Wes Huff Doesn’t Know the Scholarship  Hey everybody, I want to take a few minutes and respond to another clip or two from Wes Huff's interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast. And in addition to responding to the claims being made in these clips, I want to use this as an opportunity to address a larger issue associated with Wes's representation of himself and his scholarship and its relationship to the broader academy. Let's take a look. How do you take them from this position to believing that what's written in this book in front of me, the Bible, >> yeah, >> is the thing that should guide my life, >> right? >> Because I I like again I say I'm going to say this again that like I think I require a really high standard of evidence because of the way that I am. >> Yeah. You know, I think there's a historical case for it which I'm very much invested in because my training formerly is in historioggraphy. I study ancient biblical manuscripts and their kind of reliability and fidelity over the last couple of millennia. So, a couple of things here. Uh, first, I think it's very clear that his commitment to the historical case has pretty much unilaterally to do with his devotional theological commitments to Christianity than with his academic training. And that brings up the second thing. You cannot be faulted as a lay person if you just listen to him describe what he studies and did not come away with a very clear idea of what precisely it is that he studies cuz it almost sounds like he studies the historical reliability of the New Testament narrative when he uses words like historioggraphy and reliability and that kind of stuff. But in reality his specialization is in scribal habits and textual features. And what he's talking about is the integrity of the manuscripts from the earliest recoverable shape of the manuscript all the way down to whatever we have today. So he looks at the texts, the manuscripts, parextual features, marginelia and stuff like that to find out stuff about how the manuscripts functioned and how they were transmitted. In fact, his doctoral dissertation is about what the parextual features and the scribal habits can tell us about how these early Christian New Testament manuscripts were intended to be used, whether they were intended for private use or for public use. So, this is a very very important field of research and I have no doubt that Wes finds it just fascinating and loves doing it and that's wonderful. But I don't think he explained very clearly what it was that he studies, which is why he's going to pivot into historical reliability without making clear that he is a specialist in an entirely separate field. >> So looking at some of those manuscripts that actually can trace back to the actual time frame of Jesus and answering questions like is what we have now what the original authors wrote back then? >> So two things here. We do not have any manuscripts that date back to the time frame of Jesus. At best, we might have one fragmentaryary manuscript with a grand total of about 35 or 36 words on it that dates back to about 95 or 100 years after Jesus's death. Maybe that's the closest we come. We have no manuscripts that go back to the time frame of Jesus. But this is a more accurate representation of what Wes's specialization is. Does what we have today match what was written back then as far back then as we can go with our manuscripts. That's textual criticism. That's looking at scribal habits and marginelia and the transmission of the manuscripts and things like that. But that's not relevant to the historical reliability of the content of those manuscripts. So it seems like Wes is trying to merge together two different fields and suggest that being a textual critic somehow gives you insight into historical critical interrogation of the content of those manuscripts. This I think is a little misleading. So, I think there's a historical question to it. And I in my own personal investigation genuinely think that the evidence, the publicly available evidence gets us back to not only the time frame of Jesus, but to early eyewitness testimony that proclaims that this first century Jewish itinerate rabbi who was walking the dusty streets of first century made these claims and then there is sufficient evidence to say that he predicted his own death and resurrection and did it. So again, I think it's clear that Wes truly believes this because of those devotional theological commitments that I addressed earlier. Now, if he is convinced by the data, that puts him in the minority of specialists. And again, he's not actually a specialist on the thing he's talking about. Whether or not the events narrated in those manuscripts actually took place is not what textual criticism looks at. And the scholars who do specialize in historical criticism of the actual narratives of the gospels, the majority of them would disagree with Wes here. So it seems like Wes is trying to leverage expertise in one field to make a conclusion in another field that really is drawn from his devotional theological commitments to make it sound like that conclusion is more authoritative and is supported by the scholarship. And the reality is that the majority of scholars who specialize in this would disagree with Wes's claim here. >> How do I know Jesus Christ was real? And then how do I know what's written in that book is real versus just some guys thousands of years ago made