Michael Knowles gives his Catholic perspective on the intense debate between Wes Huff and Billy Carson. Watch as Michael breaks down the key arguments, exposes logical flaws, and highlights some of the best moments from this disastrous debate. - - - Today’s Sponsor: Hillsdale College - Go to https://hillsdale.edu/knowles to sign up for free access to over 40 online courses.
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| I love debates. | |
| I like participating in debates. | |
| I like watching debates. | |
| And I like debates because they will present two sides of an argument. | |
| And often in debates, even in debates in which I participate, often both sides have something to contribute. | |
| Usually there's a winner. | |
| Usually one side is a little closer to the truth than the other. | |
| But at least you learn a little bit from both sides. | |
| Sometimes that isn't true. | |
| Actually, sometimes there are debates where one side is just completely right and the other side has no idea what it's talking about, and the former totally destroys, with facts and logic, the latter. | |
| That is what happened in a debate over the Bible and religion between Wesley Huff and Billy Carson. | |
| I was not really aware of either of these people before I watched their debate. | |
| Wes Huff I had heard of before, but I didn't know much about him. | |
| Billy Carson I'd never heard of in my life. | |
| Everyone kept telling me, you have to watch this debate. | |
| It's a debate over the Bible, the Christian religion, who God is, what Christianity looks like. | |
| I said, okay, that interests me. | |
| Whatever, I'll take a look. | |
| I could not look away. | |
| This was the most thorough drubbing I maybe have ever seen in a debate. | |
| It's definitely up there. | |
| Viewers or listeners or whatever will be able to see that? | |
| Most of that is oral history, correct? | |
| Oh, it's all oral history, even the Bible. | |
| Billy Carson comes in and he makes all sorts of wild claims that Christ, our Lord, was not crucified, that God in the Bible is evil, is narcissistic. | |
| He makes all sorts of wacky claims about angels getting drunk and I don't know, crazy stuff. | |
| But he says he's got the goods. | |
| He's been talking about this for a long time. | |
| And he says if you look back at the old texts, the earliest texts, they prove that Christianity is bunk and that Billy Carson's view is right. | |
| Take a listen to how Wes Huff examines that claim. | |
| The statement is according to the Sinai Bible, okay? | |
| According to the Sinai Bible, Jesus wasn't crucified in that Bible. | |
| That Bible predates the King James Version of the Bible. | |
| And the text there actually is about 12,000 to 14,000 differences between the Sinai Bible and the King James Version of the Bible, which came much later. | |
| Okay, so he says the Sinai Bible predates the King James Bible. | |
| Well, I would hope so, because the King James Bible is very recent and modern. | |
| It actually corresponds to the reign of King James, who is a modern king. | |
| So what is he talking about here, the Sinai Bible? | |
| I will confess. | |
| I've never read the Sinai Bible. | |
| I'm not a formal classicist or anything like that. | |
| However, this guy, Wes Huff, apparently does have a lot of ancient languages, at least with some working facility under his belt. | |
| Here's how he responded to those claims. | |
| When you refer to the Sinai Bible, would you be referring to Codex Sinaiticus? | |
| Like the codex that comes... | |
| Okay. | |
| That's why I was trying to get some clarification. | |
| Because, so, you can actually go and see, Codex Sinaiticus is at the British Library. | |
| So you can go and see it. | |
| It's on display. | |
| And the British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript. | |
| I mean, I can go on right now, Codex Sinaiticus, and I can look up the end of, you know, say, Matthew 27, where it has Jesus being crucified. | |
| Are you able to pull up? | |
| A website? | |
| Would the viewers or listeners or whatever be able to see that? | |
| And then the moderator is, well, hold on. | |
| Let's see here. | |
| This is so beautiful. | |
| This is so beautiful. | |
| This is just a reminder, guys. | |
| If you're going to make any claim in public, make sure you've checked your source. | |
| Certain claims, you don't need to know everything yourself. | |
| You don't need to be a specialist in ancient languages and devote your entire life to studying a handful of texts with rigorous expertise. | |
| You don't have to do that, okay? | |
| But if you are going to contradict what has been established wisdom by people in authority for millennia and by serious scholars, you need to have the goods. | |
| And immediately you see this guy, Billy Carsey, pulls out the phone. | |
| You say, man, the minute you see someone pull out the phone in a debate, it is not going well for that guy. | |
| But then he brings up this other thing, Billy Carsey. | |
| He talks about the gospel of Jesus' wife. | |
