biblical gospels, within a window of the living memory of the eyewitnesses. A series of scholarly studies has shown that though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located. By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified. By narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered, and by comparing these to the list from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen. Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used. For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname and others do not. "Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him." As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description. When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with the names we see listed in places like the biblical gospels, we find that all of the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claimed to be narrating. So the argument is, the most popular names in first-century Palestine, Simon, Joseph, Judas, Mary, they tend to get qualifiers in the gospels. Simon becomes Simon Peter. Judas becomes Judas Iscariot. And this matches the statistical distribution of names we find in archaeological evidence. Therefore, the Gospels must preserve eyewitness testimony.

I'm not going to dismiss the observation. The observation is real. But I'm going to show you that Wesley is taking an argument for cultural plausibility and pretending it proves eyewitness authorship. Those are not the same claim. And current critical scholarship says so explicitly. So let me cross-examine this the way a courtroom would. Five questions.

Question one: Is the data set even a first-century snapshot? No. The backbone of this entire argument is the work of Dr. Tal Ilan, who compiled the *Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity*, published by Mohr Siebeck in 2002. Ilan's data set is real and respected. But here's what Huff does not tell you: the lexicon covers a period from 330 BCE to 200 CE. Wow.

"That's 530 years. 530 years is not a snapshot of first-century Palestine. That's like sampling American names from 1500 to 2030 and calling it a snapshot of the 1990s."

Even Dr. Lutz Vandere, who is more sympathetic to onomastic arguments than most critics, published a study in *New Testament Studies* through Cambridge University Press, where he notes that this range invites skepticism. And Ilan herself conceded that the lexicon does not present what she calls "a snapshot impression of the onomastic situation." So the very data set Huff's argument depends on is not doing what he says it does.

Question two: What exactly is the claim? The claim comes from Dr. Richard Bauckham in *Jesus and the Eyewitnesses*, published by Eerdmans in 2006. Bauckham argues that the match between gospel name patterns and the Ilan data set proves the gospels preserve eyewitness testimony from people who were actually in first-century Palestine. And Bauckham asserted this with, in the words of his critics, "a remarkably high level of confidence," but without an actual statistical evaluation.

Question three: Can fiction reproduce those name patterns? Yes. And this is the part that destroys the argument. In 2024, Dr. Camil Griegor and Dr. Brian Blasi published a peer-reviewed follow-up study in the *Journal for the Study of the New Testament*, Volume 47, Issue 2. What they did was test Bauckham's argument against literary corpora that contain obviously fictional first-century Palestinian Jewish characters. They tested the *Clementine Homilies*, the *Acts of Pilate*, the *Book of the Bee* by Solomon of Basra. The name distributions in these texts, texts that everyone agrees contain fictional Palestinian Jewish names, were not statistically significantly worse than the Gospels and Acts. In some respects, they actually aligned better.

"Wow."

Because they lacked certain distortions present in the gospel data. Let me say that again so it lands. Texts full of made-up Palestinian characters pass the same test that Huff says proves the Gospels are eyewitness accounts. Fiction can sound Palestinian, too. That breaks the entire argument.

"We find that all of the names with qualifiers match with what we'd assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claimed to be narrating."

Yes, Wesley. And fictional Palestinian Jewish texts match those patterns, too. So, what exactly does your argument prove?

Question four: Does the statistic beat anonymous tradition? No. In their earlier 2023 study published in *Bulletin for Biblical Research* through Bryant University's digital commons, Griegor and Blasi conducted the first actual statistical evaluation of Bauckham's thesis, and their conclusion is blunt. Bauckham's thesis offers, and I am quoting directly, "no advantage over an alternative model of anonymous community transmission." They even found some weak evidence against Bauckham's thesis. So the latest quantitative analysis says the eyewitness model does not outperform the old anonymous tradition model. The names match Palestine because the tradition comes from Palestine, not necessarily because eyewitnesses wrote it down. Yep.

Question five: What do other critical scholars say? It's not just Griegor and Blasi. When Bauckham's book came out, multiple heavyweight reviewers challenged the names argument specifically. Dr. Stephen Patterson said Bauckham's case is unconvincing and that, quote, "the pattern of naming names in the Synoptics offers no peculiarities necessitating the claim that they are names of eyewitnesses." Dr. John Collins argued that Luke 1:2, the verse apologists love to cite about eyewitnesses, does not actually support Bauckham's use of the term because the linguistic and contextual features suggest Luke did not have eyewitnesses in mind there, the way Bauckham claims. And Dr. Jennifer Schroeder added that some gospel material, including the prologues and infancy narratives, simply cannot be treated as eyewitness accounts and are due to the gospel writer's theological shaping. And here's what is really telling. Even the scholars who are more sympathetic to onomastic arguments are much more cautious than Huff. Vandere, whose Cambridge study I mentioned earlier, says his own work began from initial misgivings about Bauckham. His conclusion is only that "some names may have been preserved in early Christian oral archives." That is nowhere near the Gospels or eyewitness testimony.

