Blurry Creatures - EP: 256 Biblically Bulletproof with Wesley Huff

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Whether you're a devout believer, a history enthusiast, or simply curious about the origins of one of the most influential books in human history, this episode promises to provide a deeper understanding of the Bible's enduring legacy. We join scholar Wesley Huff on this week’s episode into the historicity of the Bible and any contextual clues hidden in other libraries. Tune in and embark on a journey through the sacred texts that have shaped faith and history for millennia. You can get our book of Enoch here: https://amzn.to/3xriiUB Support the show! www.blurrycreatures.com/members Socials instagram.com/blurrycreatures facebook.com/blurrycreatures twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: tinytaperoom.com &Parker Mogensen Intro/Outro Song: On the Run by TimeCop1983 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even if we go with the most skeptical data, you still have to conclude that a first-century Jewish Eritrani rabbi from Judea and Galilee walked the first century dusty streets of, you know, Roman-occupied Palestine, and made some pretty audacious claims, potentially claims to be God himself, and then was crucified, and that his followers claim that he rose from the dead. I mean, the fact that we have four biographical accounts of an individual from the backwaters of the Roman Empire in Galilee is very, very unusual. The only other person that is comparative to the amount of biographical information that we have about Jesus from this kind of window of antiquity is actually the Roman Emperor. I think we can say that Jesus

stands in just as much credibility for his actual events of his life as the most powerful, most influential, most important person during that time. All right, welcome back to Blurray creatures as you know we've uh we've been rolling on this uh this blurry bus for several years now and we've gone all over the place whether that's uh modern UFO sightings deductions people to underground military bases and people seeing weird creatures to ancient times hanging out watching giants walk across the promised land whatever we've gone everywhere in this this crazy blurry verse and we like the scholars to come on our show and kind of take us back and give us context to the ancient times. It makes sense of some of these modern day sightings and the blurry stuff that

happens on a regular basis. And whether your grandma has a story or you've seen something weird, we know you're tuning in the blurry creatures for a wide variety of reasons. So appreciate you having here. We're going to get Wesley Huff on the show today. He's one of those scholars. And he's getting his doctorate right now and goes back and he makes videos and tries to give context to some of the sort of the half truths that spread around the internet these days and tries to give more full truth and a more, you know, a full view of, okay, this is kind of true, but not completely. You know, he's got a great channel. And we're going to talk about, you know, we obviously, we just released the book of Enoch, so we get into some of these things and people debated on

our channels. But we can talk to Wesley about the scripture itself, can we trust it? And what's some historical context behind that. So this is a great, great combo. It's really cool. I mean, I love what Wes does on his channel. And I think, you know, these are important conversations. If we're going to talk about everything from big foot to UFOs to ancient history, and we're going to talk about it from a biblical standpoint, then we should really talk about why we can trust the Bible as the source of truth. And that's what Wes does. And so this will be a fun one.

It's got, he's a scholar. It's got the evidence. It's got the history. And we walk through some of the things that probably for Christians are, have become sort of second nature. But it answers a much of questions. Like, you know, is the Bible? accurate to what I was written? Is the book of John the same as it was when it was written?

Is the book of Isaiah the same as it was when it was written? Are these things trustworthy? And West contends they are. And this is a great conversation for people that are skeptics and also for folks that want more than just to believe because they believe. Because there's evidence out there. And we shouldn't be afraid to look for it when it comes to believing the stories and the text of the for the Bible. Yeah. So if you want to support what we're doing here, lawyercoachers.com slash members like always.

Got a bunch of stuff coming down the pipe. And your membership produces this show, keeps it going. Let's get Wes on this one. Go back. Walk like an Egyptian, mate. The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it.

I'm going to assume at least one person is right. Because if one person's right to bust the paradigm, it all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Herman event. And this guy defects from the kingdom.