| These are gospels that were written, gospels, quote-unquote. | |
| These are books that were written much, much later. | |
| So in this case, Billy Carson references the gospel of Jesus' wife, or the gospel of Barnabas, or the gospel of this, or the gospel of that. | |
| Yet again, he clearly has very little familiarity, if any, with the text, as Wes Huff points out. | |
| The gospel of Barnabas is a really interesting document because it is a known forgery. | |
| And so that's why I think it's important to get... | |
| So it does things like, in chapter 92, it says that Jesus spent 40 days on Mount Sinai, and then he came to the Jordan River, and he walked to Jerusalem. | |
| But Mount Sinai is more than a week's journey away from Jerusalem, and neither Mount Sinai nor Jerusalem are close to the Jordan River. | |
| And I think a bigger problem is that the Gospel of Barnabas actually paraphrases... | |
| Dante's Inferno, which was written in 1314. So there's a lot of internal evidences that disqualify the Gospel of Barnabas, never mind the fact that we don't have any evidence of it prior to the 14th century. | |
| Now we're getting into a text that I actually am familiar with. | |
| I'm no scholar, you know, so I'm not deeply familiar with many texts. | |
| But one of them that I have read many times is Dante. | |
| And so, if I were to be reading the Gospel of Barnabas, as Billy Carson is proposing, and I read something that had echoes of Dante, I would know that. | |
| And Wes Huff, who's a real scholar, he clearly knows that and can pull on all sorts of sources. | |
| This is why it is helpful to have a good general kind of education, a good background knowledge, so that if some text is ripping off, not just Dante, but I don't know, Shakespeare. | |
| Or Milton. | |
| Or Aristotle. | |
| Or whatever. | |
| You can know that. | |
| It can give you a cultural context here. | |
| But in this case, you don't even need to know that much about Dante. | |
| The text is in Italian and Spanish. | |
| So to be fooled by it, it means you have to have read it in translation, have no interest in the actual source material of it, and or be totally ignorant of ancient languages. | |
| But I think if I were going to make a claim that upended established teaching of 2,000 years, I might have the curiosity, at least, or maybe even the humility, to say, let me make sure that I've dotted my T's and crossed my I's here. | |
| You know, this seems a little bit, it's reckless. | |
| It's at this point that Wes Huff raises a meta-historical question. | |
| He's not just talking about the texts. | |
| He's not just talking about the claims that Billy Carson is making. | |
| He's talking about how you even begin to approach texts. | |
| And he points out that an historian, or really anyone who's approaching a text, needs to have some kind of hermeneutic, some method of interpretation that is principled and consistent to allow you to even know what you're dealing with. | |
| If we're talking about, say, Codex Sinaiticus, that's in the 4th century. | |
| Now that is, I would agree with you, Billy, our oldest copy of the Bible in the sense of cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible. | |
| The problem is that we have individual copies of all four Gospels going back hundreds of years before Codex Sinaiticus. | |
| I work with this particular manuscript. | |
| I can just show the screen right here. | |
| This is an almost complete copy of the Gospel of John. | |
| And it has the crucifixion. | |
| Yeah, so papyrus is just what it's made out of. | |
| The papyrus is just what it's made out of. | |
| This is not just pie-in-the-sky academic stuff that you need a principle of interpretation here. | |
| Let's say you're just approaching the Bible the way you would approach the Bible. | |
| What is the Bible? | |
| We say, well, the Bible is the inerrant word of God. | |
| All scripture is inspired by God and it's written down by different men over a long period of time. | |
| Okay, how do you know what the Bible is? | |
| How do you know how many books are in the Bible? | |
| How do you know that the Gospel of Barnabas or whatever doesn't fit into the Bible? | |
| Well, you know that. | |
| You can't know that from the Bible itself. | |
| So you have to know something about the Bible. | |
| Okay, we know that because the Bible canon was set at the Council of Rome and was reaffirmed by later councils. | |
| Okay, well, what does that mean? | |
| That means that there's a church. | |
| Okay, and what do we know about the church? | |
| Well, we can read about the church in the Bible, and we can read about the church outside of the Bible. | |
| But okay, that's the lens through which I am examining this. | |
| Here, however, Billy Carson not only doesn't seem to hold to that methodology, he doesn't seem to have any interpretive principle. | |
| He doesn't seem to have, rather, any consistent interpretive principle, which he demonstrates when he starts talking about oral traditions in other cultures. | |
| Then you have the information in the Egyptian book of Going Forth by Day. | |
