For those of you who have not been following the whole Billy Carson kerfuffle – and I can hardly blame you if you have not, as it is in a rather esoteric area of knowledge – then you will not be aware of who he is, and what he says. I was not, until this weekend. It turns out that Billy Carson is some sort of self-styled “historian”, who claims to have found many different types of “forbidden knowledge” that have been suppressed and squelched by secular and religious authorities for centuries.

He is particularly vociferous in attacking the Bible, claiming that it actually copies from much older Babylonian and Sumerian texts, and that the “Creation Myth” of Genesis is simply a rehashing of older stories. He is on the record stating that the divinity of Jesus is a Christian invention, and was denied by the earliest Christians – and that Jesus Himself was married to Mary Magdalene.

His basis for all of these claims?

Well… if you are a Christian, who takes the True Faith seriously, and who knows anything about the history of Scripture, then you already know the answer:

Forgeries, fantasies, and fairy-tales. (Also known as “having a doctorate from TrustMeBro University”)

The ordinary layman, though, does not know these things. Many – FAR too many – have been suckered in by similar claims, that turned out later to be absolute and arrant nonsense.

Take, for instance, Dan Brown‘s blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code – which, as it turns out, was based on a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Without going into details, let’s just say the research behind Mr. Brown’s book – which, to be clear, is a work of fiction, but CLAIMS to be based on true statements – is… lacking in validity, to put it EXTREMELY mildly.

Yet, millions of people, who cannot be arsed to find out the truth, and should know better, have no idea that the Priory of Sion is nonsense, the “Gospel of Mary [Magdalene]” is a 2nd-Century Gnostic text written far too late to be authoritative relative to the actual canonical Gospels, and the Gospel of Barnabas is a Renaissance-era forgery.

These things have direct relevance to the case of Mr. Carson. A Christian historian and scholar named Wesley Huff challenged Mr. Carson to a cordial debate a few weeks ago, and by mutual agreement, they filmed that debate.

By all appearances, that debate went VERY, VERY BADLY for Mr. Carson:

Yep. Mr. Carson tried to stop the release of the footage – and FAILED MISERABLY. That footage, in the form of Fair Use clips, is all over YouTube, across MANY different Christian channels.

It rapidly got worse for Mr. Carson from there:

It would appear that Mr. Carson has never heard of the “Streisand Effect”, because that is now exactly what is happening.

You can find the full debate on YouTube, if you look hard enough. But you can find it MUCH more easily on Rumble:

The moderator in that debate is very obviously partial to Mr. Carson, and hostile to Mr. Huff. But, despite having to argue against TWO opponents in this debate, Mr. Huff remains respectful, calm, and reasonable throughout.

Indeed, I am not sure how he manages to keep a straight face when listening to some of the wilder claims Mr. Carson makes. They are so ridiculous as to be unworthy of serious debate, yet Mr. Huff treats them respectfully throughout.

The lesson from all of this, for Christians and non-Christians alike, is to do your own damn homework.

If you actually do a good-faith critical examination of the history of Scripture, and you look at the manuscript evidence and lineage of the current Greek New Testament that we have today, you will very quickly realise that the New Testament text today is THE SAME as what the authors of the canonical Gospels, and the Epistles, wrote down two thousand years ago.

We can verify these facts very easily, simply by looking at the COLOSSAL amounts of manuscript evidence we have at hand. NO OTHER TEXT, anywhere on Earth, has that level of backing through evidence.

Moose Limbs, in particular, love to attack the New Testament as a “corruption” of their so-called Injeel – but, the moment you actually press them to produce evidence of this, they completely fall apart, because they have no clue what they are talking about.

That, by the way, should tell you just how bad things are for Mr. Carson. His arguments are literally at the level of “Izzlamist”. The only thing worse and stupider than that, is “Potato”.

Ultimately, the Bible stands on its own. Both the Old and New Testaments have a level of source backing that even the most ardent and dedicated attackers have been unable to refute.

The Old Testament texts we have today, through the Masoretic Texts, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Septuagint, are accurate transmissions of what was written down at the time of their original writing.

The New Testament, through the 25,000-odd different manuscripts, and through the letters and writings of the early Church Fathers, is an accurate transmission of the original Greek texts.

You can challenge these facts all you like. You will run into a true mountain of evidence that you cannot climb. Many have tried. ALL have failed. Even Dr. Bart Ehrman, the foremost atheist/agnostic critic of the New Testament’s transmission and veracity, is on the record stating that the many manuscript differences (over 500,000, last time I heard), make no difference whatsoever to the core doctrines and messages of the New Testament.

Better men than Mr. Carson have tried, too. Most of them were not stupid enough to try to silence their critics. And now, he is going to have a LOT of fun trying to explain to his fans – many of whom are going to see their idol fall and collapse – why and how he got basic facts about the Biblical texts, so badly and terribly wrong.