Billy Carson Gets A Needed Spanking From Wes Huff

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In Matthew 16, Jesus chastised the Pharisees who could interpret the appearance of the sky but failed to interpret the signs of the time in which they lived.

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Non -rocker boaters must stop. I don't want to rock the boat, I want to sink it. Are you going to bark all day, little doggy, or are you going to bite?

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We're being delusional. Delusional, yeah. Delusional is okay in your worldview. I'm an animal.

05:10

You don't chastise chickens for being delusional. You don't chastise pigs for being delusional. So you calling me delusional using your worldview is perfectly okay.

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06:31

This is the Gospel Heard Around the World. Welcome, welcome to Apology Radio. Very excited about today's episode.

06:37

Special guest today. You guys have probably seen the viral videos going around of Billy Carson and the wild things that he says regularly.

06:46

You may have even seen the episode that Billy Carson did with Joe Rogan. I listened to that about six months ago.

06:53

Very interesting. Long episode with a lot of claims made. And you probably have seen recently the viral video of the debate -slash -discussion conversation between Wes Hough and Billy Carson and all the controversy surrounding that.

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We're going to get into that today. So make sure you guys hit the like and the shares and all the doodads, all the buttons and everything, and get this out so everyone can see it.

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10:02

Let's do it. Okay. So we, as we said, are doing the show today with Wes Hough. And so Wes is joining us right now from Toronto, Canada.

10:10

Wes, welcome to Apologia Radio, eh? Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here. Absolutely.

10:15

Wes and I spoke last week when I asked him to come on the show today. And he reminded me that we spoke together in Canada, eh?

10:23

At the Ezra Institute's thing. And you spoke in the morning. I spoke in the afternoon,

10:28

I think. Is that right? Other way around. I spoke in the morning. You spoke in the afternoon.

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Yeah. I think you said that right. Okay. All right. Good. And so we've been together before, live and in person. And, man,

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I'm, dude, Wes, so grateful for, I mean, I obviously know who you are. And I've seen, you know, your stuff.

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And then I saw you with Billy Carson. And then I just went into a deep dive into some of your other stuff.

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And it's such a blessing. Even in particular. Perfect. Perfect. You need to see this. Don't leave the show now. But definitely do this.

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Go check out Wes's stuff on Christmas. Oh, what? Oh, dude. Dude. I have to say this.

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Sorry, Wes. You're in the room and I'm praising you right now. I did not know this. You're in the room and I'm praising you right now. In person. Dude. The. Without.

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Hands down. Without question. What? The best stuff I've ever seen. Debunking the pagan

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Christmas stuff. Yeah. Myths. It's fantastic. I gotta watch it. And the way that Wes approached it was great.

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Anyways. Wes, welcome to the show. Yeah. I'm very glad to be here.

11:27

I've been watching you guys for years. And like you said, we've passed each other like ships in the night on various occasions.

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And, you know, kind of exist in a lot of the same circles.

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Yeah. With Dr. Joe and that kind of thing. So, yeah. It's just excited to be here.

11:45

Yeah, man. So, let's get into it. So, first of all, I want to make sure everyone knows where to get more stuff from you. Your stuff is just a blessing.

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It is so great. I just. I can't. I can't say enough good things about the work that you do, brother.

11:56

So, tell everyone after the show where they can get more from you. Yeah. For sure.

12:03

Right now? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. That's great. I said that wrong. Yeah. So, when the show is over, everyone can go and research more and get more.

12:09

Oh, I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. So, WesleyHuff .com is kind of the one -stop shop.

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That's where you can find my videos and the podcasts that I participate on. And the infographics that I make.

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And what have you. So, I could give you all the handles. But if you'd simply go to WesleyHuff .com,

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you can find my YouTube channel and my Instagram and my, you know, X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it these days. And that's where the content is.

12:34

So, yeah. I love to make infographics and educate people on all sorts of things. Whether that's biblical manuscripts or the fact that Christmas is not, in fact, pagan.

12:42

That's right. It's so good, man. I listened to it while I was getting stuff ready for the Christmas cookie exchange in my house. You probably just geeked out on that.

12:47

I was geeking out totally. It was fantastic. Did you listen to the one Joe just did too? Speaking of Dr. Joe. On Christmas? Yeah. Yeah.

12:53

Same premise. I missed it. It's not as good as Wes's, I'm sure. Probably not. Yeah. But it's good. Even though we love

12:58

Joe. It's not as good as Wes's. Well, Wes doesn't have the accent. That's exactly what I was just going to say. I don't have the accent.

13:04

So, Joe does have a cut above. Yeah. A accent. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right.

13:10

Okay. So, let's get everyone into the conversation because, you know, there's a lot of people that aren't going to know who Billy Carson is and don't maybe know about what took place.

13:17

You said that the discussion took place back in September, actually. But let's ask this question first.

13:23

Bring the audience into who Billy Carson is and why you wanted the opportunity to engage him.

13:31

Yeah. So, Billy Carson kind of came across my radar about a year and a half ago when I was kind of throwing this idea around for a video project with a friend of mine that we were going to call

13:41

The Gospel According to TikTok. And so, we were just sending each other these videos of crazy outlandish things that people seem to latch on to about the canon of scripture and the content of the

13:52

Bible. And, you know, obviously, you throw the Council of Nicaea in there somewhere because that's always the catch -all for anything conspiratorial when it comes around the

13:59

Bible. And amongst these clips that we're passing back and forth was this guy, Billy Carson. Now, I didn't really know much about him at the time, but the first introductory clip that I'd ever seen of him was him telling this story where he supposedly recounts this time where he makes a fool of this

14:16

Christian who's trying to evangelize him. And Billy refers to himself as a world -leading expert on biblical texts.

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And I thought immediately, this guy is not a world -leading expert in biblical texts. A, because that's my world and I have no idea who this guy is.

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And B, world -leading experts on biblical texts don't go around proclaiming themselves as the world -leading experts on the biblical texts.

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And so that was kind of my first introduction to him. And as time went on, like you said, you know, he's appeared on these big podcasts.

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He was on Joe Rogan, Patrick, but David, he was on flagrant with Andrew Schultz and saying these just not just false things, but I mean, things that you could debunk by going on Wikipedia, like it did not take a, an academic level of inquiry in order to figure out that the things he was saying was false.

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So I just made last summer a couple of videos very quickly responding to just what

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I considered some of the most foolish and easily kind of referenced of these silly things that Billy was saying, things like, you know, well,

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Jesus in Greek is Jesus and Jesus really means hail Zeus. So whenever you're praying to Jesus, you're really praying to Zeus, like things that are just so silly on their face.

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And part of that was, you know, his statements about biblical manuscripts and that, you know, certain manuscripts don't have the crucifixion.

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And so I was making these videos and I was seeing they were gaining traction and I was seeing that people are taking notice of this.

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And so I tried not to become the Billy Carson response guy. So I made a few, you know, made some of other people as well and kind of went on my way with the usual nerdy manuscript content that I usually put out on social media.

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But then in October, the beginning of October, I was out for lunch with a friend and I noticed on my

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DMs someone who said, hey, I'm a friend of Billy Carson and I'm a

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Christian and he's going to be in my studio tomorrow. And I was wondering if A, you could get yourself to Florida to engage with him physically or B, if that's not a possibility to jump on a call.

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And so I immediately said, yes, I can engage with Billy with 24 hour notice.

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That's not an issue. And so I and that was really the catalyst. And unbeknownst to everyone involved, it really was a hornet's nest that we stepped on because not only did the interaction go not very well for Billy, who

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I'm convinced has never been confronted with the facts of the things that he says.

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He's very good at monologuing confidently, but he's not good at a dialoguing competently.

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Those are very two different things that Billy is very good at one and not the other. And so it really didn't turn out well for Billy.

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And the podcast host, Mark, the next day calls me relatively early in the morning.

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I was I was out at the gym and says, hey, hey, Wes, Billy does not want this thing released. And so that kind of led to a lot of things to where we are today, where Billy has tried to not only suppress the footage, but threaten legal action.

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And I think realizes very concretely that, you know, he's been outed as someone who does not, in fact, know what they're talking about.