a book. >> Yeah. So that is a question of historical reliability. So there are a couple different ways we could go about it. First we have four biographical accounts of Jesus's life which is very unusual. So we call them the gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Um those aren't actually our earliest source material for the life of Jesus. That comes in the person of Paul. Paul is actually writing before the gospel accounts and he is uh someone who was hostile originally to the Christian message and he's persecuting Christians. He comes along and he has this radical conversion experience when he's traveling to Damascus where he says he's he's literally thrown off a horse. He hears God's voice and it's Jesus and he says, "Paul, why are you persecuting me?" And then he writes these things about his experience and and then ultimately goes and connects with the individuals who are who we call the disciples who are like this this close Jesus community and connects with them. So he's our earliest source but then you have these gospel accounts these these biographies and the gospels are interesting because they fit within the historical framework of ancient Greco Roman biography. So Wes is not getting into the merits of the historical claims made within the Gospels. Instead, he's backing up and taking the apologetic approach of talking about the genre of the gospels. And this is supposed to generate a kind of sense of historioggraphical parody that oh the gospels are this specific type of genre and we should consider them to be historical because there's this other set of texts that are the same type of genre and we consider them to be very very historical. So we should treat them the same way even though the actual content of the gospels and the actual content of these other Greco Roman biographies as well as the rest of the data that is available around them to reconstruct the historicity or non-historicity of the claims made in those texts differ wildly between the gospel accounts and these other Greor Roman biographies. So, apologetics doesn't want you to think about all that stuff. So, it's not going to talk about all of that stuff. Instead, it's going to talk about genre and suggest that, well, it's a historical genre, so we should assume it's historical. And it wants to build the illusion of historicity based on assumptions about what it means for the gospels to be written in a similar genre. Even though it's more of a hybrid than the actual Greco Roman biography genre in and of itself. So let me give you an example. The most well-known person in Jesus's day was the emperor. His name is Tiberius. Tiberius has four biographical accounts that are written about him. Valas Petculus, Casiodio, Sutonius, and Tacitus. So, these are the four guys, okay? And what's interesting in sort of a comparative analysis of Jesus and those people is that they're all writing around the same time period. So, the biographies are coming from the first century for Jesus. They're coming in this time period where you have an early eyewitness testimony. This is not what the majority of scholars agree. The majority of scholars agree that the gospels are not eyewitness testimony. That none of them were written by anyone who ever knew or even met the historical Jesus when he was alive. This is very different from the biographies of Tiberius because the first one he mentioned which he's going to go on to poo poo is written by someone who fought under Tiberius personally knew Tiberius and published his biography during the reign of Tiberius. So there are very different qualities associated with these different texts and Wes is glossing over all of that to make it seem like, oh, these are just two different versions of the exact same kind of thing. And that's just not accurate for the emperor, for the most well-known person in the ancient world. All of the sources except for uh Val Petculus are coming from the second century. >> Mhm. Val Petriculus is coming from the first century. He's very close to the source, but he's a paid propagandist. So even though he's the earliest, he's the least reliable. So paid propagandist is pushing it a little bit. He was someone who was faithful to Tiberius and his administration and he was someone who appreciated it and his own interests were advanced when the interests of the administration were advanced. And so he had a bias. He had a clear commitment. But the notion that he was a paid propagandist is pushing it a little bit. Having said that, yes, critical scholars acknowledge that his perspective was biased and that is figured into how critical scholars examine his text as a source for the life of Tiberius. But here's another thing that Wes is not talking about. He wants you to imagine that the biographies of Tiberius and the biographies of Jesus ought to be set on level playing field. They're the same genre. They have more or less the same chronological relationship to the subject matter. He wants you to imagine that they're about the same. The biggest problem is the data that we have for the life of Tiberius far outstrips the data that we have for the life of Jesus. Because we have inscriptions, we have coins, we have busts, we have ba reliefs, we have all kinds of stuff that come from the life of Tiberius that were executed or written by people who personally knew Tiberius. We have so much data that absolutely indisputably confirms the existence and many of