"Yep."

Wes is overselling even the scholarship that is most helpful to him. Do y'all catch this? Again, I know this is kind of in the weeds, but essentially what's happening is Wes, as a pop, a pop, pop apologist, is saying things that aren't really like that well-grounded in scholarship and he's relying on his audience not knowing that to pass these claims off as reliable evidence that the gospel accounts are historically and therefore factually true. And again, like, it's almost like, I guess the only way, the only way I can really give you like a really easy way of viewing this is when I, am I used to be a a professional drummer, if you didn't know that. I played for almost 30 years and I got quite good. And when I see a drummer playing, I can tell if he's a good drummer and if he, or if they, if they know their stuff or not. So sometimes I'll get someone who's like, "Tim, have you seen this drummer? They're amazing." And I'm watching them, like, actually their their technique is super sloppy. They're really not a great player, but they give the illusion to people who don't know about the craft that they're competent in what they do. But someone who knows the craft can point out easily why it doesn't add up that they are a quality or, you know, a great drummer. It's the same kind of thing here where it's like, I'm not an expert. I don't spend my life or my time reading all of these books and reading the scholarship. Wes is educated. He knows enough, right, to present these these uh statements and this evidence, so to speak, to a lay audience where someone like myself would go, "I don't know how to disprove that, so I guess it has to be true." He relies on that. In fact, evangelical apologists rely on that. And they are often, I'm not saying in Wes's case, but often trained by evangelical apologetic institutions like Biola University to do this. They're given these talking points, but again, under scrutiny by actual scholarship who write the books on this stuff. Even the most sympathetic um, uh, authors who hold some of these views loosely have a much more nuanced take than, therefore, this is an eyewitness account.

All right, let's, we're almost done, friends. Thanks for being here with me. I really enjoy doing this. Give this video a like. I appreciate you all. Thank you. Here we go. All of this runs into the same wall. The Gospels are anonymous. We do not know who wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. The names were added later. And this is not a fringe position. Even Dr. Simon Gathercole, who actually argues against anonymity in his 2018 article, acknowledges that the great majority of scholars, including major figures like Michael Wolter, Francis Watson, hold that the Gospels are anonymous. A dissenter from the consensus admits it is the consensus. That's how strong the majority view is. Dr. Bart Ehrman covers this in *Jesus Before the Gospels*, published by HarperOne in 2016. Dr. Hugo Méndez, in his Oxford University Press book on the Gospel of John, published in 2025, has shown how the authorship traditions were constructed and reconstructed over time.

So here's the verdict. Wesley is taking an argument for cultural plausibility, names that sound Palestinian, and pretending it proves eyewitness authorship. It does not. The data set is too broad. Fiction can reproduce the same patterns. The statistical analysis shows no advantage over anonymous tradition. Multiple critical reviewers have rejected the inference. Even sympathetic scholars are more cautious than Huff. And the Gospels are anonymous. Wesley, I have a direct question for you: Are you arguing that the names fit first-century Palestine? Or are you arguing that this proves eyewitness authorship? Because current scholarship says those are not the same claim, and the evidence backs up the scholars, not you. That is conclusion inflation at its finest. Ladies and gentlemen, a real observation inflated into a conclusion the data cannot support. Do better, Wes.

Now watch how Huff tries to strengthen the names argument. He compares the canonical Gospels to the Gospel of Judas. "In contrast, the Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit, Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first-century Galilee and Judea like biblical Gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the second and third centuries. Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have four biblical Gospels with four different named authors. And yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every time. A test in standard that the apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels simply do not pass."

"Wesley, this is a rigged comparison. The Gospel of Judas is a mid-second-century text preserved in Coptic, discovered in Middle Egypt, and already known to Irenaeus around 180 CE. Of course, it looks Egyptian. It is a later Egyptian text. Beating it on Palestinian name patterns tells us almost nothing."