| More accounts by people, our ancestors, that have accounts that do not match up. | |
| sudden we're saying that all these cultures, the Aboriginal people, I can go into them as well. | |
| I've sat, I've gone to walk about in the outback, in the outback, these Aboriginal elders, same thing. | |
| They were seated here by Pleiadians. | |
| This is their verbal hand in our history for thousands of years. | |
| And I can go around the world and I can come up with all this information from all these eyewitness accounts from people that should be respected, dignified, and shouldn't be scoffed. | |
| And that we're now saying that all this information that they put forward, all their verbal hand in our history, all their written history, that's got to go to the side because this one text is 1000% accurate. | |
| Sure, but so my question is, most of that is oral history, correct? | |
| Oh, it's all oral history, even the Bible. | |
| The Bible is not oral history in the sense that there's a book. | |
| It is written down. | |
| I'm not saying nothing comes from oral history. | |
| That's not to discount oral history in itself, but the stories he's talking about are... | |
| Actually, just oral history. | |
| There's no Bible of the Mahamahi tribe, you know, talking about space aliens giving them satellite dishes. | |
| So when we're engaging with oral history, what methodologies are you using to confirm that the orality is accurate? | |
| Oh, man. | |
| Well, first and foremost, some of these texts or some of these cultures have written down information in caves. | |
| You've got cave paintings. | |
| The Dogon tribe actually have... | |
| Sure, sure. | |
| No, I don't disagree with that. | |
| The question is one of historic... | |
| Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there. | |
| The question is one of methodological analysis. | |
| So you have to have a method by which you can find either that something is falsifiable or that there are avenues by which you can show internal and external accuracy of credibility. | |
| So this is what we do with documents. | |
| How do you... | |
| Do you know the... | |
| If I use the term verisimilitude, do you know what that term means? | |
| No, but I can tell you this. | |
| Tell me how the Dogon tribe saw Sirius B, knew the orbit of Sirius B, a trinary star system, accurately. | |
| Okay, so you see the problem. | |
| You see the problem here is Billy Carson approaches an event like the crucifixion. | |
| He takes the historical accounts backing up gospel narratives from people like Tacitus or Suetonius or Josephus, or he takes the 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection. | |
| He takes all of these accounts. | |
| To say nothing of the rapid spread of the Christian religion and the enduring power of the church. | |
| He says, well, forget about that. | |
| Yeah, that's not real. | |
| There's no evidence for that. | |
| But because Chief Babunga over in some random tribe in Africa tells us that Zeno 17 came down and gave him a neon-colored corncob, and he told us that this really happened, so we've got to believe that that's obviously true. | |
| What are you talking about? | |
| You obviously have no consistent principle of interpretation here, especially when you're using these two cases, because you're discounting the records that we have pretty good authority for. | |
| And you're believing any ridiculous story that some guy tells you without any evidence. | |
| That was really embarrassing. | |
| That was one of the most embarrassing moments of the whole debate. | |
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| So now outside of the New Testament, what about the Old Testament? | |
| They'll say, well, Genesis is just a myth in the same way that Gilgamesh is a myth. | |
| And actually, they probably, the authors of Genesis, it wasn't God-inspiring writers. | |
| It was actually just guys, old-timey guys, who were ripping off other stories from pagan creation myths. | |
| And this is Billy Carson's argument. | |
| See if it persuades you. | |
| a lot of the in Genesis a lot of the creation story that comes into Genesis but it's literally almost word-for-word from the Enum Elish and the seven depths of creation the epic of Atrahasis as well is also there and in the Old Testament and so we tend to see this this copying of ancient tablets text and scriptures even some papyrus is into the biblical text | |
| I think a lot of people saying that this information was written in real time A lot of people believe that. | |
| If you ask the average person, they really believe that. | |
| I think it was written in real time. | |
| He's saying that Adam wrote the book of Genesis in the garden? | |
| What would it mean to be written in real time? | |
| I don't know anyone who claims that, or who has ever claimed that. | |
| Okay, anyway, he keeps going. | |
| There are certain words that they utilize that let me know that they copied it from that text. | |
| So what words? | |
| Separating the water from the waters, the void, the earth being void. | |