the events of the life and the rule of Tiberius. We have none of that when it comes to Jesus. We don't have a single inscription, a single piece of direct archaeological attestation of the person or the life of Jesus that dates to even within a decade of his death. nothing at all. When it comes to comparing Tiberius to Jesus, the notion that we ought to consider their biographies as on a level playing field. Therefore, the degree of confidence we have in the person and the life of Tiberius ought to be transferred to the degree of confidence that we should assume we can have in the person and the life of Jesus is wildly facious. just ludicrous. We have so much direct attestation to the person and the life of Tiberius that it's not even funny. And when it comes to the accounts of these different biographers for Tiberius, we do compare them and say this conflicts with that and we recognize that there are contradictions and we can say it's likely that this author wanted to get this across and so manipulated the data or the narrative or added stuff in or left stuff out or altered stuff. We do that when it comes to the biographies of Tiberius. But someone like Wes is very reluctant to do that with the conflicts between the gospels. Everything needs to be accurate because of the presupposition of inspiration of historicity of inherency and of univocality. So this is an apologetic misrepresentation of where the data stand. This is an apologetic attempt to control what kind of case is being made so that someone who does not know better is misled into thinking that we can be confident in the relationship of the gospel narratives related to Jesus to the actual person and life of the historical Jesus. This is an apologetic ploy. This is not scholarship. This is not an actual historical case. And for the gospels that comes around in the 4th century. >> So I'm not sure exactly what Wes means when he says for the gospels that comes around in the 4th century. If he's talking about accounts that were written by paid propagandists, again I don't think that's an accurate representation of that first biographer that he was talking about. And if we're talking about someone who is biased and is writing things to serve their own interests and to advance their own standing rather than to accurately reflect history, we already have that in the 2 century CE. So there's a comparison with the source material for someone like Jesus even though we really shouldn't have anything about him because he's he's kind of a nobody from nowhere in terms of the Roman Empire and the grand scheme of things >> and we don't have anything from him during the time period when he was a nobody from nowhere. So that's not a surprise. We only begin to get stuff from him or about him after traditions began to circulate far and wide that he came back from the dead and that he is God's son and that he's going to usher in the end times. So the actual biographical accounts and other texts and things talking about Jesus actually don't even begin to pop up until he becomes a somebody from somewhere because of the traditions that began to circulate after his execution. >> But we have a phenomenal amount of source information for his life. >> I think it's a significant exaggeration to say we have a phenomenal amount of source information about his life. We have a handful of traditions and the relationship of those traditions to the actual life of the historical Jesus is something that continues to be debated. And the trend is not in the direction of placing more and more trust in that relationship. And this is also, I think, misleading when you're trying to hold this up as in any way, shape, or form whatsoever comparable to the amount of source information that we have for the emperor Tiberius, which far outstrips the source information that we have for Jesus, both in quantity and even more significantly in quality. So, the point of all that was to illustrate that we're not actually getting a good historical case. What we're getting is an apologetic performance that is supposed to help people who really want this to be true and don't really know any better to feel like it's true. This is pretty standard apologetics. This is not scholarship. This is not representative of where the scholarship stands and this is not the methodologies of a specialist in historical criticism. This is just apologetics that is trying to appeal to formal training as authorization. >> The biographical material of Jesus is actually written in a closer time frame than the majority of anyone else. >> What was that gap? >> It's it's about 40 to 60 years. >> So I really want to I imagine there's some people listening that have probably never read the Bible. And I really want to explain to them like what this book is in the simplest terms. Can I I can open your Bible? >> Yeah, of course. Yeah. >> So is there is there like chapters in here? Yeah. So the Bible is though we now have it in one book is 66 books written over a period of about 1,600 years on three different continents by close to 40 different authors in three different languages. So this is also not an academic representation of what the Bible is. This is an apologetic claim that you see reproduced every single day all over social media. This claim presupposes the historicity not just of every single thing that is narrated in the text but also of the traditional attributions of authorship to these texts