Some of you might be familiar with a chap named Billy Carson, who runs a YouTube channel called “4biddenknowledge Podcast Network”, or something like that. He purports to investigate the hidden secrets of the ancient past, looking at documents that various religious institutions – primarily the Christian mainline churches – have supposedly suppressed and forbidden over the centuries.
Based on what little I have seen of his channel, since he came to my attention, he peddles in the kind of surface-level examinations into various ancient texts that would easily convince people who lack detailed knowledge. And he clearly is into a lot of the New Age spiritualism that incorporates things like “manifesting” your dream life into reality, simply by willing it into existence. Much of what he puts forward, does not appear to be terribly scientific or rigorous, but if you are interested in a form of “edutainment”, then I suppose his work has its place.
Now, because I am almost completely clueless about pop culture – both deliberately and happily so – I had never heard of him until a few weeks ago, when a kerfuffle erupted over a debate he had with a young man named Wesley Huff. The debate centred around general topics related to Christianity and the Bible, and Messrs. Carson and Huff both had 24 hours’ notice to prepare for the debate.
Apparently, Mr. Carson wanted the debate because he had been insisting for years that nobody in the serious Christian apologetics and polemics community would debate him, to take on subjects like the “suppressed” books of the Bible, which supposedly the Catholic Church had kept out of the canonical Bible for many centuries. (This is patently ridiculous – the Catholic Church is guilty of MANY grave mistakes over its existence, and is almost certainly an apostate church now, but the books that Christians have kept out of our Bibles, are freely available for people to look at online, and we keep them out for very good reasons.)
That is where Wesley Huff comes in.
This young man is a serious Protestant Christian from Canada, and he does rather a lot to redeem the generally poor opinion most people have of Canuckistanis as being the overly polite, effete, gay, and rather confused cousins of the Murkins. He experienced actual paralysis of his lower body when he was 12, due to acute transverse myelitis – that is to say, an autoimmune disorder in which his immune system attacked the nerves of his spinal cord – and posted a miraculous recovery within a month, from a condition that normally cripples people for years, if not for life.
Mr. Huff then went on to a career of in-depth, very detailed, highly rigorous studies of ancient languages and texts, in an effort to help him understand the origins, authenticity, preservation, and inspiration of the Biblical and deuterocanonical texts.
In my mind, it is patently obvious that there was a supernatural, miraculous force at work in his recovery from a debilitating disease, which helped him heal and recover. And good thing too, because his performance in the debate was nothing short of astounding:
The full debate is rather lengthy, so you might be better served watching summaries and commentaries of it, like these:
Put simply, it was a massacre.
Mr. Carson evidently does not like Christianity very much – which is why he seems to take a rather mocking tone about the God of the Old Testament, and does not appear to think much of the New Testament either.
As we shall see, God is not mocked, and God does repay disrespect in rather unpleasant and profoundly painful ways.
Mr. Carson also clearly does not know much about the Bible, the Christian faith, or the historicity of the texts and core doctrines of the faith. He is a smooth and polished talker, to be sure, but the moment he ran into any actual facts and evidence, when talking with a genuine scholar who knows exactly what he is talking about, he repeatedly tried to shift away from the very topics that he himself brought up, to ground that he thought was more in his favour.
Tens of thousands of people watched that debate when it happened – most of them fans of Mr. Carson. It did not go well for him, despite the fact that the moderator was very obviously in the tank against Mr. Huff.
But that, one would think, was the end of that. Useless know-nothings lose debates against actual Christian apologists all the time – all you have to do is listen to the average Moose Limb trying to take on someone like Sam Shamoun, or Christian Prince, or GodLogic, to see that most of them have zero clue about their own scriptures, let alone the Christian ones, and are simply repeating a tired series of dawah scripts that our own side has refuted comprehensively for decades. Debates like that do not typically result in massive online attention coming to the obscure channel of the Christian apologist who trounced the other guy.
Not in this case. Mr. Carson evidently realised he looked a complete and total asshat in the debate, and did his absolute best to get the debate taken off YouTube, in the most ham-fisted way possible:
Apparently, Mr. Carson has never heard of the Streisand Effect, but this was a textbook case of watching it happen in real-time.
And then, he went onto his own channel, and ranted and raved in an increasingly unhinged fashion for over 3 hours, somehow trying to salvage his reputation with his own fans:
That didn’t work out very well for him either.
While tens of thousands watched the original debate live, HUNDREDS of thousands subsequently watched the debate afterwards, when the controversy exploded. And they saw the same thing I did – a polite, highly educated, very intelligent young man patiently and calmly took a confident blowhard apart in comprehensive and spectacular fashion.
The end result of this particularly hilarious public meltdown was that Mr. Huff saw a gigantic spike in the number of subscribers for his own work – his channel exploded from about 30K subscribers, to well over 10 times that number, in the space of about a month. Most of his new fans are former Billy Carson fans, who realised they had been ripped off and lied to by their idol.