That's a big deal. Welcome back to blurry creatures. We have a fun episode for you guys today. Wesley Huff. on Wesley is, I've probably seen some of his videos that have been going around lately, you know, addressing some of the wild ancient alien stuff and other theological conversations that happen a lot in these spaces. Wesley, thanks for coming on. Our podcast, and it's the first time you've been on our show. You have a master's in theology, and you're currently doing your

Ph.D. right now in New Testament, and it's good to have you on the show. Our podcast gets strangely biblical. We talk about a lot of the weird stuff here, and one of the ways we do that to kick off the conversation is ask everybody from Dr. Michael Heiser to whoever. Tim Mackey from the Bible Project is my favorite one to reference because he had no thoughts on Bigfoot. But we ask everyone at the top of the show. Because we started out as a Bigfoot podcast and then we started saying, what else is weird out there that we can talk about as Christians that just doesn't get addressed from the pulpit or in our circles? Yeah. That probably needs some addressing. Otherwise, people don't really have context for it. So we ask everybody.

And we kind of joke it's sort of bad being baptized in the bluephrases in the bluer verses. is Wes, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot if you have any? Yeah, you know what? It's funny because I have a good friend. He comes to our house every Wednesday for a Bible study that we do. And he is thoroughly convinced. He's got like Bigfoot T-shirts, Bigfoot hats. He's got like the Bigfoot stickers on his water bottle.

We have a couple guys in our church actually who are like Bigfoot paraphernalia guys. And he's been talking about this with me for a while. And when I mentioned that I was going to come on with you guys, he was like, oh, you got to talk about Bigfoot with them. And so it's funny. He did send me. I said, you know what? Send me what you're listening to that convinced you.

And so he sent me a bunch of podcast interviews of Bigfoot encounters. And I can't say I'm convinced. But you know what? I'm enough of a bit of a skeptic that I'm totally open to the idea. I mean, I analyze historical evidence and I'm constantly dealing with things like eyewitness testimony in ancient documents. And I don't think it's completely unreliable in terms of some of these stories. Man, there's a lot of weird stuff out there.

And a lot of stuff that is come. I mean, we like to put things up in a nice square box and time up with a bow. But reality is a lot stranger than that. And so if Bigfoot does exist, I mean, I'm totally okay with it. But I don't think I have any, if you want to call them personal conviction. Although the chair of the board of the organization I work for, Apologetics Canada, has a cottage that we occasionally go up to on Sasquatch Mountain in British Columbia. Oh, wow, dude. So I've been to Sasquatch Mountain, if that means anything.

Yeah. It sounds like a fake place. It sounds like a fake place. It sounds like a fake place. It's like, yeah, I was hanging out. I've got a cabin up at Sasquash Mountain. You're like, that isn't a real place. That's not actually.

Yeah, that's right. You're in Sasquatch country. up there in Canada. I mean, the Pacific Northwest, and there's so many sightings that come out of that area, and I think that where blurry creatures kind of started was, you know, I grew up in the church, and I grew up all these different denominational backgrounds. Every kid in my Christian school was a different denomination, and so I got a little taste of all these aspects of Christianity, and then, you know, in my 30s started really just hearing these stories from these paranormal stories, and I just was so interested in how to, if this stuff is real and these things are out there and this

kind of, you know, this whole elusive side of, I don't know, creation or maybe the defilement of creation, because we get into that a lot in our show, is, you know, there was this point in time when creation was corrupted, like everything, you know, if you really go back to the days of Noah. And could this be some sort of remnant of that event, those days? And it's kind of lingered on to this day. And so that's kind of how blurry creatures started. And then Luke and I started with Big and asking like doctors, academics, like, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? And then it turned into this, well, then they start talking about the ancient giants on our show a lot.

And then we got into this, there's whole categories of giants that were tribes of giants and modern day sidings and digging up skeletons. And so blurry just became sort of shoved into the biblical space. And we have conversations on our podcast that the church doesn't want to have, but are biblical. And because it's a podcast, you just say whatever you want. want, right? Well, that's 100% right. Yeah, you don't have an elder oversight. They're saying, hey, guys, by the way. Yeah. That was a bit wild. Yeah. What, you know what's funny is I grew up on Kent Hovind, Young Earth Creationist VHSs. We had like a seven-part series. And one of them was about

dinosaurs. And I definitely remember, you know, the Ogapogo and the Loch Ness monster. And he would talk all about this. Now, since then, in my more academic endeavors, I've kind of peeled back a lot maybe not as very sound methodologies that someone like Ken Hoven, who ended up going to prison for tax evasion and there were lots of issues there, had, but I'm not a stranger to them. Arguably, I grew up on a lot of those kind of more unusual stories about some of those.