because according to what Wes has said about the 1600 years and all this stuff that means that Moses living in the 15th century BCE wrote the Pentatuk. So this is not scholarship. This is again apologetics that wants you to think it is scholarship. >> So I've just opened your Bible >> and there's one section that says the Old Testament. There's another section section that says the New Testament. >> What am I looking at? Like is this God's words? Is this a bunch of people's stories that have been compiled together? What is the Old Testament? What's the New Testament? What's the difference? >> Yeah. So the Old Testament is the Hebrew scriptures. So that's the scriptures of the Jewish people. >> Okay. >> So that is uh you know it starts in what's referred to as the Torah which are the first five books or the five books of Moses and then that goes in a time frame all the way up to the period of the Persians. So once again this telling of the story presupposes that every single word of these texts is historical. every single authoral attribution whether it is made by the Bible or comes from post-biblical traditions is accurate. So he goes all the way up to Persian period because he imagines that Malachi was the last person who wrote a text that ended up in the Hebrew Bible. Again, this is not scholarship. The overwhelming majority of scholars agree that there were texts that are in the Hebrew Bible that were written in the Greco Roman period as late as the 160s BCE. Specifically, the book of Daniel was almost certainly finished and compiled in the middle of the 2n century BCE. So again, what we're hearing here is apologetic claims that are not backed up by the scholarship masquerading as the claims of scholarship >> from the point of Jesus's death. >> What book from the New Testament is written last? And how big is that gap? >> That's a debate. >> Okay. What's the debate? So the debate so the the there's it's a question if John's gospel >> is written before 70 AD or after 70 AD and if it's written after 70 AD it's written in the '9s. So it's written pretty far afterwards. >> How many years? >> So if Jesus dies in 33. >> Okay. So about 60. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Fine. >> Yeah. So this is the at minimum I I think like 99% of historians, biblical scholars, classicists would argue that the 27 books of the New Testament are written in the first century. So, this brings us back to the original clip that I responded to where I pointed out that it is profoundly uninformed and misleading to suggest that at minimum 99% of historians and classicists and biblical scholars would say all 27 books of the New Testament were completed by the end of the first century CE. And when I shared this, I had a friend of mine chime in on Facebook, a friend who wrote this book, Jonathan Bernier. And this book is one of the strongest arguments for moving the dating of most of the texts of the New Testament 40 years earlier in time. And what Jonathan had to say was the following. So yeah, Dan Mlelen is spot on here. I have argued at length and strongly believe that most if not all anti books are first century texts. But it is simply false to say that 99% of New Testament scholars hold this to be the case. And he has shared a number of comments on his own post as well as on my post about that. And if you look in his book, while he is moving most texts much earlier in time, he also acknowledges that if things like second Peter and things like the pastoral epistles were not actually written by Peter or Paul, then they could date as late as 125 for second Peter and then 150 to 175 for the pastoral epistles. So even Jonathan's own argument includes dating windows that extend well into the 2n century CE. Even though he has made one of the strongest cases for dating the New Testament texts earlier, it is simply wrong to suggest that 99% of the relevant scholars, the relevant experts on this issue would date all of the texts of the New Testament to the first century. And this is where I want to conclude because what this demonstrates is that Wes wants to speak on behalf of the academy as a trained and credentialed expert. Now, he's had training in a specific field. He's not credentialed yet. He's still working on his PhD, but as a representative of the academy, he wildly misrepresents the academy because what he does is just shares apologetic talking points. He does what most apologists do. They have a quiver of apologetic arguments, four different texts and four different issues and four different arguments. And he's just pulling these arrows out of his apologetic quiver to say, "Oh, historicity of the gospels. Well, let's talk about Grecoman biography." And as I said, try to use genre as a proxy for an actual historical argument. And it doesn't work if you know anything about all of the historical data that undergur our historical case for these other folks who have Greco Roman biographies written about them. So Wes doesn't appeal to scholarship. Wes appeals to apologetics. Even when he went on Joe Rogan and said that the great Isaiah scroll matched the MT word for word, word for word, word for word, he had to later come out and say that's not actually true, but really it's the truest because he was trying to push back against critics who were pointing out there are lots of differences in these texts. But even when he said that, he wasn't leaning on his understanding of any actual scholarship. He