That's like challenging a French chef to a spelling bee in English and then bragging that you won. What you would actually need to prove is something much harder: that the gospel name patterns can distinguish eyewitness tradition from later literary inventions set in the same Palestinian world. And that is exactly where the argument breaks down because we already covered this. Gregory and Blasi tested Bauckham's names argument against texts full of clearly fictional Palestinian Jewish characters. The *Clementine Homilies*, *Acts of Pilate*, *Book of the Bee*, the *Babylonian Talmud*, and those texts passed the same test. Fictional Palestinian characters fit the Palestinian naming data just fine. So Wesley did not compare the canonical Gospels to the right control group. He compared them to the easiest possible target and called it proof. The real scholarly test is not, "Do the Gospels beat the late Egyptian text?" The real test is, "Can the names argument separate the Gospels from other non-eyewitness literature set in the Palestinian Jewish context?" And the answer from current peer-reviewed research is no. It cannot.

"A test in standard that the apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels simply do not pass."

You picked the wrong comparator, Wesley. You picked the late Egyptian gospel as your foil because it makes the canonical text look impressive. But when scholars ran the real test against Palestinian literature, your argument collapsed. And while we're here, let's address the way Huff draws this clean, hard line between canonical and everything else, as if there's a wall, and it was so obvious from the beginning. It was not. Dr. Jennifer Schroeder has pointed out that for early Christianity, the hard distinction between canonical and non-canonical gospels is itself somewhat anachronistic. He explicitly speaks of various gospels of the first and second century as part of a shared textual space where they could be compared, competed with, and interpreted alongside one another. The neat four-gospel-only world that Huff presents to his audience is a later development, not a first-century reality. The Cambridge edition of *Early Christian Writings* dates the *Didache* to the latter half of the first century or the first half of the second, calling it "most likely contemporary with some of the books later included in the New Testament." *First Clement* is typically dated to 80 to 100 CE. These are Christian texts circulating in the same era as the canonical Gospels, and early communities treated them as authoritative. And Codex Sinaiticus, one of our oldest surviving complete New Testament manuscripts, includes the *Epistle of Barnabas* and the *Shepherd of Hermas* right after Revelation. Think about that for a second because often what you're told by evangelical apologists is that, well, the Protestant canon is, you know, it's, it's the, it's the real Bible because it's, it's the closest to the life of Jesus. You know, it's, it's, it's what the early church passed around. But Derek here just said actually there were other, in our earliest copy of the New Testament, there are other books in that canon. So again, I just want to, I just want to um, demonstrate here that this narrative of the Bible is inherent, the Protestant Bible is, is God's word, it just falls apart on so many different levels. It just does. It, it cannot hold up to real scrutiny. Now, if, if it's a dogma you want to believe, feel free. Like, you know, Alisa Childers would say the Bible's narrative. I'm not saying she can't believe that. But what she and these apologists do is they try to prove to you why other perspectives are totally wrong and crazy and why they're standing on truth when in reality they're just not. They're standing on dogma, not in a separate section, not with a disclaimer, bound into the same book as the canonical text. That does not mean everything was canon, but it does mean the boundaries were not the neat, hard wall Huff is pretending they are. So when Wes Huff tells his audience the apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels simply do not pass, he is doing two things wrong at the same time. He's using the wrong comparator to make the Gospels, the canonical ones, look special. And he's pretending the canonical versus non-canonical line was obvious and settled when it was not. Both moves are misleading, and both are designed to make his audience think the case is stronger than it is.

"Mhm."

Now we need to talk about the elephant in the room. Did you catch those, friends?

"Less than 10 minutes."

Synoptic Gospels, 40s through 70s. Acts, 50s through 65. Those are not the mainstream critical dates. Wesley is presenting aggressive minority dates, the kind that show up in apologetic settings, as though they are what scholars know. They are not. Let me show you what the mainstream actually looks like. And I'm going to use Cambridge University Press material for most of this. So nobody can accuse me of cherry-picking fringe sources.

Mark.

The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament says Mark was probably composed around 70 CE. This is the standard position. One of the major reasons is Mark 13, the little apocalypse, which appears to describe the destruction of Jerusalem's temple. When Jesus says, "Not one stone here will be left on another," and the chapter describes wars, sieges, and the desecration of the temple, that looks like someone writing after the event and putting it in the mouth of Jesus as prophecy. This is called Vaticinium ex eventu, prophecy after the fact, and is one of the most common literary techniques in ancient writing. Another Cambridge source says Mark 13 reflects a time in the second half of the first century.