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That is very clear, Wes, from seeing the interaction. I want to say you didn't need to mention that you got the call in the morning at the gym.

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That goes without saying. That's obvious. I saw somebody called him

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Wes Buff in the comment section. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He puts the man in manuscript. That's right. Practitioner of Swolegenics.

18:00

That's all good. So so you have you have the interaction and it takes place back in September, but the flurry of activity is more recent.

18:08

And then there was even a threat from Billy Carson to sue you as a result of what?

18:14

I mean, I don't know we can get into a discussion here, but as sue you, sue you for what? What was the what? What claim can we made against you in terms of I'm going to file a lawsuit against you because you had a discussion with me?

18:24

Yeah, yeah. So the debate took place on October 18th. And so it actually wasn't released for over a month after that.

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But yeah, the lawsuit was I mean, in one sense, it never actually had any grounds to be a lawsuit to begin with.

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So he sent me a cease and desist letter and said, if you do not take down any content with my face or use that uses my name or as long as you agree to never use my face or my name and refer to me in the future, if this does not happen within a written confirmation within 20, 24 hours, we're going to pursue further and drastic legal action against you.

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So, I mean, it was pretty clear to me from just looking at it that Billy is a public person. You know, like we said, he's been on some of the biggest platforms in the world.

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You can't tell someone they can't use your face or your name when you're a public persona. So it was pretty evident very early on.

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I mean, then Billy proceeded the week after, you know, he sent me the cease and desist letter and by the way, also sent a cease and desist letter to the podcast host who was his friend.

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And I think I can say that with the proper tense. Now their friendship is over. Unfortunately, also the media producer who kind of set this thing up.

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He's also been threatened with legal action and sent a cease and desist. So Billy is trying to sue everyone who's possibly involved in this, but he has no actual grounds to do so.

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So he's posturing as far as I can tell, you know, this is the equivalent of a pump fake.

20:00

You know, he's going in for pretending to punch you, but he knows that he won't and can't actually hit you.

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We're just laughing. Yeah, we're laughing. Any sports reference, any sports references get lost on me.

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He knew the punch. I know if you put it in terms of fighting, I'll get it just fine. Yeah, a pump fake is a basketball where you go up and the guy jumps out of the way like a fake lead jab or something.

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You come over for the cross. I get it, guys. I'm not dumb. So Wes Huff.

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Okay, so Wes Huff here, guys. Don't leave the show yet because we're still on with Wes. But when you get done with this, Wes Huff's channel on YouTube has the full and unedited, unaltered

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Wes Huff versus Billy Carson debate. You can go listen to it. Look, there's a lot. We could honestly probably spend six months of content just dissecting different parts of this discussion that are really important.

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Some of them unrelated to the wild stuff that Billy Carson constantly says, but some of the stuff just goes into like, you know, why would

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God tell Abraham to kill his son? That seems, you know, sadistic and malicious.

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And I'm like, that's actually one of the coolest stories in the Old Testament. The most incredible thing that points to Jesus.

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There's just so much there. But I do want to at least have Wes on today to talk about a few, maybe some of the popular moments or maybe just selectively some of the important moments for us of the discussion.

21:20

Highly encourage you guys to go check it out. And I think it'll really bless you. And I was thinking about this too, and we'll get to the first clip here,

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Wes. And this was a clip that something I'd seen that you had done before. You see this, it seems like sort of standard fare with some of these popular talking heads that criticize the

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Bible, act like they know a lot about, you know, church history, manuscript history, history of the Bible, those sorts of things.

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You've got, you know, Billy Carson. I almost said Billy Crystal. Billy Crystal? Billy Carson does that.

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And then you also have, you know, I was watching a clip that followed one of your clips, and it was somebody on Joe Rogan.

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And Joe Rogan was like, you know, yeah. And these, you know, the Gospels of Jesus went, you know, when? How far after Jesus?

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And it was like, oh, it's like 100 years after. And every person who knows like the history of the New Testament and manuscripts are going, where do they get these people?

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Like they just spread these myths, these myths. And so this is such an important field.

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And before we even spring into that, the Billy Carson thing, this would be good for our audience.

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So like someone's on Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan's like, yeah, you know, I guess Jesus really did exist. He's a historical figure. Like there's enough evidence for that.

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But like the Gospels themselves, the eyewitnesses, this stuff's not written to like 100 years or more after the events of Jesus.

22:38

Address that. Because it's the same kind of like pop culture, criticize the Bible, make stuff up, address that just to show like this stuff is easy to respond to and refute.

22:50

Yeah. Well, I think there's a few things that are often missed when people kind of throw these things out, is that we live in this hyper literate culture where we just write everything down all the time, constantly.

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And the ancient world was not a hyper literate culture. In fact, it was the opposite. Most people were illiterate.

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And so you would not write things down often during the lifetime of someone living.

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You would write those things down afterwards. This was an oral culture where actually the norm was seen as memorization and kind of regurgitation in that way orally.

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And then paraphrase was the way that people would often communicate how they would understand something.

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I mean, even you have the ancient Greco -Romano, sorry, the Jewish Romano writer Josephus, Flavius Josephus, who in the antiquities of the

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Jews paraphrases almost the entire Old Testament. And even when he comes to the Ten Commandments, he doesn't recount them word for word.

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He paraphrases them. If there was anything that you would think he would recount word for word, it would have been that. But he doesn't. And yet what we have with the gospels, our early eyewitness testimony that kind of go outside of the norm of this in that they're collecting these stories and they're going out of their way to communicate exactly what happened to you.

24:03

And you have guys like Luke, right at the beginning of his gospel, who says that he's drawing it up an orderly account in order to communicate exactly what

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Jesus did. And so obviously we have four gospels, not one. And so they're capitalizing on different things, writing to different audiences for different reasons.

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But these are incredibly early in terms of ancient biography as far as those are concerned.

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And we're talking really, I would put, you know, if we're assuming that the first gospel is

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Mark, which there's argument about, but for the sake of argumentation, let's say that it's Mark. I would put it easily within 15 to 20 years after Jesus's life.

24:41

That's right. I don't see any reason to not do that. Right. And then the other gospels fall in shortly after.

24:47

So we're not talking about something, you know, a hundred years plus. No, this is something not just within a short period of time, especially for ancient antiquity, when the norm is, you know, 50 to a hundred years at minimum for a lot of these other ancient writers.

25:02

I mean, most of the time, if you look at Alexander the Great, we're waiting over 450 years for the first kind of comprehensive biography of his life.

25:10

But the gospels are written within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses themselves, within the community of people who would have been there at the feeding of the 5 ,000 even maybe.

25:21

And so they are able not only just to read these stories or hear these stories read to them, but they are able to talk with people who can verify the stories for themselves, who knew

25:32

Jesus, who knew the disciples, who knew the disciples of the disciples. And so, yeah, these kinds of ideas,

25:39

I think it's a combination of people not really understanding how history is done and simply being ignorant of the plethora, the mountain of data that we have in terms of the life of Jesus from these early independent documents they were referred to as the

25:57

New Testament. And that's what I was just thinking. It's not just the time frame or the time window is so close.

26:03

It's the volume of manuscript support. It's better tested than any work of antiquity.

26:08

Not even close. Really? There's nothing that comes remotely close. You stack all the manuscripts we have, everything we have, New Testament, transmission, text and history, it's over a mile deep.

26:18

Well, and not even just that, but I mean, we have very few of multiple biographies of anyone from the ancient world.

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In fact, during the time that Jesus is living, there's only really one other person that has a comparative amount of biographical material, and that's the

26:33

Emperor Tiberius. So he has four writers, which is very kind of comparative to Jesus.

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He is Vilius, Petrocholus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassio Dio, and they're writing in and around the same time.

26:45

And they're writing in kind of a similar time frame.

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A little bit later on, their kind of second century, apart from Vilius Petrocholus, who is actually, even though he's the earliest one written, he's the least trusted because he's a political propagandist.

27:02

And so they don't trust his work because he's monetarily incentivized to make the emperor look good.