And Wes, one of the things we talk about on our show and what I think it was Michael Heiserd said is that like just, I mean, if all the thousands of encounters, and this is where we're kind of our crux that, people have or reportedly have with with a creature like big foot you know on an annual basis and there's thousands across north america even one of those is true and say 99% are a line one's true

once true then we have to expand our paradigm to sort of to encompass the idea that there's a a big hairy creature that lives in the woods and you know how do we contextualize that does it and that's kind of you know that's some of the things we like to talk about so but as you talked about growing up one of the things I wanted to start with before we got into it and personally there The reason I'm real excited to have you on West is I love your work. You have some amazing videos called Can I Trust the Bible? It's one of the conversations I want to have is that if we're 200 and almost 50 episodes into our show and it rests very heavily, our foundation is the biblical text. It's like how do we make sense of the weird in the world if we are Christians through the Bible, right?

Before we get to that, as we're talking about growing up and we're an 80s show too, so VHS is right in our wheelhouse. You've got kind of a crazy story. And I wanted to just to bring everyone on our, listen to us and introduce you up to speed, but you, you grew up. You were born in Pakistan. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for?

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New customer offer for first three months only, then full-price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mintmobile for details. And then I'll let you go from there because you have, a pretty amazing story of how God intervened in your life in a very tangible way that kind of sets you on the course that we're sitting here today as the, you know, Central Canada director of apologetics Canada and finishing your PhD in New Testament, you know, but you got there really intentionally because of what happened in your childhood. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the listener can't see my complexion,

but you would not be able to tell that I was born in Pakistan by my skin tone. You know, I can't wear my skin after Labor Day. It's too white. So there are, You're in a good company here. We've got a ginger. I mean, come on. Right, right. Nate's allergic to the sun. There you go.

All of our ancestors were cave dwellers somewhere in Europe. And so it does no benefits to us living in sunny areas of the globe at this current point in time. But yeah, so I was born in Pakistan. My parents were missionaries in Islamabad. And then during the Gulf War, we were, we were forced to leave and came back to Canada for a little bit, ended up going back overseas where I spent a portion of my childhood when I was really young, in the Middle East. So my parents worked in the capital city of Jordan in Amman, and that played a big part into even some of the work that I've done since then in my apologetic career with Muslims,

having lived in majority of Muslim countries and interacting with the Islamic worldview. And that, like I said, played a big part. But my story, which I think you're alluding to, Luke is that when I came back overseas, from overseas, my family was living in rural Ontario, and I was diagnosed with the rare neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down. And so the short story is that I had the flu and was home from school on a Wednesday, and I'd gone down for a nap on the bathroom floor for reasons that we don't necessarily have to go into. And then I woke up early in the afternoon, and I couldn't feel my legs. and so I called my mom who called like an ambulance and I was rushed from one hospital to the other

and when I was eventually settled into a hospital where they were able to test me I was diagnosed with a condition called acute transverse myelitis which is a word you can forget as soon as you hear it but what it means is as they described it to me was that my body's immune system instead of attacking the flu, attacked the nerve endings of the base of my spinal cord, caused inflammation, and left the communication between my legs and my brain cut off.

And so I was told after being tested and living in the hospital for a week, that the chances of me walking were very, very low to zero and that I was most likely going to be a paraplegic for the rest of my life. And so that entered in questions. I was 11 years old at the time, entered in questions that could arguably describe as apologetic. You know, why do bad things happen to supposedly good people and those types of things?

But the short story of what I do consider to be a miraculous healing was one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't fill my legs. I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down. And that was it. And so I had a regular schedule checkup where I went back. And it was the doctors who first used the word miracle and said, we really don't have a medical explanation for this. In fact, I have my mom's journal entry. She photocopied them for me some years ago.

And I have them in an envelope. And she has recorded that the doctor asked her while they were talking, what did you guys do? And she said, we prayed. And he went and he printed off a list of the other kids in the intensive care unit. And maybe jokingly, maybe not, said, hey, do you mind? I'm praying for these. Wow. And that did spark what I truly believed to be a powerful supernatural experience in my life.

