Wesley Huff — A Canadian biblical scholar and apologist specializing in New Testament manuscripts and paratextual features, who works with Apologetics Canada. He went viral after a debate exposing Billy Carson's claims about ancient texts.
The gist
Joe Rogan talks with biblical manuscript scholar Wesley Huff, who became widely known after debunking Billy Carson's claims about ancient languages and the Bible. Huff explains how scholars date and reconstruct ancient manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll, and the oldest New Testament fragment (P52), and walks through the discipline of textual criticism. The conversation ranges across dead languages like Sumerian and cuneiform, Egyptian archaeology, the formation of the biblical canon, and methods such as onomastic congruence used to verify where and when texts were written. They also dig into the historical case for Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, the Big Bang as 'science's one miracle,' cult psychology, and why Huff thinks Jordan Peterson stops short on Jesus.
Big reveals
- Huff reveals he was asked to debate Billy Carson with only 24 hours notice and minimal preparation.
- Carson sent cease-and-desist letters; Huff screenshotted his lawyer's letter and publicly said he would ignore it.
- Huff describes being paralyzed from the waist down at age 12 by acute transverse myelitis and walking again exactly one month later with no muscle atrophy, which his doctors called a miracle.
- The Great Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls is word-for-word identical to the Masoretic text written a thousand years later.
- Joe reveals he was under contract to buy the actual theater from the 'Holy Hell' cult documentary for the original Comedy Mothership.
- Only about 1% of ancient Egypt has been excavated, and only 5% of Gobekli Tepe has been uncovered.
- Huff argues the Gospel of Barnabas, cited by Carson as proof Jesus was never crucified, is a 15th-century text that paraphrases Dante's Inferno.
- Huff critiques Jordan Peterson for treating Jesus as an archetype and moral example rather than a literal resurrected person.
Things worth remembering
- The Copper Scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls is an inscribed ancient treasure map listing 65 tons of gold and 26 tons of silver.
- Martin Luther's Reformation partly started because Erasmus's Greek New Testament showed the word meant 'repentance,' not the Latin Vulgate's 'do penance.'
- The Latin Vulgate is named from 'vulgata' meaning common language, yet a thousand years later almost no one could read Latin either.
- Ancient Mesopotamians used a base-12 counting system from finger joints, which is why we have 360 degrees in a circle and roughly 365 days in a year.
- We still do not know how the Romans made their self-healing concrete or how Amazonian peoples made the fertile man-made soil terra preta.
- The P52 fragment of John's Gospel pushed the dating of John back into the first century, overturning the prior scholarly consensus that it was second-century.
- Codex Sinaiticus required about 360 sheep to produce, costing the equivalent of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars today.
- 'Onomastic congruence' verifies gospels by matching name frequencies to first-century Judea, while the Gospel of Judas matches names popular in 2nd-3rd century Egypt.
- Roman citizens were legally banned from being crucified because crucifixion was reserved for the lowest of the low, like slaves.
- Tolkien sent the manuscript of Dune back to its author saying he had nothing good to say, so he would say nothing at all.