27:08

But if you're comparing Jesus to just any other of the biographies from the time frame, you're really comparing him to the most important, most powerful, most influential, and most well -known individual within the ancient world at that time.

27:23

So you have this Jewish itinerant from the backwaters of Roman occupied Judea, and you have the emperor.

27:30

That's really the comparative literature that we're dealing with. And I think people fail to realize how we should have very little, if anything about Jesus, comparative to who he was historically.

27:42

And yet, not only do we have four biographies, which like I said, only really comparative to some of the best known, most powerful individuals within history, but then we have the other letters of Peter and Paul and Jude and James.

27:58

And so we're just on a completely different level. It's not worth comparing apples to apples in the ancient world.

28:04

When we're talking about Jesus, we're comparing apples to orchards. I love that. Very good.

28:10

Mic drop. That's good. That's some Swolegetics right there. So, okay.

28:16

So let's bring everyone into the first clip here. Wes, this is probably the thing I've seen most being viral.

28:24

And it's the moment about the Sinai Bible. Why did you bring this point up?

28:29

It was clearly something that you were familiar with, you understood, and you really wanted to press on this.

28:36

Why was this, before we get to the clip, why was it important to you? Bring everyone into that. Yeah. So it was actually

28:41

Billy who brought it up and I was glad he did because as we'll see in the clip, he's asked, you know, why do you deny the crucifixion?

28:49

And like he usually does in his kind of pre -script that he gives whenever this comes up is he cites the

28:58

Sinai Bible, which is really a term that I think only he uses. I've never heard anybody else call it that, but he's talking about Codex Sinaticus and he cites the gospel of Jesus, his wife, as these two sources of evidence.

29:11

And one of the reasons why I really wanted to push him on that was because I'm very familiar with Codex Sinaticus.

29:18

I've worked with Codex Sinaticus. I have a facsimile of the New Testament of Codex Sinaticus and I have worked through its texts, at least in the gospels, if not a number of the letters of Paul, in the actual document, translating and transcribing through it.

29:35

So I knew that he both hadn't and also was making claims based on what this document was that simply were not the case when you actually look at the manuscript itself.

29:46

Very good. Okay, here we go, everyone. A little bit of a jaunt, but I really appreciate the fact that you seem to have investigated to a certain degree some of these facts.

30:00

Do you mind if I ask a clarifying question? Sure. When you say the Sinai Bible, what are you referring to specifically?

30:10

It's the biblical text that was written, it made it into a, you can actually look it up on Amazon, it's a

30:15

Bible called, I have a version at home, it's called the Sinai Bible, right from Mount Sinai, I'm assuming that's the mountain that they're referencing there, but they put together their own version of the biblical text prior to the

30:29

King James Version being put out. Sure. So when you refer to the

30:36

Sinai Bible, would you be referring to Codex Sinaticus, like the codex that comes?

30:41

Okay, that's why I was trying to get some clarifications, because, so you can actually go and see,

30:48

Codex Sinaticus is at the British Library, so you can go and see it, it's on display, and the

30:54

British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript. So I work with manuscripts in my linguistic work,

31:02

I'm an expert on early Christian scribal culture, and particularly in Greek and Coptic manuscripts.

31:08

I actually have, I have a facsimile, so I have a photocopy that was done by the

31:14

British Library of Codex Sinaticus that I work with in my office, so I have it here, and the only reason

31:21

I ask for clarification is because I want to make sure that what I'm addressing is actually what you mean, and not addressing something else.

31:29

Because the Codex Sinaticus in particular is just a Greek, it's a 4th century

31:36

Greek manuscript, it comes from approximately between 325 and 350

31:42

AD, and its text of the Gospels reads almost identical to the modern

31:50

Greek text that we develop translations from. So my curiosity is just simply in kind of exploring, when you say that it denies the crucifixion, or that the crucifixion isn't there,

32:03

I mean, I can go on right now, Codex Sinaticus, and I can look up the end of, say,

32:10

Matthew 27, where it has Jesus being crucified, and that's in Codex Sinaticus, or John 19, or any of the other ones.

32:22

So I think my confusion is that it doesn't read any differently.

32:31

So actually, are you able to pull up a website? Would the viewers or listeners or whatever be able to see that?

32:38

While he's pulling that up too, like I keep saying to all the people that aren't scientists traveling the world, and linguists,

32:51

I don't even know how to pronounce it the right way, like me. Young linguists? Sinai, I keep thinking of Sinai, like the

32:57

Sinai Bible, so is that like a version? So from my own knowledge that I know, like when

33:06

I really studied all this, what I thought was interesting about the Bible was how many different eyewitnesses,

33:12

I studied C .S. Lewis back in the day, how many different eyewitnesses and stuff there were, and they went on purpose to mention so many other names that they were able to cross -reference throughout history and throughout those times.

33:25

From my understanding, and those were different things that I always thought were kind of interesting that I felt was a good concept of proof, and then

33:37

I want Billy to answer, and also, I'm just curious, like the Sinai Bible, where was that piece discovered?

33:46

I found a text where I was referencing, actually, I misquoted there, it's the Gospel of Barnabas. So the problem here is...

33:54

Okay, yeah, so that... Okay, so the problem on that point, and Wes, of course, you clearly understand this, it's not the first time that he's, quote, misquoted that point.

34:04

When he's talking about the crucifixion being missing from the account, you can see him in numerous places before this making the claim that it's the

34:11

Sinai Bible, not what he finally here discovers, oh, I wasn't really, I didn't mean that,

34:17

I meant this other thing. Oh yeah, going back to 2017, I've found clips of him saying that the

34:24

Sinai Bible denies the crucifixion, or that the crucifixion is absent from the Sinai Bible, and that it's the oldest

34:30

Bible, and doing his sort of comparison to the King James, which, I mean, is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, comparing a fourth century

34:39

Greek manuscript to a 17th century English translation. Sure, you can find all the differences you want, but...

34:46

He's been at this for a while then. Yeah, he has. Yes, yeah, and these claims, that's why

34:52

I think it was really important when he did admit that, when he said, oh, I misquoted,

34:58

I think he meant to say I misspoke, and he's misquoting himself, but if he is misquoting himself, he's been doing so for years, and he's been doing so on the biggest public platforms along with his own channel for years, and so I think it's important to take note of that fact, that this is not a mishap.

35:22

This is Billy Carson getting called on something that he has said over and over and over again, casting doubt on the reliability of the

35:33

Bible and Jesus' own death, and that he's just patently and overly wrong about it.

35:39

Yeah, and I think this goes, Wes, to something that's a methodological issue when it comes to how

35:46

Christians are obligated to think, and to reason, and to work through evidence, and those sorts of things.

35:55

Christian worldview says that God cannot lie. It's a grounding of the Christian worldview in terms of the character of God.

36:01

To engage in something that is a logical contradiction is to actually violate what even the character of God is like.

36:09

God doesn't lie. God doesn't act in an unreasonable way.

36:16

Christians have a grounding for saying, okay, I need to be reasonable like God. I need to be logical like God.

36:22

I need to be consistent like God. I need to not lie like God. And I'm in God's image, and God has standards and commandments for me and how

36:30

I'm supposed to live and operate in his world as his image, and so the Christian worldview provides a grounding for scientific exploration, discovery.

36:38

It provides a grounding for a study of history and even relaying facts and information.

36:44

So like, for example, the Christian worldview would decry anybody with a history of telling people things that are not true, right?

36:53

Like, we have a worldview that says that if you're going to speak on something, you tell the truth, and so that's part of how

37:01

Christians develop in education and how we're supposed to speak and communicate.

37:06

It's the basis of even public debate, not to lie in public debate and to give a bunch of false evidences. Christian worldview says that if you're going to believe something, it has to be based upon evidence, facts, witness, those sorts of things.

37:18

And so you have a particular worldview and grounding of philosophy, a

37:23

Christian philosophy, that says that you ought not do that, Billy Carson. You can't do that, and you don't want to—I mean, obviously, there are times where as humans, fallible humans, we might make a mistake, but we shouldn't go around for years lying to people about anything that's in the

37:40

Bible or not in the Bible. And so I think I want to point to, in terms of worldview commitments,

37:45

Billy Carson, because he's not a Christian, because he doesn't stand on the Word of God as the ultimate standard, he doesn't really have any reason not to do these things, right?