And yet it didn't negate me having intellectual doubts later in my teen years, trying to measure up, okay, while something happened, how do I make sense of that in light of questions about meaning and purpose, but also intellectually about, you know, things like, can I trust the Bible? or what do I do with origins? What do I do with science? What do we do with all of these different areas that seem to, at least in terms of the cultural conversations, be pushing against what I have been raised to believe.

And so I knew that believing in Christianity because my parents raised me to, it probably wasn't the worst reason, but it might not be the best reason. And so that's when I really started to dig into some of these questions. And unfortunately, living in a household where I had, parents who were missionaries. You know, my mom was raised a missionary too. She grew up in India. And so we had documents like the Bhagavid Gita or the Quran or the Book of Mormon on the shelf

in our living room. And although it was never said overtly, I felt very strongly that what was communicated in my upbringing was if Christianity is true, it can handle you looking at these things. You know, they're not verbatim. They're not forbidden. Christianity can stand up to other objections and worldviews. And so I did, I did, you know, as much as a teenager can with, you know, some of these physical copies and the internet, digging into some of these questions and looking at, well, what are the best rebuttals? Who's writing the objections to what I believe? And then trying really to figure out, okay, well, does that make sense? Is that a better explanation than what the Christian worldview is offering? And at the end, coming to the conclusion that,

no, I think Christianity does make sense. I think it does answer the all. ultimate questions that I'm looking for, both emotionally and intellectually. And that process kind of connected the dots between my head and my heart and having that experience as a child, but then also saying, okay, well, now, because of the publicly available evidence, I truly believe it's true, the capital T. And that journey led me down to where I am today, you know, doing a doctorate at a secular university at PhD in New Testament studies. And I'm a manuscript guy.

So I look at some of our earliest copies of particularly, particularly the New Testament, but digging into some Old Testament manuscripts as well. And that has only strengthened my faith. It's only given me more confidence that what we have now is what those original authors wrote and that it is an accurate representation of particularly the events and sayings and teachings of Jesus Christ. if we're going to foundationally as believers believe in the in the Bible these 66 books that they are the inspired word of God and that these are they are inerrant you know and that's where we that's the foundation of our faith you know how do we because this is your work how can we

pragmatically you know walk walk us through pragmatically understanding that and the things you've found because you are an ancient document guy whether it be Old Testament new Testament right like we've talked a bunch on the show about the Dead Sea Scrolls for example and you know all of the of the books there that we could provide a history that we didn't have up until the early 1900s, right? We just had sort of whatever survived the destruction of the temple, the second temple in 70 AD. And, you know, those things are great plans, great understanding. And we talked to, you know, Dr. Michael Heiser, we talked about the top of the show, you know, about the old testament and the Hebrew and everything that we can look at it in that and the first five books. And going through Genesis, I want to focus on what you've done and kind of how,

you have taken this idea of can we trust it and pulled this thread, kind of working, maybe reverse engineering the biblical text to prove its ferocity. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that has been hugely beneficial and encouraging to me is when I really started to study the biblical languages and got kind of narrowed my area of interest into the biblical manuscripts themselves, being able to have the opportunity to look at some of these manuscripts in person. And to go and see something, like I actually have a facsimile of it on my shelf behind me, but go and see something like a document called P66, which is a late, second, early third century,

the copy of the Gospel of John. And to see, okay, this is an 1800-year-old copy of John. And it preserves for us almost the entire gospel, but particularly the first few chapters. And to open that up and to be able to read. And in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was God. and the word was God and think, man, when I open an English translation, that's exactly what I'm reading. I don't, like, I'm sight translating this and what am I coming up with? What sounds like the

NIV, right? Like, so just the tenacity of the Christian scribes over the last two millennia to preserve those words. This is a Bose moment. Your 10 boring blocks from home until the beat drops in Bose clarity. And the baseline. transforms boring into maybe the best part of your day. Your life deserves music. Your music deserves Bose. Find your perfect product at Bose.com. Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great,