"Really quick, Mark is the, well, the consensus, I should be careful with my words. The consensus, as I understand it, is that Mark is the earliest gospel. It was the, it was the gospel written first. So the earliest gospel account we have is almost what, 37 years after the life and death of Jesus. 37 years. So when I was born to now, that's the gap. And now someone starts writing the eyewitness account. There's no technology. There's no video cameras. There's no audio recordings. There's no flash photography. There is no iPhone. There's nothing. You're going off of oral tradition. And maybe whatever you believe about about about the new Messiah that you believe has has come as a Jewish person, by the way. So keep that in mind. There's a lot of layers to this. It's not just, oh, Matthew was a or Mark was a real person who knew Jesus and wrote this stuff down and here you go. That is an over, way oversimplification and not even a true one at that of what we're actually dealing with when it comes to these manuscripts."

I want to be fair. There are a few scholars who date Mark earlier, and not all of them are conservatives. Dr. James Crossley has argued for a pre-70 date from a non-apologetic perspective. So I will not say these are exclusively conservative dates, but they are minority dates. The mainstream critical position is Mark around 70, and that is what the Cambridge material confirms.

Matthew and Luke. Here is where Huff's timeline really falls apart. Markan priority, the view that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, is near consensus in current scholarship. The main debate is not whether Mark came first. The main debate is whether Luke also used a sayings source called Q, which is the two-source hypothesis, or whether...

"We don't have Q, by the way. As far as I know, there's no, there's no foundational, like, tangible evidence for Q. But based on how they're writing, many scholars who know this stuff much better than me, I think, including Bart Ehrman, say that there's a good chance that they're ripping off of another document that we just don't have access to."

...used Matthew directly, which is the Farrer hypothesis, championed by scholars like Dr. Mark Goodacre at Duke University. But under either model, Matthew and Luke are later than Mark. Yes, if Mark was written around 70, Matthew and Luke came after that. The Cambridge commentary on Acts, in its introduction by Dr. Craig Keener, reports that the largest group of scholars dates Luke between 70 and 90, with a majority in the 80s. That is a far cry from the 40s that Huff puts on his timeline.

Acts. This is where Huff's timeline is most exposed. He puts Acts at 50 to 65, but Cambridge material on ancient Mediterranean religion summarizes Acts as written around 90 to 100 CE. Even scholars who do not build their case on Josephus, which I favor, do not land anywhere near Huff's 50s to 65 window. And then there's this...

"That's like, that's like a 40-year discrepancy. So remember I said earlier that apologists like to date these manuscripts that we don't have, by the way, to like super close, as close as they can to Jesus. According to Derek in Cambridge, that is not the case. Like the schol, the general consensus is that these texts happened much later, at the earliest potentially 70 CE. So at least 37 years after. And like you said earlier, a few scholars will argue a little bit earlier than that, but it's not by much."

...argument. If Dr. Steve Mason is right that the author of Luke-Acts knew Josephus's *Antiquities*, published in 93 or 94 CE, then Dr. Gregory Sterling's 2025 article in *New Testament Studies*, published by Cambridge, argues that Luke would fall in the mid to late 90s and Acts in the early 2nd century. I'm not presenting that as settled consensus, but it is a serious argument from a major scholar in the top-tier journals, and Huff completely hides it from his audience. I honestly believe in the coming decades, a prediction of my own, you will find more and more scholars convinced of this dependence upon Josephus. Cuz once you look at it carefully, it's hard not to see it. So, let me put this together. Huff puts Acts at 50 to 65. The Cambridge material says 90 to 100. Sterling says possibly early 2nd century. That is a 30 to 50-year gap between what Huff tells his audience and what mainstream critical scholarship actually says. When some of these other Gospels with names like Peter and Judas...

"Let's pause here. So this is the timeline in case you're not looking. So on the, can you guys see my, my, my mouse? So Jesus dies 33 AD and um, Wes is putting the Gospels between 40 to 70s, but Derek is arguing that mainstream scholarship puts it more in the 70s and later. So a 30-year discrepancy. And then he talked about earlier about Acts. And you can see here, Wes has it 50 to 65 AD or CE, common era. And in reality, there's a good chance it's 95 or later. So this timeline, while I guess you can say some scholars might hold to it, is not in the mainstream of general scholarship. Okay. And again, what did I say earlier? Not that I'm an expert, but I know apologists because I grew up in these worlds. They want to date these um, these manuscripts as close to Jesus as possible because it makes their argument stronger that they were eyewitness accounts and therefore factually accurate. Therefore, Jesus really did objectively rise from the dead. Therefore, he is the way, the truth, and the life. Therefore, our view of salvation is correct. And everyone else's is wrong. That is, that's the steps to get to where they get to."

...Philip and Mary that were attached to them when they were actually composed, when they were written.

"Wesley's timeline only works if his viewers never hear what mainstream critical scholarship actually says."