37:55

If he wants to take some random fact, like the Sinai Bible, and it doesn't have the crucifixion of Jesus in it, he can do that in terms of ethically, in his own mind, because it's not important for him to not live a life of lies.

38:07

He has no ultimate grounding. So I wanted to say that at the front here, in terms of methodological differences between how a

38:13

Christian should operate in the world and how unbelievers operate, Christians have a reason to be rigorous in their thinking, like Wes is being, and to say, well, is that true?

38:22

Is that claim you made true? Do you have evidence for that? And we live in the generation now where it's the

38:29

TikTok generation, it's someone made a post, and so it's true, someone made this claim, so it's true.

38:35

I saw this 30 -second TikTok video that said that aliens actually produced us, and whatever the case may be, that's what we believe now, it was a really good 30 -second

38:46

TikTok video, that's where I heard it. And Billy Carson has just gone on for many years being able to do that, and this was the moment where now he's confronted with a

38:57

Christian who doesn't share his commitments, and says, well, let me ask you a question about that. So unless you guys have something you want to add.

39:04

I would just say quickly, I went to Amazon and put in Sinai Bible, and it doesn't exist, so.

39:10

Which was the point, yes. Just for the record. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good that Wes knew that. So okay,

39:17

Wes, just bring the audience into the next point, and forgive me, I forget, what was it, he said the gospel of what?

39:22

He said, no, I wasn't, gospel of Barnabas. Okay, so the gospel of Barnabas, he says, no,

39:28

I meant that, and so I'll play a little bit of that, and then we'll get your comments. Here we go.

39:34

That's good. So let's deal with that too, because I've actually worked with, there are two manuscripts of the gospel of Barnabas.

39:41

The gospel of Barnabas is a really interesting document, because it is a known forgery.

39:48

And so that's why I think it's important to get to these sources. So at the very start of the gospel of Barnabas, which we only have two copies of, one is in Italian, and one is in Spanish.

39:58

We see right off the bat that the gospel of Barnabas, not to be confused with either the epistle of Barnabas, or the

40:04

Acts of Barnabas, which are two apocryphal documents from the second century, but the gospel of Barnabas in particular, we know it's a forgery, because it does things like, in chapter 92, it says that Jesus spent 40 days on Mount Sinai, and then he came to the

40:23

Jordan River, and he walked to Jerusalem. But Mount Sinai is more than a week's journey away from Jerusalem, and neither

40:30

Mount Sinai nor Jerusalem are close to the Jordan River. So nevermind there not being a route from the

40:36

Jordan River to around Mount Sinai or going to Jerusalem, but there are internal problems with the gospel of Barnabas, which indicate that it shows no actual indication of evidence of coming from or even having knowledge of first century

40:56

Jewish understanding. It actually says Jesus is the Christ, but not the Messiah, which indicates that whoever the author is, he didn't know that those were the same words.

41:05

And I think a bigger problem is that the gospel of Barnabas actually paraphrases Dante's Inferno, which was written in 1314.

41:14

So there's a lot of internal evidences that disqualify the gospel of Barnabas, nevermind the fact that we don't have any evidence of it prior to the 14th century.

41:25

So... How long did that take? I mean, two minutes? Is this the point where Billy goes, yeah, I'll go with that? Yeah, okay.

41:31

Yeah. All right, Wes, let's talk about... Yeah, he concedes the point. Yeah. So he struggles really, really hard here, because he just started, he's just throwing things out, hoping people will just believe him and his claims.

41:43

But when he's faced with a Christian who doesn't share his commitments, who actually understands these things and knows these things, he has no response.

41:52

And, you know, I think it's unfortunate that Billy has been able to throw these terms out, because a lot of people,

41:58

Joe Rogan and Patrick McDavid, they don't know what Codex Sinaiticus is. They don't know the gospel of Barnabas from the gospel of Peter, from the gospel of Luke.

42:06

So it's... And Barnabas is one of those biblical names, right? So if you're throwing this out, you think, oh, Barnabas, I recognize that.

42:13

He's in the book of Acts. And so I've never heard of that before. And I kind of gave a laundry list there, and I could have kept going.

42:22

I mean, I really had to regulate myself. And in chapter three of the gospel of Barnabas, it tells us that Herod and Pilate ruled

42:28

Judea at the time of Jesus's birth, which is historically incorrect and impossible. It's the equivalent of saying that George Bush was president and Kamala Harris was his vice president.

42:40

Like, it's a historical inaccuracy. And in chapters 20 and 21,

42:45

Jesus sails to Nazareth and is welcomed by seamen on the other side of the lake. But Nazareth is landlocked.

42:52

So there's no sailing. He's not sailing on anything. So these are major issues with the gospel of Barnabas.

42:59

And I think... I don't know if Billy has actually ever read the gospel of Barnabas. I have serious doubts about that, given the fact that he says these things.

43:07

But he is right in the sense that the gospel of Barnabas does deny the crucifixion. On that count, he is right.

43:14

The only problem is that, like I said, it's a clear 14th century forgery.

43:21

And so like you were saying there, Jeff, it's an issue of integrity and methodology.

43:29

And I think Billy is just grab bagging anything that he can use that he thinks sounds impressive to kind of stump people who don't know what they don't know.

43:38

That's right. I think your point, too, about the internal contradictions that really dismiss, you know, these false claims kind of points to the question that you asked him.

43:47

I thought it was a really great question. From your perspective, Billy, something along the lines of... I'm paraphrasing here.

43:52

You said, what's your methodology for examining these things? Like, do you have a criteria for how you weigh these historical claims?

43:59

Because I'm a historian and I actually try to trace these things to the events themselves, historically.

44:06

Like, I thought that was a very helpful way to bring the point across here that when you're doing this kind of work, you have to have a methodology.

44:12

You have to have a standard that you're employing to measure the accuracy of these claims that you're making. Yeah. And I don't...

44:20

I really wanted to harp on that issue. And unfortunately, I don't actually think Billy knows what

44:26

I mean when I say the word methodology. I don't think he's ever been confronted to think about what the ways he gets to discerning whether something is accurate or not are actually valid to begin with.

44:40

That his criteria and standards are something that should be employed versus something that obviously discredits something internally and externally.

44:49

So he got kind of frustrated at me with continually asking, well, what is your methodology? Because, A, I don't think he knew what that meant to actually employ a methodology.

45:00

But I wanted to make sure I kept asking the question because I wanted to make sure that whoever was listening, whoever's been duped by Billy, can see that if you cannot trust his lines of evidence for something like the

45:15

Bible or proving that the crucifixion did or didn't happen, then you cannot trust anything he says.

45:21

That when he talks about aliens and the pyramids and a 36 ,000 -year -old tablet written by the

45:29

Egyptian god Thoth, that that is all cast into question because he's shown...

45:38

He has a track record of simply not being able to do simple and credible historical research.

45:44

Yeah, it's a display that this man is a sloppy thinker and he's sloppy in his methodology.

45:51

And if it's a consistency, obviously, again, just to be gracious to the man and to all human beings, we're going to make mistakes because we're fallible.

45:58

We're not infallible human beings. We're going to make mistakes. But there's a difference between making a mistake, owning it, and saying, oh,

46:04

I didn't know that. I'm going to correct that. I'm going to be corrected on that. And then somebody who just... Their whole life is wrapped up in sloppy thinking, sloppy methodology, making claims that are unsubstantiated, unjustified, without the basis of solid lines of evidence.

46:17

And that's Billy Carson. And that was displayed quite easily on this two hour long discussion.

46:24

All right, Luke. Yeah, so I had a question. I'm going to change topics slightly.

46:30

I think it was on a... It wasn't in this debate. I think it was a follow up show you did. You mentioned... I think it was you mentioned

46:37

Sumerian was something you have not been able to wrap your mind around. And I was like, one,

46:43

I've never heard someone actually say that. But two, I was curious, what is so complicated about Sumerian?

46:52

I'm not familiar with that language at all. So I just wanted to hear you kind of bring us into that conversation a little bit.