The best part, though, was that many of those new fans were people who had either lost their faith in Christianity, and had rediscovered it thanks to Mr. Huff, OR people who are now willing to read the Bible and explore the Word of God, because they were so impressed by Mr. Huff’s calm, collected, polite, yet fearsomely knowledgeable demeanour during his debate.
The capstone to the whole saga slotted into place about 2 weeks ago, when Mr. Huff appeared on perhaps the biggest podcast platform on the entire planet – the Joe Rogan Experience. I watched (and listened to) the entire episode, which is over 3 hours long, over a few days, and once again, I was hugely impressed by Mr. Huff’s ability to speak with the calm and articulate confidence of a true scholar, while yet retaining the capacity to bring things down to the level of the layman:
That episode now has over 3.8 MILLION views, at the time of writing this poast. Think for a moment what that means.
Over 3.8 million people have now been exposed to the fundamental truths about the Christian faith – that the Bible has a level of integrity and authenticity, in terms of the “chains of transmission” (as it were) of the core texts, that is second to NONE. We Christians can be absolutely confident that the text of the New Testament Gospels we have today, is the same as the original Gospels circulated by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We can also have no reason to doubt the authority of the Epistles of Paul and the other Apostles – the sheer amount of manuscript evidence we have at our disposal, allows us to do textual analysis and criticism to a degree that makes it possible for us to reconstruct the original letters to an incredible level of accuracy.
More than that, though, we can also rest assured in the knowledge that the Old Testament we have today, matches the Old Testament that existed with the Jews centuries ago. As Mr. Huff pointed out in his appearance on Toe Rogan’s podcast, the discovery of the Great Isaiah Scroll at Qumran – the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls – shows conclusively that the Hebrew text of the Masoretic Texts, dating back to the Middle Ages, matches precisely with the original texts the Jews had with them back in the 1st Century AD.
And that, combined with the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament from the Ptolemaic Era, gives us an incredibly solid foundation for the texts that define our faith.
No other religion anywhere on Earth can make the same claims.
Izzlam, in particular, has a very severe problem here. As I pointed out recently in a write-up about the Izzlamick Dilemma, Moose Limbs constantly claim that their fake, man-made Koran is the completion of the Old and New Testaments, and corrects mistakes or falsehoods found in the earlier texts, and is therefore the final revelation for Mankind. The problem is, the Koran claims to affirm, and be affirmed, by those earlier texts – but the earlier texts comprehensively refute and contradict the Koran.
Therefore, the Koran is false.
Izzlamists try to lawyer around this by claiming the Bible is corrupted, and therefore they only accept the bits of the Bible that agree with their Koran. But here, again, they run into very severe problems, because the chain of evidence that supports the transmission of the authentic Biblical texts is so strong – precisely as I described above, and as Mr. Huff so eloquently presented in both his debate with Mr. Carson, and his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.
Meanwhile, the authenticity of the Koran is in severe doubt – in fact, the evidence says very clearly that the Koran is a man-made construct that underwent repeated revisions over the course of well over a century, and started out as essentially a set of Syro-Aramaic Christian lectionaries that were then transliterated into Arabic, and completely bastardised by the Abbasids in the 8th Century. Izzlamick theologians did their level best to undo the damage through comprehensive revisions and further explanatory texts, like the hadith collections and the tafsirs (commentaries) in the 9th and 10th Centuries, but all they managed to do, was to compound the problem to the point where the whole hot mess is completely irrecoverable.
That is why Izzlamick theology today is such a disaster, to the point where Moose Limbs themselves cannot make head or tail of what their texts say. The whole thing is a swampy morass of contradictions, failures of logic, astoundingly silly anachronisms, outright falsehoods, and disastrous scientific and historical errors.
Put simply, as I noted in my earlier poast about the Izzlamick Dilemma, if the Bible is true, then the Koran is false – and if the Bible is false (which it patently is not), the Koran is still false.
The Bible has no such problem or logical dilemma. Its integrity is assured, and it has withstood every attack against it, for over two thousand years. Every attempt by others to assault it, has failed – and every time somebody tries it, new evidence emerges that supports and strengthens the Bible’s claims.
As for Mr. Huff – he is living proof of the way in which the Lord repays faith in Him. Trust the Lord in a little, and He will reward you tenfold. That, after all, is precisely what happened to Wes Huff, who now finds himself in extraordinarily high demand, and has more subscribers to his channel and his work than he knows what to do with. The world is paying far more attention to the good work he does in researching the Bible’s origins and texts, and in looking at ancient texts from nearby cultures from the early Biblical period.
More than that, his work is bringing people back to the one true God – the God of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, the God who heals and saves, the God who wants an actual and direct personal relationship with us.
It is hard to think of a greater reward than that, for a good and faithful servant.
1 Comment
Impressive presentation and conversation ability. Rogan draws people out with great listening, Wes was right there with plenty to say.
He gets Henotheism and Christian Cosmology completely inverted in at 2hr 36m. Biblical cosmology recognizes there are other elohim, spiritual powers at work among men, but that Yahweh is the elohim of elohim, the Lord of Lords, who rules over them all.
He redeems himself by squaring away his fellow Canadian Jordan Peterson though.
Thanks for posting the full vid!