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Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, terms and conditions apply. And then the diligent work of translators throughout the centuries to render those in the language that we now understand today. Like you mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls and the fact that before the 1950s, the only copy of Isaiah that we had was from the Middle Age. Right. Right. It's from the Masoretic text. And so when we uncover the Dead Sea Scrolls and we find a complete copy of the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is predating Jesus by 300 years. And it is word for word exact to the copies we have in the Middle Ages. I mean, that's pretty phenomenal. Like not just, you know, there are a few differences here and there. No, word for word exact. Now, I have to be careful with that because that's not true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls. But even just using. You know, there are a few differences here and there. No, word for word exact. Now, I have to be careful with that because that's not true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls. But even just using. But even just use. that as an illustration of saying that there's a level of confidence that we have with how these documents have been preserved and even finding out that the mistakes and the additions and deletions also contribute to our ability to have confidence because one of the factors of early

Christianity was that the Christians were so eager to get the word of God out into the hands of believers. And so they didn't ask for your qualifications. You know, there was a scribal kind of process within the Jewish community where you had to have qualifications. And that had a great benefit in terms of something like the copying of what eventually became the Masoretic text and that middle-aged copy of Isaiah. You know, there was a procedure of very careful checks and balances there that allowed that to happen. The Christians had somewhat of the opposite problem because they were so eager to get it out

that, you know, you don't have a copy of John. Well, here, you know, make sure you copy this. And the end result of that was that the copies are not always as carefully copied and in their manuscripts. And so mistakes happen. And people write notes in the margins. And then other scribes later don't know if that note in the margin is supposed to be part of the text. And so they include it. And all of these things happen.

But this happens at such a crazy level that within a few centuries, even decades of the originals being written, there are copies of the New Testament books, even the Psalms and some of the Old Testament prophets. They're in Asia. They're in North Africa. They're in Europe. They're even as far as the British Isles. And so now we have this giant massive pile,

2,000 years later, of all these manuscripts. And it's actually because of the mistakes that we can find out exactly when, where, and sometimes why deletions, additions, or scribal insurions happen. And that gives us confidence because if we only have one copy, you have to be sure that that person got it right. And if you have two copies, even if there are mistakes, you can compare them. And three copies and four copies and five copies. We're talking thousands of copies. And so with thousands of copies, you can really be able to trace that text back.

And so this is what's referred to as textual criticism. I was actually last week, I was in Oxford in England attending a conference of text critics. And we are talking about some of these things about, you know, the methodologies that we use to trace the text back. And everyone in that room, believing or not, agrees that we have what the original authors wrote to pretty much 99.9% of a level of accuracy. And so it's, but it's because of this kind of massive amount of information that we're able to do something like that. I think it's so important because there is a bunch of folks out there in camps out there to say that what we're reading is manipulated text and that it's done purposefully and willfully and simply even say to deceive sort of the meanings of the author. And what you're saying is that now that actually, and I think that this is so interesting. Like I hadn't heard this.

But the fact there's so many copies is so important because they need to look at sort of the breadth. of all the copies and see, you know, all sort of the changes and you can track it all the way. You can reverse engineer. You track it all the way backwards to the actual text. And yeah, I mean. Yeah, and that that isn't true for a lot of ancient documents. I mean, the Beowulf, right? One of, I think Beowulf is the first English written book.

But we only have one copy of Beowulf from the ancient world. And if I'm remembering the story correctly, it was only preserved because someone threw it out of the window of the museum it happened to be in when the museum was burning down. And so in terms of like, if we want to talk about the textual history of the document of Beowulf, we can't analyze that in the same way because when you only have one, you only have one.

It's one source document. Yeah. Exactly. And this isn't something we just do with the Bible. there are text critics that work on Homer. There are text critics that work on, you know, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Aristophanes, even people who work on Shakespeare because, you know, there are no original, quote-unquote, copies of Shakespeare.

We have copies. And so in one sense, there are scholars who actually debate, you know, maybe this word should actually be that word. So it's not something that's unusual with the Bible, but the Bible, we just have so much more to go off of that the conversations can sometimes they can sound really complicated or overcomplicated, but that's just because we have so much to go off of that we can have these conversations to begin with. You know, what are some sources that really give you a lot of context to the scripture?

It's that kind of support it, give you an idea of what they're alluding to. Because something that Luke and I kind of come up a lot on our show is that, you know, we try to make sense of some of the weird stuff that happens. And also in the scriptures, there's a lot of these. wild moments in the scripture that don't give you a lot of backstories. So you don't really know what's going on, you know. What are some other documents or things that you feel like support the text and the canon that we do have today? Yeah.