46:58

Yeah, so the background to that is that one of Billy's claims is that the biblical stories are actually copied.

47:04

And sometimes, oftentimes, he says word for word from Sumerian tablets. And I mean, the reason why we know that is patently untrue is because Sumerian was a dead language by the time that the

47:19

New Testament was being written for a longer period of time than Latin has been a dead language to today.

47:25

Wow. So if say these Jewish individuals had found or whoever they were that he's claiming was writing the

47:35

New Testament, if they had found Sumerian tablets in a cave somewhere, as far as work would have been concerned, those were just scratchings on rocks.

47:45

They would have had no idea how to read cuneiform. And so I have done a lot of ancient linguistic work.

47:53

I work primarily in ancient Greek and Coptic. Coptic is kind of the final iteration of ancient

47:59

Egyptian when they employed the Greek alphabet. I have done a little bit of work in Demotic and Hebrew.

48:06

And I've dabbled in a number of other Afro -Semitic languages like Akkadian.

48:14

But the thing with Sumerian is that Sumerian is what's referred to as a language isolate in that it is completely in an island to itself linguistically, grammatically, syntactically from any other ancient

48:27

Near Eastern language. And so if you put it alongside something like Akkadian or Elamite or other

48:33

Semitic Canaanite languages, it is completely different. It is as different from something like Greek and Hebrew as,

48:45

I don't know, rural Japanese from 100 years ago is to modern day

48:52

English. Like there's a bigger divide there. And so Billy Carson goes around not just making these claims about kind of the origins of Christianity coming from ancient

49:02

Sumerian, but claims that he himself has read and translated some of these Sumerian documents.

49:08

And so as someone who has, like I said, I mean, I have Sumerian lexicons.

49:14

I have tried. I have attempted to wrap my head around some of these, like even just the basic level of spot throws the ball to Tom kind of thing.

49:26

I can't do it. And so for someone like Billy to come around and say to Joe Rogan that he can read ancient

49:33

Sumerian is not just silly, but it's implausible on a level that for anybody who does try to learn these languages is just pretty self evident.

49:45

Interesting. Thank you. Okay, guys. Another moment. Here we go. Mary, M -E -R -O -Y.

49:51

But the point that I'm making here is when you start to really analyze what these angels are doing and you start to analyze how many people are dying in the biblical text, you start to say, well, how many people did

50:04

Satan actually kill? And when you start doing the tally on the numbers, God's killing doing most of the killing in the

50:11

Bible. It's not the devil that's doing all the killing. And then God says in Isaiah, I created the good and I created the evil.

50:17

Do what I say of the Lord. So he's saying that he's doing the good and the evil. That's what he's saying. Yeah. I'm going to pause there.

50:24

We're going to listen to more. But you were saying before the show, Wes, something you would have liked to have said there in that moment when he talks about Satan's death tally versus God's, something you would have liked to have said there.

50:39

I'd like to hear that because I think it's actually a good point. Yeah, I afterwards kind of thought, ah, you know what

50:45

I should have said is, I hate to break it to you, Billy, but God does a hundred percent of the killing anywhere, the

50:50

Bible or otherwise, because God is sovereign. He is in control and, you know, all his purposes come to pass.

50:59

And he is the one who is removing people from this side of eternity and putting them on the other side of eternity.

51:07

I mean, as the author of creation, he's the one who's doing that. So if Billy's gripe is that, you know,

51:12

God kills people. Yes. I mean, how else do you think it happens?

51:19

That's right. And when he does, he's perfectly just right. We're not confusing that with the category of murder, for example.

51:25

Oh, one hundred percent. Yeah. God is the just judge. He's the holy one that we've all offended. We're all made in his image.

51:31

We're all accountable to him. And all of us, ultimately, according to the biblical worldview, all of us deserve justice from God, not mercy from God.

51:38

And that's what makes the cross so glorious, is that God, who is just, who actually owes to the perpetrator justice, has in the person of Christ condescended to live the perfect life that they've failed, to die the death that they actually deserve, conquering that death, and then giving the free gift of eternal life to all who would turn to Christ in faith.

51:59

That's the glory of the gospel. It is mercy, grace, and love that is undeserved. What all of humanity deserves is justice.

52:06

And so it shouldn't confuse anybody if we understand the holiness of God, the character of God, and our unrighteousness.

52:13

It shouldn't confuse anybody that God kills anyone. And so I think

52:19

Wes had a great point. I love it, Wes. He tied it in there perfectly. It's God's sovereignty, his right to rule over his creation.

52:26

Like you see it in the biblical text, like, I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.

52:33

Same idea. You're not going to thwart the purposes of almighty God. Yeah. And unfortunately, Billy does not understand the

52:40

God of the Bible. He does not understand God's divine decree. He has contrived a

52:46

God that he mocks, but in one sense, it's not the

52:51

God of the Bible. The God who says all things happen according to the counsel of his will, right?

52:56

Ephesians 1, 11. And that's God's divine decree, which includes whatever comes to pass by that physical, moral, good, or evil.

53:04

He works all things after the counsel of his own will and is known unto God are all the works from the beginning, right?

53:11

That's Acts 15. And so I think, unfortunately, what Billy continues to communicate when he talks about those things is just a fundamental straw manning and misunderstanding of who

53:24

God is, how his divine decree operates in the world, and that all things come to pass by his divine command.

53:31

Yeah. I think that came to the surface too with their attack on, you know, God, whether it's he, you keep saying he.

53:37

Yeah. We're going to get to that. I believe we're going to have that in here. Yeah. It is interesting. People will say, like it said in the show, and the host said something like, you know, that God murdered all the people in the flood.

53:46

First of all, a category error in terms of the judge of all the earth, the creator, ending the lives of anybody.

53:52

We're not talking about the category of murder. But if you understand, if you want to be consistent and look at the worldview at least and be honest with it in terms of God is holy and us as the offenders, what's confusing is not that God flooded the earth and destroyed everyone on the earth.

54:07

What's confusing is that it took so long. That's what's confusing. What's confusing is that it took so long and that there was so much patience and mercy and grace from God that it got to the point was where you have this large population who are continually in their thoughts evil only, and that God was merciful and gracious, not only to preserve their lives for so long and cause the rain to fall and adjust and the unjust and give them life and breath and everything for so long.

54:34

What's confusing is that it took so long for him to wipe them out and confusing that God preserved a remnant.

54:39

And he warned them with a righteous preacher for a long time before he did it. That's... Right. So there's more to the story always.

54:46

Here we go. I keep going over the same rhetoric over and over again. My personal opinion is that the biblical text is a good book.

54:55

I've got videos, my number one video on Twitter has me saying this. It's good text because if you actually apply some of the information that's in the

55:04

Bible, you can get a good result like you have done, Mark. Right. I struggle with... No, I want you to finish your thought.

55:11

Go ahead. So because you can get a good result, but there's a lot of misinformation in the Bible. There's a lot of false information.

55:18

There's copy information text. And if you go by that text, all of a sudden you end up with 400 years of slavery. You end up with abuse.

55:25

You end up with divide and conquer tactics that separate people. You end up with people thinking that they're the chosen ones and they're the chosen people.

55:33

And we've been promised this promised land so we can eradicate another race of people because this is our land, because God promised it to us.

55:40

You have people that want to go on the papal inquisitions and torture and kill and murder over 80 million people. You have the

55:46

American Holocaust, 111 million indigenous natives slayed. You have all this going on because of this text, which is set up so contradictory throughout its path across time.

56:01

You get into the New Testament, slavery is still being condoned in the New Testament. Was it? Honor thy slaves, masters.

56:07

You would honor God or Jesus. It says, I believe. So it doesn't say that, but I'll let you real quick, but I'm just, and I know you have to go soon too, but I'm speaking as I challenge my own.

56:23

It was always. So let's just deal with a couple of those things because he goes on for a little bit here. And I guess time in the show,

56:29

I don't want to take too much time on that. So, and I want to hear what you have to say, Wes, just in a burst here to which you do speak to it here.