"Thank you, Derek. There's a nice little list. Yeah, there, there's a timeline, guys. I mean, we're, we're 40 to 50 years off sometimes. Again, not saying here's what we're not saying, and I, I think Derek would agree. We're not saying it's impossible. We're not saying it definitely is in these time frames. What we are saying is that the scholarship generally that has done the most work on these on on this topic has has a general consensus in the majority that if we were to date these things, we're looking at this time frame."

As for the claim that the Synoptics were written in the 40s, I checked the standard introduction textbooks used at major research universities. Dr. Bart Ehrman's *The New Testament: A Historical Introduction*, used at hundreds of universities, dates Mark to around 70 CE. Dr. Raymond Brown's *An Introduction to the New Testament*, published by Yale University Press, dates Mark to 68 to 73 CE. The Oxford Annotated Bible study notes date Mark around 70 CE. I could not find a single standard introduction textbook at a major research university that dates any Synoptic Gospel to the 40s. Wesley is not giving his audience the mainstream critical timeline at all.

"He's giving them aggressive minority dates and presenting them with fake certainty. Show the survey of scholars that supports a 40s date for the Synoptics, Wesley, or stop showing the timeline. End of part one."

What comes next?

So that is what we've seen so far. Wesley Huff's historical claims: 66 books, the 1600 years, Luke the historian, Pilate's title, the Lachish relief, the names argument, the dating timeline. Every single one either collapses under scrutiny or involves presenting minority positions as settled fact. And we'll stop there because the video is pretty much over there. And again, Derek, thank you for doing that work. Make sure, friends, to go subscribe to uh Myth uh Vision. I've really enjoyed what I've seen on there so far. And Derek has had scholars on like Bart Ehrman, so it seems like he definitely is in the know way more than me, at least. Look, I want to be clear here. Like the reason I, I wanted to show you all this video and put it on my channel is because too often we let evangelical apologists run with these wild narratives that just are not commonly held and have very little evidence to back them up. And there's a reason why a lot of these apologist types don't actually debate actual scholars because when they do, they usually get smoked. Go watch James White versus Bart Ehrman if you want to see an example of that. I would love to see Wes Huff talk to someone like like Dan McClellan, for example, or I mean, there's many others. Pete Enns, or even, you know, um, uh, Jennifer Bird or Angela Parker. I've done episodes, long-form episodes with Dr. Jennifer Bird, responding to people like Preston Sprinkle's commentary on homosexuality in the Bible. And I've offered people like Preston to come on the channel and talk to Jennifer Bird, and they refuse. They're just not interested. And I think there's a reason for that. I think that because for a lot of people, and by the way, I don't put Preston directly in the evangelical apologist world, although he is not affirming. I think he's, I think he's a little more honest, frankly. But you get my point. These kinds of folks, Alisa Childers, Tim Barnett, Frank Turk, they really don't engage mainstream scholars on these topics because they would be outclassed. And here's why. Because a lot of scholars know their lanes. They would say, "Actually, I'm not an expert on the dating of these manuscripts. I'm an expert on this verse in Luke and what it might or might or what it might and might not mean." But Wes is like Derek said, collapsing so many genres of study into one ball that's impossible to distinguish where one starts and one ends, and then presenting this narrative that comes across so emphatically true and accurate that you can have full assurance that the way you believe as a Christian is objectively true, and your friends' religions or the Muslims or the Hindus are just standing on a, a foundation of sand. That's what this is in service to. This supports this is what this is what gives credence to the whole missions complex, right? Because if you believe that the only way to go to heaven one day is if you pray a prayer of repentance to really what is white Jesus, then you will do whatever you can to spread that message to all parts of the world to save people from the depths of hell. And these apologists give the foundation for that kind of logic. They give the foundation for that perspective. But as is shown, at least in this video, and again, I have 300-plus episodes on the New Evangelicals podcast. Please go check out the podcast interviewing many other scholars like bona fide scholars on these topics. It, their dogma doesn't hold up. It just doesn't. It just doesn't.

So anyway, friends, like I said earlier, first off, thank you so much for being here. It means the world. I am an independent creator. So any support to make this channel possible really helps. Super chats or supporting at the link in the description below. I am trying to carve out this Wednesday time slot between 3 and 3:30 for either guest interviews or videos like this that are all live. I really love going live. I love reading the comments. I love being with all of you in real time. It honestly, it's life-giving for me as someone who works behind a camera most of my of my day. So, I'll be working on trying to schedule these out a little more in advance so you know when they're coming uh your way. Make sure to turn on the notification button. There should be an option somewhere on your screen to hit "Notify me when Tim goes live." Do that so you don't miss out. I appreciate you all. Have a great day. Talk to you later. See you.