| That information is literally just copied over, so it tells you that somebody saw that. | |
| I said, let me add it to this. | |
| Sure, there's superficial, you know, divided the waters, but we find that in almost every society and culture. | |
| That's not a parallel as much as it's just a generality. | |
| I would say, just with all due respect, the parallels linguistically are not there. | |
| There might be superficial kind of concepts that are there, but they're so superficial that we can find them in everything. | |
| I love this. | |
| I love his point here. | |
| Billy Carson says, well, look at all these parallels. | |
| And then Wes... | |
| Huff says, well, what are the parallels? | |
| He's like, well, there's water. | |
| Like, yeah, there's water, man. | |
| There's water in a lot of stories. | |
| You know, you got anything better than that? | |
| Well, it's an account of creation. | |
| Yeah, there are lots of accounts of creation, but are they parallel accounts? | |
| Is one a copy of the other? | |
| Or is it a harangue against? | |
| You sometimes hear the same arguments that Billy Carson is making about Christmas. | |
| They'll say that Christmas was a pagan holiday, and then the Christians just borrowed it or baptized it or something like that. | |
| There's really no evidence for that. | |
| It actually seems as though the pagans were trying to compete. | |
| ... | |
| ... | |
| or even the Eucharist, you know, the Holy Eucharist, which is the center of the Holy Mass. | |
| We have accounts from the early second century of Justin Martyr writing about the Eucharist and how the Christians considered the Eucharist to be a sacrifice on the altar and how it was not just common bread and wine, but rather the true flesh and blood of Christ, drawing on John chapter 6, but rather the true flesh and blood of Christ, drawing on John chapter 6, in which Christ says, my flesh is real food and my And if you do not eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. | |
| So this was central to Catholic liturgy and to worship. | |
| So you, you, Just because there are superficial similarities or even more detailed similarities, you have to show that... | |
| Which way the copying is going, and point out, as Wes Huff is pointing out, that it's actually not an invective, one against the other. | |
| So this thing goes on forever. | |
| I mean, this goes on for like two hours, but at a certain point, Billy Carson has exhausted whatever nonsense he was trying to present, and Wes Huff the whole time is so polite, but knowledgeable, forcible. | |
| He's really nice. | |
| Maybe a little bit too nice, but it serves a great rhetorical purpose. | |
| Carson gets totally exhausted and he taps out. | |
| If you were a king and you stole somebody and you sold them into slavery, they would punish you by death. | |
| But you steal somebody else's slave. | |
| You can't steal somebody else's slave. | |
| That's not a good thing to do, right? | |
| The point that I'm making here, I got to say something before I get out of here. | |
| So you see, sometimes Wes Huff's camera and mic have been cutting out throughout this debate. | |
| So he'll cut out and he'll try to get it back on. | |
| And the other two guys, Billy Carson and the moderator, will just chat during that time. | |
| So this is one of those moments where Wes Huff's camera has cut out. | |
| He's waiting to cut back in. | |
| We're living on an insane asylum. | |
| Earth is an absolute insane asylum. | |
| Mental illness has spread throughout the planet Earth like a complete virus. | |
| This entire planet is a mental insane asylum. | |
| And I'm talking everyone. | |
| So if you know the beginning and the end, you have a certain level of foreknowledge. | |
| You have advanced knowledge that goes beyond. | |
| You know what's the ending before the end even occurs. | |
| So you set up everything for success. | |
| Why? | |
| Because a genius solves problems before they happen. | |
| And I'm going to drop the mic on that. | |
| With some of that too. | |
| I think it came back on. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So he just rambles about nothing. | |
| He goes, yeah, and you know, and God, he should have done it better, and he didn't do it great, and people can misinterpret things, and anyway, I'm going to drop the mic on that. | |
| And then the moderator says, no, hey, we got Wes Huff back, and Billy Carson says, no, I'm out of here. | |
| I can't take any more, please, man. | |
| That was just beautiful. | |
| That was beautiful to watch. | |
| I watched so few internet debates, because often they're not moderated well, and actually this one was not moderated all that well, but the debate was great anyway. | |
| It's hard to moderate, hard to reign in Billy Carson. | |
| But Wes Huff held his own, and he was very patient, and then he just absolutely destroyed this guy. | |
| It is the most beautiful dismantling I've probably ever seen in an internet debate. | |
| I feel like I'm back in 2015. This title could be, you know, destroys with facts and logic and hermeneutics and philology and the Codex Sinaticus. |