56:36

But I would say in listening to this, what I want to always point to is someone like Billy Carson that wants to indict

56:45

God and to criticize the Bible and talk about things like, well, you know, if you listen to some parts of the Bible, like you'll live a good life, it'll result in good.

56:52

But there's so many inconsistencies and there's so many contradictions in the Bible. I want to say, okay, where do you get the right to borrow all that capital from the

57:03

Christian worldview? Because you're talking about concepts that you've already abandoned. When you abandon the

57:09

God of the Bible, you can't be talking about things that are ultimately good. Like, well, some things in the Bible are quote, good, and it'll lead to a good life.

57:16

I would say you already gave that up, Billy. You already gave it up when you rejected Christ. You gave up a grounding for knowledge, for truth, for beauty, for goodness.

57:24

All of that, you gave it all up. And now you want to borrow capital back from the God that you reject and talk about things that are good.

57:30

Also, why would it matter if something is inconsistent in your perspective? Why does it matter that there's contradictions in the

57:36

Bible? So oftentimes, I think Christians will listen to a guy like this and they'll say, okay, I want to respond to every little part and piece of inconsistency he brings up.

57:43

And I want to make sure I show that there aren't discrepancies and there aren't inconsistencies. But there's something that's actually at the bottom of that.

57:50

And it's like, no, I want to know from your perspective, Billy, why does it matter that something's inconsistent?

57:56

I thought you gave all that up. And so there's two ways to do this, and I love how Wes did this in the show.

58:03

The Christian can answer the ultimate challenges, the philosophical challenges, the epistemological challenges, and the things like the ethical claims.

58:12

This is good. This is bad. Okay, how do you know that? By what standard is something good or something bad? Or we shouldn't be inconsistent.

58:18

Okay, I believe that as a Christian, but I have a basis to not want to be inconsistent. But I want to know what your justification for decrying inconsistencies are.

58:26

But then the Christian worldview can also operate in this realm over here. And this is why I love Wes so much.

58:32

And what he does is because it also can operate when you take the presuppositions of the Christian worldview into the world of science, into the world of history, into the world of language.

58:41

Then you see this beautiful flower, like blossom, where it's just the glory of the

58:48

Christian worldview. And you go, oh, we can operate in both realms, the ultimates, and then over here in the particulars, all these things over here.

58:54

And so, Wes, you know, obviously people can go listen to the debate and what you said to him there, but he's just throwing stuff out in the

59:00

Bible, condoning history, and is responsible for the Native Holocaust. And slavery.

59:06

And it's just like this scattergun approach where he just dumps everything out there. How do you respond to that now when you think about it post -debate?

59:15

Yeah, I think you're exactly right in that Billy is apologetic for his worldview is bankrupt on a number of fronts.

59:23

It's bankrupt epistemologically, it's bankrupt morally, and it's bankrupt historically. Because he wants to, in one sense, like you've just articulated, he wants to pluck the fruit of moral agency and moral ethics, and also deny that the roots that are actually drawing in the nutrients to create that fruit to begin with are valid.

59:48

And so you can't have the fruit without acknowledging the root. And so that's why when we talked, you know,

59:55

I pointed out Celsus in the second century, his objection to Christianity being that of the foolish, dishonorable, stupid slaves, women, and children, because those were the people who were given agency within early

01:00:08

Christianity. I mentioned Rodney Stark and his volume, The Rise of Christianity, The Role of Women, and how he says that you can track empirically the agency of women across the ancient world by the movement of Christianity.

01:00:22

And whenever an area became populated by Christians, we see a direct correlation with the privileges and treatments of women expanding in time, when the surrounding culture largely didn't view women as being people.

01:00:32

I also could have thrown in, you know, Julian the Apostate, who decries Christians because they don't just take care of their own poor, they take care of the

01:00:40

Roman pagan poor. You know, this is the inheritance of Christianity that is ultimately drawn from Scripture, that every person is created in the image of God and has intrinsic worth because of their birthright, because they are humanity.

01:00:57

And I mean, same reason why we are, you know, we fight for the agency of the unborn, same reason why we fight for the agency of the physically disabled, the mentally disabled, people who our society wants to do away with, remove from society via, you know, whether that's euthanasia or whatever.

01:01:14

It's because we understand that we have a mandate to defend image bearers of God.

01:01:21

And so Billy wants to say, you know, well, look at slavery and look at racism and look at...

01:01:26

But A, those things are, like you said, Jeff, decried by my worldview, not his.

01:01:35

That's right. And the actual institutions that overthrew them were

01:01:40

Judeo -Christian movements. That when you look at the abolition movements, when you look at the movements that fought for, you know, people within the margins of society throughout history, it wasn't, you know, the pagan culture, it wasn't

01:01:58

Islam, it wasn't Eastern mysticism or Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism.

01:02:03

No, all of those worldviews have a way to get around these issues, whether that's, you know, advocating for karma being the end result of someone doing something bad in the previous life.

01:02:17

And so you don't want to help them now because they're working off their bad karma or what have you. Some sort of survival of the fittest, whether that's from a atheistic materialistic perspective or from a religious perspective.

01:02:28

And like my friend Glenn Scrivener says, you know, what we see within Christianity is that the fittest steps down and sacrifices himself for the survival of the weakest.

01:02:37

That's Christianity. And that's why we fight for what we fight for, right? So Billy really doesn't have any ground to stand on.

01:02:45

He wants to burn down the house of Christianity, but then pick up the smoldering embers and try to build himself a hut.

01:02:54

He can't do that. That's not how worldview operates. That's right. And it's something Christians need to be prepared for.

01:03:00

And Wes, you did an amazing job in bringing these points up. And look, we can't go through the whole debate today, but they weren't responded to, is the point that I want to make.

01:03:09

They were not responded to. So when Billy Carson makes a claim about Christianity and slavery, you refute the claim.

01:03:15

You even pointed back to the law word of God that he actually, he mentions Deuteronomy and says like it's one of the most evil books or something to that effect.

01:03:22

Like it's so awful, so evil. I'm like, have you read that book, Deuteronomy? Do you know about the discussions of justice and all the ways that we want to not show partiality and not show partiality in judgment?

01:03:34

And where we get America's and British common law, the case law system, all the good that you have in the world right now in the

01:03:41

West came from a biblical world. Oh yeah, that law of God stuff from that awful book, Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

01:03:48

But you even brought up, and he wasn't responded to because he doesn't know his Bible. You brought up when he brings up slavery.

01:03:55

Look, when you see slavery mentioned in scripture, it's not 19th century Georgia. That's not what we're talking about.

01:04:02

And it's a completely different system. You're talking about even the preservation of life in some of what was going on in the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

01:04:11

But you even brought up the key point that was mentioned by the abolitionists a lot.

01:04:16

And that was that man stealing and enslaving is a capital crime that God so detests.

01:04:23

Leviticus, yeah. He so detests that, that the Christian worldview says, you should lose your life if you kidnap someone and enslave them, you deserve to actually die, not pay them back, but actually die.

01:04:39

And so for Billy Carson to, oh, the Bible and slavery and all the rest, and it's like, hey, that Bible says that what took place there is worthy of death.

01:04:46

That's how much it's opposed to that. But Billy Carson doesn't care because it's a scattergun approach.

01:04:52

Let me just throw all these different concepts and we try to pull on everyone's heartstrings and emotions by using words that we hate like slavery.

01:04:59

By the way, why do we hate today in America, this word slavery?

01:05:05

Why do we hate it? Only because the Christian worldview. It is only because the

01:05:11

Christian worldview and the work of the abolitionists behind us that work to end that atrocity, that it's such a dirty, evil word today.

01:05:18

So if you hate slavery, thank a Christian. If you hate slavery, thank

01:05:24

Moses. In terms of what we think about took place in the slave trade, kidnapping and enslaving people. But these are things that are utterly meaningless to the unbeliever that doesn't have a grounding for what they actually say.

01:05:37

Any more words here? I got one more quick clip. I think people will really enjoy. This was an interesting moment.

01:05:43

This took place about a quarter of the way through the discussion.

01:05:49

Or even in the same place. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I don't agree with that. I just see if I have all these texts out, there's a lot of different information that you can see this.