So I think there are, in terms of, like, details about the stories. Is that what you mean? Like, about some of the things we read. Or in corroboration. Cooperation. Because I think a lot of people reject the biblical story because they don't have context. And I think that's why we have so many different denominations today because everyone's reading the Bible and coming to these conclusions. And they don't always have a lot of context of, okay, this is what's happening in the story.

But, you know, when you go back, you realize that the ancient writers seemed to have a catalog of works that they knew that were influencing the way they were writing and who they were writing to. Yeah, the Bible doesn't exist in a vacuum. You know, these people exist in real places in real times and were interacting. with other individuals of their times. I mean, Paul, when he's on Mars Hill, he quotes pagan philosophers to the Greeks, right? He's aware of their literature. He's quoting individuals like Menander and Aristophanes when he's interacting with these cultures because that's what their context would have been.

Or, you know, Jude quoting the Book of Enoch. Or, you know, these are sources that would have been publicly available. And even just something like, it's an apocryphal book in the sense of the Duderoconical books that we don't as Protestants have in our Old Testament, but first and second Maccabees are historical documents that chronicle a time period between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, that kind of valley between Malachi and Matthew, things happened, right? And that gives context when you have the story of Judas Maccabias going into the temple and rededicating that. And then you see in John chapter 9 when Jesus goes to Jerusalem for the

Feasts of the Dedication, that's Hanukkah. That's what happened in the stories of first, second, and third Maccabees. And so I think maybe as Protestants, we can have this kind of pushback because, oh, the Catholics have those books in their Bible. And we don't think they're scripture. So we're going to ignore them. And unfortunately, what that does is that then has us floating in history where we're losing context for understanding, not that you know.

need to understand what the feast of dedication is in John chapter 9. But man, does that fill out the context of, okay, I understand what's happening here. I understand. And then that gives context to Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, which is what Judas Maccabeus does. And the kind of understanding that the first century Jew seeing that happen would have kind of, it would have drawn their attention. Oh, Judas did this and he rededicated the temple to God. What's going on here? Because Jesus is drawing on, he's drawing on Old Testament prophecy,

right, that the Messiah would ride into a Jerusalem on a donkey. But then there's also this kind of cultural context of that. And then he is alluding to and fulfilling those things. And so that can give us filling out the frame, as you will, sort of these things. In terms of like historical events,

I was, as I mentioned in England last week. And if you go to the British Museum in London, you can enter a room that includes a wall relief of an individual called King Senechrib of Assyria. And we actually find the story that's chronicled on that wall in 2 Kings 1830 or 1315, where it says that Sinakrab King of Assyria, he attacks Judah and he tries to take over Jerusalem, but he doesn't end up, he sieges Jerusalem, but it says that what he does do, even though he does end up destroying Jerusalem is he sacks the city called Lakers. And if you go to this room in the

British Museum, which originally comes from Iraq, but you see the wall relief that they've pulled off of the wall from the old, old temple, the old palace, and you can walk through it. And it has Senecrab, king of a serious throne room from 2,700 years ago. And the room originally included a series of floor to ceiling carving. So they're about 40 feet tall. and they depict this conquest over Lakers, which is the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah after Jerusalem. And so in 701 BC, Senecrib led this vast army against Judea. And as both the biblical and historical record tell us, King Hezekiah had rebelled against the Assyrians. And then he's confronted with the world's greatest war machine at the time.

And we didn't discover this wall relief until 1845 in modern day Iraq. And so before that, all we had was the biblical story. So if you were to go to a monk in the 9th century and say, hey, who's Senechrib? He would say, oh, he's king of Assyria. Look, let's open to the Second Kings. But all of a sudden, we have this corroborative archaeological data that has a depiction from the other side of what we see going on in Second Kings. And then there's a prism, I think it's eight-sided.

I think he's octagonal. And it has all of these listings of the king of Assyria's conquest. And once again, it mentions King Hezekiah. And it particularly says that, you know, portraying Senechrobin in the best light, you know, not, hey, I failed to, I failed to destroy Jerusalem. But he says, as for Hezekiah, I shut him up in his royal city like a bird in a cage. And so these types of kind of corroborative ancient documents from the. the ancient near eastern world

also shed light on some of these stories. And obviously we don't have corroborative evidence for everything in the Old Testament. You know, we've never found Abraham's tent, nor do I think we ever will.