wasn't leaning on anything written by Marty Abeg or Peter Flint or Tig Shellar or Tove or anyone else. He was just misremembering a passage from a book written by Gleon Archer, a well-known mid 20th century conservative evangelical apologist. All of the points that he brings up are fundamentally drawn from apologetics and he's just trying to use the fact that he is undergoing advanced training to authorize that to suggest that this makes his argument authoritative. And this is where I'm going to bring in two publications that address precisely this issue and warn about listening to people who are definitely not specialists on what they're talking about and are also not representing the scholarly consensus or at all accurately representing the field. First, I want to look at James Bar's book, Fundamentalism, which I want to say was originally published in the mid80s. I don't remember exactly when it was originally published, but if we go down to page 128, we get this section, study in the enviring fields. And in the red box, Spar says, "A very striking characteristic of conservative scholarship is that of the conservatively minded people who are taking an interest in the Bible. A very large proportion interest themselves academically in the margins rather than the center of the biblical field. Typically, they do not become scholars in the theology of the Old Testament or in the concept of messianism or in the Pauline doctrine of faith or in the biblical concept of covenant. Much more do they become scholars in fields like textual criticism, the grammar of New Testament Greek, archaeology in the Bible, Coptic, Semitic linguistics. Many take up as their field of study not even the periphery of biblical study but a field which though separate from it have some contact with it. So for instance Egyptology, aiology, eugaritic studies. The presence in these fields of scholars who are also religiously very conservative is a well-known fact of the present situation and one that deserves to have some discussion. And this was discussed more recently in Kenton Spark's wonderful book, God's Word in Human Words, an evangelical appropriation of critical biblical scholarship. In the red box, we read, "One final point before I conclude, though I hesitate to say it. A good explanation for the poverty of evangelical biblical scholarship needs to include one more element. It is unfortunate but true, I think, that some evangelical scholars are poorly trained in the critical issues of biblical scholarship. a difficulty that is in some respects inevitable because their views are not generally welcomed in academic settings. Conservative evangelicals have always had difficulty securing advanced university degrees in biblical studies, particularly in Old Testament. As a result, evangelicals have long tended to study in programs or institutions where they are not required to face the critical issues head-on. This option has been available for a long time in evangelical institutions and in some Jewish institutions as well as in British universities where the system permits one to focus narrowly on one biblical topic while avoiding others. Where evangelicals have elected to study outside these more hospitable contexts, the standard solution has been to specialize in something safe like textual criticism or to sidestep the issues by studying Neareastern literature and culture instead of Old Testament or the Greek classics instead of New Testament. As a result, evangelicals who have elected to take one of these soft academic routes are often, though not necessarily, underinformed in matters of critical scholarship. Surprising as it may sound, it is possible to hold a PhD in biblical studies from a very reputable institution and still know very little about the evidence that critical scholars consider in their assessment of biblical literature. So both of these observations separated by decades point out that frequently conservative evangelical scholars will seek their credentials in fields that are peripheral to a lot of the issues that they are addressing in their scholarship particularly in their public scholarship. And this is particularly true of apologetics because once you have the PhD in hand, you're an expert, even if you're talking about something you never directly or thoroughly studied. And so I'm not suggesting that Wes intentionally took this sidstepping route. I don't think he consciously did this. And I imagine that he absolutely loved studying textual criticism and parexual features. I love textual criticism as well. It was one of the things I considered making my primary area of specialization. So, I'm not suggesting that this is all an intentional manipulative deception. But what I am suggesting is that in this video we see Wes making claims outside of his area of expertise that are demonstrabably uninformed and leveraging the perception that he is a trained expert to overcome that fact that he is uninformed so that people who don't know better will be convinced that this is an expert sharing an expert opinion. Wes Huff is not an expert in these things. Wes's expertise is in a particular area. And you know what? I am not even going to try to challenge him on parextual features of New Testament texts because I am sure he is far more of an expert than I am on those things. But when it comes to the historical reliability of the New Testament, when it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls, when