01:06:00

A lot of it's been copied word for word into the biblical text. In the... But what's the word for word?

01:06:06

In your version of what you believe in, you keep saying that he,

01:06:12

God's a he. Yeah. And so where do you get that from? Well, throughout both the

01:06:20

Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament, you have the masculine singular pronoun used for God.

01:06:30

And why is God a man? Where's the evidence of this? Well, God isn't a man.

01:06:35

See, within historical Christianity, we don't believe that God has a gender. However, the way that he has decided to reveal himself is through the masculine plural.

01:06:45

And then ultimately by becoming a human in the person of Jesus Christ. So we don't believe that God has a gender.

01:06:52

In fact, the fact that God creates humanity in his image and he creates the male and female, those are two aspects of the image of God.

01:07:00

And so that's the completeness. So historical Christianity has never argued that God is gendered.

01:07:05

Jesus is gendered in the sense that during the incarnation, he becomes a human man, but he's still fully man and fully

01:07:11

God. But God is spirit. And right, as the scripture says, we worship him in spirit and truth.

01:07:17

But nobody's arguing that... What's that? Sorry. God always blows my mind. God is the same all the time, right?

01:07:24

He's always good. God is all the same all the time, right? Yeah, but we do see that in scripture,

01:07:32

God has revealed himself through the masculine plural. And there are aspects of God's character that we see within scripture that do actually communicate.

01:07:41

You know, Jesus says that he longs to gather Israel like a mother hen collects her chicks.

01:07:46

We see aspects of the feminine of God, not meaning that God is feminine, but that the image of God reflects both the masculine and the feminine.

01:07:55

And that's why when the two become one flesh, there's a uniting of that that reflects the image of God as well within the covenant of marriage.

01:08:04

Do you actually believe that the majority of Christians really believe that God is not masculine, that God has both aspects?

01:08:12

I mean, it's irrelevant what the majority of Christians believe. How many would, how many of you, you know, that God's not a man, they don't.

01:08:21

It's irrelevant what those Christians think of. What's relevant is what the biblical text says. Yeah, yeah.

01:08:28

And that was his argument. And then he doubles down. And I say, you know, all sorts of Christians believe all sorts of things they shouldn't.

01:08:35

That is no bearing on historical Christianity. And so, you know, you don't judge Beethoven's symphonies based on my ability to play them on the cello.

01:08:44

Just because I'm a poor musician doesn't mean that Beethoven's music isn't wonderful and masterful.

01:08:49

And so even if I claim to be a musician, you shouldn't base the actual objectivity of beautiful music based on my ability to play it.

01:08:58

So we're going to see Christians saying, doing and believing things that do not comport with historical biblical

01:09:04

Christianity. But that's on them and they need to be corrected and they need to be conformed to the word of God as their standard.

01:09:13

And so it's a silly move, but actually at that point in the discussion,

01:09:18

Billy had lost every case that he had made. He'd brought up the

01:09:23

Sinai Bible and that had been refuted. He brought up the gospel of Jesus' wife that had been refuted. He brought up the gospel of Barnabas that had been refuted.

01:09:30

And then he wanted to say that the Genesis chapter one was word for word copied from the

01:09:35

Enuma Elish, which is the Babylonian creation story. And so I simply asked him, can you recount the creation story in the

01:09:42

Enuma Elish for us? And he went on about a five minute, you know, monologue about all sorts of crazy things that are in there.

01:09:48

And, you know, also commentary on what he thinks is going on as well. Nothing of which sounded anything even remotely close to Genesis chapter one.

01:09:57

And so after he kind of, I had to cut him off because he just kept going. And I said, you know, well, what in there is word for word?

01:10:04

And he says, well, the waters were divided from the waters. And then there's a bit of a pause.

01:10:10

And I kind of chuckled because I thought, OK, yeah, sure. That's in there. But we're making a word for word claim, like a causation claim, not just a correlation claim, a causation claim.

01:10:21

And I think at that point he'd realized he had he'd undermined all of his positions.

01:10:28

He, in his own words, had shown that he didn't know what he was talking about. And so he tries to pivot to an emotional argument.

01:10:33

You're using a masculine pronoun for God and that Christianity is obviously a negative force for women.

01:10:40

I mean, this is not this is not an empirical argument. This is not a historical argument. This is an emotional ploy and one that likewise failed because Billy, as you can hear, his depth of biblical interpretation is doing things like saying, well,

01:10:58

God is the same all the time, isn't he? Isn't he good all the time? And that's the depth of Billy's actual ability to dig into the biblical text is to kind of use these platitudes that he's heard you described about the

01:11:11

Bible. Yeah, I think that was continued even later on in the discussion right before he jumped off. He was doing the scattergun approach again, but then he was blaming

01:11:20

God essentially for these injustices committed by people, committed by man. Well, why did God put it there?

01:11:26

See, man has taken that and they've ran amok with it and caused all this turmoil, you know, as if that's

01:11:32

God's fault, as if mankind is not responsible for his actions, as if he's not accountable to his creator.

01:11:39

That's right. Powerful stuff, Wes, man. I'd love to keep talking with you, man. I know we're probably out of time and I don't wanna run over your schedule too much, but I'm looking forward to doing more stuff with you, man.

01:11:49

I mean, you're a true, true blessing. I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm grateful. Thank you. Grateful for all your work. I truly, truly am.

01:11:55

And I wanna encourage everybody, strongly encourage you, go check out Wes's stuff, go to his YouTube channel, go to his website.

01:12:04

One more time for all the viewers in right now, Wes, what's the website again? It's wesleyhuff .com.

01:12:09

W -E -S -L -E -Y -H -U -F -F .com. Excellent. Would you say the best place to start,

01:12:14

Wes, is like, I went to the website, I saw you have even a documentary on there about Can I Trust the

01:12:19

Bible? Would you say that's a great place to start for people? Like, where would you recommend for your resources that they, you know, they're trying to get into this area and understand more, get grounded in, you know, historical understanding of the text and why we can trust it?

01:12:32

Yeah, 100%. I would definitely recommend. If you're gonna go and look at anything that I've done, I would recommend that you look, you know, explore a number of things that I've done.

01:12:41

But that Can I Trust the Bible series is really my baby. That was a project that's an, it's an ongoing process.

01:12:47

In fact, I'm going to be flying out to Turkey and Italy to talk about the canon of scripture. It's the 1700 year anniversary of the

01:12:53

Council of Nicaea. It's the upcoming year. So we're going to be going to Iznik, Turkey, where Nicaea happened and talking about what did and didn't happen in Nicaea, arguably where it took place.

01:13:05

Dispel all the myths about Constantine. We really want to make sure that that's communicated properly.

01:13:11

We're going to be going to Trent in Italy and talk about, you know, what significance did Trent have on the canon?

01:13:17

Why does the Catholic Bible have seven extra books? Why can we be confident that 66 is inspired scripture and not 72 or 74?

01:13:26

So those are the things I really want to get across to people. And so those first two episodes, we flew to Egypt two summers ago and we filmed them there, went to some of the places where our earliest

01:13:37

Christian manuscripts have been discovered. I went to Nag Hammadi, talked about the discovery of the

01:13:43

Nag Hammadi library, went and saw the Gospel of Thomas at the Coptic Museum in Cairo. And so what

01:13:48

I want to do is I want to show just the mountain of evidence that we have for the confidence of the

01:13:54

Bible and that we as Christians have. Our worldview is true and it's true based on the evidence.

01:14:00

And so, yeah, if you're going to, if you're going to just, you just have a, you know, a short amount of time.

01:14:06

Those episodes are 20 minutes each, not even 19 minutes. And, you know, 20 seconds or something. So episodes one and two are out.

01:14:13

Three and four are in the working process. I'm digging it. That's exciting. Yeah, I really appreciate you.

01:14:19

Since it is Christmas and we're talking about Nicaea, so dispelling myths, did Santa Claus really punch

01:14:25

Arius? It's an apocryphal story that comes later. But those, the iconography is pretty cool when you see those pictures of St.

01:14:34

Nicholas of Myra punching areas in the face. So is it true? I don't know, but it's one of those stories that's good enough that it should be true.

