If you’ve never heard of Wesley Huff before, don’t feel too bad. I’d never heard of him either, until a few weeks ago. Suddenly, he’s famous because of an impromptu debate he had on a podcast with Billy Carson, founder and CEO of a company called 4BiddenKnowledge and a self-proclaimed expert on “ancient texts and tablets, scriptures, papyrus, and cylinders.”
Carson has complained in the past that Christian scholars have refused to debate him but all that changed when his good friend Mark Minard invited young Wesley Huff, a Canadian Bible scholar still working on his PhD on his podcast to debate Billy. Huff accepted the challenge to debate Carson with only 24 hours advance notice to prepare, but he didn’t need more time.
Huff didn’t merely defeat Billy Carson in their debate, he embarrassed him. In fairness, Carson later revealed he had not been feeling well and had been recently hospitalized with pneumonia, even coming near death. Perhaps in hindsight it would have been better had the debate been postponed until Billy felt better, although Billy has refused to debate Huff again now that he’s fully recovered.
Though the conversation went on for roughly two hours, the debate was probably over in the first ten minutes. Huff began by asking Carson a simple question to clarify their individual positions, asking Billy if he was referring to Codex Sinaiticus when he claimed the Sinai Bible did not contain any references to the crucifixion. Carson said yes, and then Huff promptly pulled his own personal copy of Codex Sinaiticus off his bookshelf. He showed it was virtually identical to modern Greek translations and specifically contained the four chapters of the Bible where the crucifixion accounts can be found. Billy conceded that he had misspoken. Billy then claimed that he meant to say the Gospel of Barnabas instead, but Huff quickly responded that the Gospel of Barnabas was a rather well-known forgery and not a legitimate source of information.
It wasn’t long before Carson began trying to avoid further discussion that might reveal his lack of real knowledge of ancient scripts and scriptures. He tried to steer the conversation to UFOs and other subjects nobody knows much about. It had been easy for Billy to claim to be an expert on ancient scriptures until he met a real authority on the subject.
In short, Billy was humiliated but not yet humbled. How did he respond? He recorded a long, angry (and ill-advised) YouTube video that alienated some of his followers. Billy Carson threatened everyone involved with lawsuits, even personally delivering a handwritten cease-and-desist letter to Mark Minard at 2:30 a.m. Instead of admitting he’d lost the debate, Billy tried to suppress the podcast and pretend it had never happened.
What Billy failed to realize was the so-called “Streisand effect” was about to take effect, where a public figure tries to silence his or her opposition with threats and intimidation but compounds the problem and makes it considerably worse by their efforts. Carson’s threats to Minard might have worked but Huff also had a copy of the podcast and published it himself. As a Canadian citizen, he isn’t afraid of being sued by Billy Carson.
International lawsuits are notoriously difficult to win. But winning isn’t necessarily Billy’s strategy. In the livestream video Billy threatened lawfare against everybody involved with the podcast and said he hoped to cause great financial hardship whether he won or lost the case, his rhetoric driven more by emotion than rational though. Since then, Billy recorded a response video with Dr. Daniel Amen where he showed contrition for recording the livestream video. Obviously, he still feels hurt and betrayed by his close friend Mark.
Christian podcasters such as Wise Disciple, Whaddo You Meme?, Vision unSEALED, Mike Winger,Capturing Christianity, and Daily Dose of Wisdom all weighed in at that point, posting videos where they commented either on the debate, Carson’s reaction, or Huff’s subsequent appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience and the PBD podcast with Patrick Bet-David, or all of the above. Sean McDowell noticed.
Suddenly, millions of people have been introduced to Wesley Huff in the past two months. He’s become a Christian rock star. Millions of people are praying for Billy Carson to use his tremendous platform to communicate what he has hopefully learned about the Bible.
The Carson/Huff debate even got the South Park treatment! That last sip of coffee must have been delicious. Of course, Wesley Huff is brilliant, but he isn’t Jesus–he’s fantastic, but not perfect. In his debate with Billy Carson Wesley said that the Dead Sea version of the Great Isaiah scroll was “almost identical” to the Masoretic texts, but on the Joe Rogan podcast he used the phrase “word-for-word identical”, and skeptics pounced. At least, the Cosmic Skeptic (Alex O’Connor) pounced. O’Connor hosted a biblical scholar of his own (Dan McClellan) and criticized Huff for his imprecise language using the phrase “word-for-word” when there allegedly were over 2,600 differences in those manuscripts.
But O’Connor was trying to strain out a gnat while swallowing a camel, as Jesus said in Matthew 23:24. The most important takeaway from the Rogan interview is that the Dead Sea scroll version of the Great Isaiah scroll is 99 percent faithful and advances our earliest known version of the Bible by 1,000 years, not that there were some minor copying mistakes in the Old Testament. Can’t see the forest because the trees are in the way.
Why is the Book of Isaiah so important? Isaiah 7 predicts the birth of Jesus and Isaiah 53 prophesies about his crucifixion, a full 700 years prior to His birth.
However, Dan McClellan appeared with a Christian podcaster who goes by Ruslan KD and said that the Isaiah texts were in fact 99 percent identical, making the whole controversy a nothing burger. He claimed if Huff had used the same language with Rogan that he used with Billy Carson, he wouldn’t have had any criticisms to offer. Why he would appear with O’Connor to trash Huff in the first place remains a mystery.
However, O’Connor’s fans were so upset with him for nitpicking Huff’s interview with Rogan that Alex recorded a second video responding to criticisms from yet another podcaster named Gavin Ortland. Practically everybody is getting in on the act.
O’Connor’s leap into the fray drew the attention of William Lane Craig, and even Dr. Craig recorded a video responding to O’Connor . It seems like everybody is making videos talking about Wes Huff these days. Heck, even Wes Huff has responded to Wes Huff.
When Wesley Huff agreed to appear on Mark Menard’s podcast to debate Billy Carson, he probably had no idea how dramatically his life was about to change. Six months ago, only a few thousand people knew of Wesley Huff. Now, millions of people know his name. And millions of people suddenly have renewed interest in the Bible.
All because David slew Goliath.
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