it comes to when the New Testament was composed, Wes is not representing the scholarship. Wes is representing apologetics. and wants you to imagine that he is representing the scholarship and that's a big problem and I have heard from a number of colleagues who are experts in these fields that they don't appreciate that this is going on that these misrepresentations of the data and the scholarship are getting so much attention on social media millions and millions of views this is a problem now I want to demonstrate one of the ways that this bad faith attempt to position himself as a spokesperson for the academy and for the scholarship plays out. A while ago, Wes Huff published on his YouTube channel a video of a presentation he gave talking about the historical reliability of the New Testament. And in it, he talked about undesigned coincidences, which is an argument that he pulled from an apologetic book by a scholar named Lydia Mcgru. And I made a video where I criticized the arguments that were being made in that video based on the fact that they conflicted with the way scholars think and talk about these passages and this idea of undesigned coincidences and they are not really supported by the data. And I also pointed out that Wes was not going to be able to respond to the criticisms. And a bit later, Wes published this comment on the community tab of his YouTube channel. It says at Mlen made a critique of my undesigned coincidences video. Though he accuses me of not engaging with his criticisms, he himself either fails to engage with the detailed responses that have been available in the scholarly literature or he's completely ignorant of them. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and side with the latter and just assume he's out of his depth rather than purposefully ignoring the publicly available research over the last decade. That being said, his criticisms have been dealt with and found wanting for some time. A good and thorough example of such is my good friend Dr. Jonathan Mlachy's article here. And then Wes links to a blog post by someone who has never published any peer-reviewed research in any field remotely related to the Bible, much less the historical reliability of the New Testament. And what I pointed out in response was that this is entirely made up. There are zero detailed responses in the scholarly literature of the last 10 years that even acknowledge much less directly address the criticisms I raised regarding undesigned coincidences. And even Jonathan Mcclache, the non-speist whose blog post Wes linked to as an example of a thorough engagement with the arguments, acknowledged in another blog post that Wes was wrong, that there are no detailed engagements with my criticisms of undesigned coincidences anywhere in the scholarly literature. So, let's take a look at Wes's comment again. Notice he's trying to speak down to me and say, "Oh, I'm just going to assume you're just ignorant of all of the scholarly literature out there. I'm going to be graceful towards you and I'm going to just assume you're just unaware of all the stuff rather than knowingly ignoring all of the detailed responses that are out there." There are no such detailed responses. What Wes did was imagine that there were because he's not familiar with the scholarship and then publicly assert that there were because he knew that would effectively convince his audience that I'm in the wrong here. And I've brought this up to Wes multiple times. Now, there's no more community page on his YouTube channel. Now, that's not because of me. It's actually because someone pointed out he seems to have plagiarized a lot of a very popular Twitter post. uh from another content creator. That's when the community tab went away. However, I confronted him about this multiple times and he refused not only to acknowledge that he was wrong, but even to respond to me. And the best he could do was say, "Well, a scholar or two used the phrase undesigned coincidences in a publication or two," which is very clearly not the claim that he made here. So in this comment, Wes is trying to act as a representative of the scholarly literature of the scholarship of the academy and is trying to pass off his uninformed assumption about what's in the scholarship as an authoritative declaration of what is actually in the scholarship in order to try to win an argument or at least deflect accountability for an argument and the responsibility to actually continue to engage the argument. Wes has never acknowledged that he was just flagrantly lying here. He has never taken accountability for making a false claim about what's in the scholarship. And this is what Wes does when he is confronted by actual experts who know the scholarship so much better than he does. This is part of the MMO of apologetics. it is to act as if you are far better informed than you actually are. And that's really what I wanted to say in this video. When you look at the arguments that are constantly popping up in these high-profile interviews that Wes does, the overwhelming majority of the claims are coming through apologetics. They're not coming from the actual scholarship, but they are being held up as if they are the product of advanced formal training and are actually coming from the scholarship. And they're not. And the fit for this video, Ben Shade., Wes Huff Doesn’t Know the Scholarship, YouTube, 01kmn7z2cqqfx7hftjgjcp6f6m.