01:14:43

I hope I like that. I told my son and he just looked at me like, are you serious? My son was like, he did what?

01:14:50

I hope he punched him. Right. I hope he did. Blasphemy mouth. Merry Christmas.

01:14:56

Yeah, the right hand of fellowship. Yeah, that's right. All right. You're a blessing, dude.

01:15:03

So everyone, we're going to let Wes go here. Thankful for you, brother. Thanks for spending time with us. Appreciate you very, very much.

01:15:09

Yeah. Likewise. Appreciate you guys. Keep fighting the good fight. Thank you, man. Hopefully talk to you soon. All right, everybody. So we're going to, what we're going to do, you guys are hanging out right now.

01:15:17

I'm going to, we're going to tell you a few more things and then we're going to head over right after the show today to the after show.

01:15:23

ApologiaStudios .com A -P -O -L -O -G -I -A -Studios .com Go over there. If you're All Access, your partners with us in this ministry, make everything we do possible.

01:15:31

And so we're going to do an after show for you guys right over there in just a few minutes after the show. And point everybody, of course, to the people that we love, the stuff that we love.

01:15:41

Very thankful for IonLayer .com I -O -N -Layer .com You guys have heard me talk about this a bunch.

01:15:48

Go search, go research NAD benefits. It'll blow your mind.

01:15:53

I'm so thankful for all the technology and the growth that we've had in biology and biohacking and things like that.

01:16:00

And so NAD, amazing, amazing stuff. It's nicknamed the fountain of youth. People have been doing it for a long time through IV injection.

01:16:08

However, it's known that though it is extremely beneficial for your system, it is also extremely painful to do through IV.

01:16:18

And so IonLayer, the guys over at IonLayer, solid dudes, have created a medical patch where you can get a high dose of NAD that goes right into your system without the pain.

01:16:26

You just wear it on your arm over 14 hours. It's truly blessed my life in a number of ways.

01:16:32

So I was doing it anyways. I'm doing it anyways. And I wanted to tell you guys about it. They are just great.

01:16:39

And if you go to IonLayer .com, you want to invest in longevity and your wellness, and you do it, just put

01:16:44

APOLOGEEA in all caps in the coupon code. They're going to give you a discount and they're going to bless the ministry here at APOLOGEEA so we can continue to do this gospel of the kingdom work.

01:16:54

And so one of my favorite things that I regularly do, I hope you guys give it a shot. And so also,

01:17:00

Luke? They also got the glutathione patches now, which is right next to you there. Ah, glutathione, the master antioxidants.

01:17:09

So do your research too on this stuff. Glutathione, master antioxidants. It is, there's too much, there's too much great stuff to say about it in this short period of time.

01:17:17

Just research benefits of glutathione and master antioxidants. And so there's a number of ways you can take glutathione.

01:17:23

Orally, you don't actually get very much at all, sometimes if any at all.

01:17:29

And so there's different technologies to be able to get glutathione. You can get injections, but of course

01:17:34

IV injections are expensive and they're painful. There are, there's a specific topical one that is very good that you get a ton into your system.

01:17:43

It is very expensive though. And, but now Ion Layer is doing it through the patch as well.

01:17:49

Glutathione, same deal, APOLOGEEA in all caps and you'll get $100 off of your kit.

01:17:56

Each patch is a 500 milligram glutathione infusion, six patches per kit, one month coverage, one patch every five days.

01:18:04

We are living in such a cool time right now with the biohacking and the way to like look at our systems and say, well, how could

01:18:10

I increase production here or fix my metabolism here or help my longevity here?

01:18:17

Just so you feel well and even do some healing stuff in your life. It's just great.

01:18:22

We live in a great time. Glutathione, master antioxidant, fantastic. They have NAD now and glutathione.

01:18:28

Go to ionlayer .com and again, APOLOGEEA in all caps. Me and I wish Billy was still on because someone is upset about our pagan

01:18:35

Christmas tree. You mean Wes, not, we don't want Billy on. Sorry, not Billy, Wes. Sorry, Wes.

01:18:41

Yeah, yeah. I meant you, I meant Wes, not Billy. Again, if you're just getting on right now and you said something so stupid as Christmas is pagan, go

01:18:49

Wes Huff and Christmas Myths Pagan. Is that on YouTube? You're welcome. It's on YouTube.

01:18:54

You're welcome. Speaking of Christmas, which is what?

01:19:01

Six days away, I think. Couple days away. It's probably too late to get any of these cool products we got in time for Christmas, but you should still order them anyways.

01:19:10

You can go to shop .apologyeastudios .com and get some sweet pre -sip coffee to get all of our tracks or swag.

01:19:16

We love Bill Rapier, Amtac Blades. Go to amtacblades .com. Get your husband a battle axe or a nice blade.

01:19:23

You can put apology in the coupon code, get 5 % off and he gives 5 % to an abortion that would help save the babies.

01:19:29

And then Heritage Defense. Speaking of babies, if you have babies in your homeschool, please sign up with Heritage Defense.

01:19:34

You can go to heritagedefense .org, put apology in the coupon code and get your first month free.

01:19:41

And then lastly, we got our sweet stuff here from Rooted Pines. We got the cigar whiskey holder there.

01:19:48

We got the shield. They got all kinds of wooden toys and tinctures and cool stuff there.

01:19:54

I'm grateful for them. You can also put apology in the coupon code and get a sweet deal. So I just want to point out in terms of how

01:20:01

Christians should think. And of course we can disagree on non -essentials. We all should be able to love each other, be gracious to each other and disagree on the non -essentials.

01:20:08

The Adiaphora, we're united on the essentials. That's vitally important. But in terms of how Christians should think, and we were just making the whole argument with Wes that Christians have a grounding for their beliefs and wanting to believe true things and wanting to have a consistent methodology.

01:20:24

And we shouldn't be like someone like Billy Carson who doesn't and his methodology is flawed and he just makes claims that are not rooted in history, not rooted in evidence.

01:20:32

I'll give you one right here by Joe Leyva. Christmas is worshiping the devil. You're just proving in something like that.

01:20:40

You're just proving the very things we were claiming about Billy Carson. The very things that Billy Carson says, tossing stuff out, not rooted in history, not rooted in fact.

01:20:50

And if you guys would like to engage with that discussion, again, Wes Hough, in the search bar of YouTube, Wes Hough, Christmas myths,

01:20:58

Christmas pagan, and you're welcome. I hope it blesses you to the degree that by tomorrow, you're running over to Walmart or Target to get yourself a

01:21:06

Christmas tree to light that bad boy up and just fill your house with Christmas and wear Christmas pajamas and drink eggnog and celebrate

01:21:12

God becoming a man because it is a great celebration. And so we're gonna head over to the after show, everybody.

01:21:19

Love you guys. Thank you so much. We're gonna take the next two weeks off of the radio show and spend time with our families and take a rest to get into the next year with rest and ready to fight.

01:21:28

I wanna again, remind everybody to please pray for End Abortion Now. Endabortionnow .com

01:21:34

is where you guys go. Please give there financially so we can have the budget that we need satisfied to fight the fight that we have.

01:21:41

Approximately 20 plus bills of abolition going in to various states across the country next year.

01:21:47

Be in prayer that God allows one of those bills to pass or all of them to pass. He can part the Red Sea. But we wanna establish justice for the preborn.

01:21:53

We've got babies being saved every day because of churches that are just like the one you're a part of that are going out to save lives at the abortion mill.

01:22:00

If you wanna get the free training, free resources, we want nothing from your church. We wanna give everything away to you so that you can go to the abortion mills and save lives.

01:22:07

Just go to endabortionnow .com, get your church signed up and you can be a part of the tens of thousands of babies that have been saved since the inception of endabortionnow .com.

01:22:16

That's Luke the bear. Hey, real quick, Nick Martin, thank you brother for the super chat and for the encouragement. Appreciate it.

01:22:22

Lord bless you and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and JL, go on home. They're waiting for you. There you go.

01:22:28

I'm Jeff, the commenter ninja. That's Zachary Conover. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, everybody. God bless you. We're so thankful for you.