But these kind of things lend credibility to the fact that, okay, every time we stick a shovel in the ground, we're finding something that at minimum confirms people in places and times.

And as Christians, we can have confidence that, you know, whether we're talking about Second Maccabees, or whether we're talking about the lakeish relief, or whether we're talking about something like the Book of Enoch, or whether we're talking about, all of these documents have their place in time and history, and they give context to the things that we read about in scripture. You said this place was steps from the water.

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Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. I love that. I think it's so interesting because I feel like as time continues to roll on, it's like there's a new discovery all the time

that backs up the biblical narrative. It feels like it's happening all the time. I know there's folks right now that are specific. specifically in the Holy Land, finding digging up things, trying to find the location of finding evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah and the burning of that space and then the evidence for Jesus. And you talk about things like Josephus and his accounts that also back up everything that we see, or a lot of things, not everything, but a lot of the things in the New Testament that we see as a Roman historian. What about, do you, have you done much work on sort of the evidentiary, maybe the pile of evidence for

Christ. If we conclude that we can't know that Jesus existed, then we also have to conclude that we don't know anybody in the ancient world exists. Correct. Amen. Because we have, if, even if we go with the most skeptical data, you still have to conclude that a first century Jewish, a rabbi from you know judea and galilee walked the first century dusty streets of you know roman occupied palestine and made some pretty audacious claims potentially claims to be god himself and then was crucified and that his followers claim that he rose from the dead i mean the fact that we have four biographical accounts of an individual from the backwaters of the roman empire in galilee is very very very unusual. The only other person that is comparative to the amount of biographical information

that we have about Jesus from this kind of window of antiquity is actually the Roman emperor, Tiberius at the time. Because during this time period, there are only two people who have more than about one, maybe two biographical sources of their life. The first one is Jesus, right, with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, those four biographical accounts. And then Tiberius has Vellus Petrocolus, Tacitus, Soutonius, and Cassio Dio. And so at face value, I think we can say that Jesus stands in just as much credibility for his actual events of his life as the most powerful, most influential, most important person during that time, that being the emperor.

And so if we can say that, if we can put him parallel, and I would actually say that the evidence is actually quite a bit better because those four individuals that I mentioned, Veles Petrocolaus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassio deo, they're not just writing about the emperor. They're writing about a number of other things and they mention the emperor, but they're actually writing about a whole host of other individuals. In fact, both Soutonius and Tacitus also mentioned Jesus, but these other individuals, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they're only writing about Jesus, right?

It's the gospel, the Eugenelion, the good news, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But what is the good news? Well, it's the Jesus came. And so that's the purpose. And even those sources that we have for the gospels, our earliest copies are being written earlier than the copies that we're finding for the life of Tiberius. Apart from the one individual who I mentioned, Velas Petrocalis, his is actually pretty early, but he's a Roman paid propagandist.

So in terms of historical credibility, he's often seen as a little bit suspect because he's like on the payroll and he has incentive to make the emperor look really good. But all the other guys, they're writing in decades after even the latest books that are written for Jesus. In fact, if we're talking about almost everybody, including Roman emperors, but particularly religious figures like the Buddha or Muhammad, our latest evidence written documentary. evidence for Jesus is still earlier than our earliest evidence for almost every other religious or political figure within the angel world. So those who are casting doubt on the credibility of the historical Jesus are really doing so at the expense of history. It's almost always an indication of, hey, you're probably not aware of the historical data.

And if you are, you probably don't understand it. because if you want to say Jesus never existed and his historical information is suspect, then let's grab bag everyone else, you know, pre-7,100s and say, well, we can't know anything about them either because the standards that are often held, you know, you want Jesus's thumbprint and his social security card. You're not going to get that. But on the basis of how we actually do history, we have phenomenal evidence for the historical Jesus. So in addition to your work on, can I trust the Bible, some of the stuff you've been doing, which I really loved, was looking at some of the other documents and claim documents that have really kind of blipped on the internet lately.

And one that really comes to mind is Billy Carson, who was on Sean Ryan and also on Joe Rogan. making a bunch of claims about the Emerald Tablets. Then there's also the Gospel of Thomas, Infancy. There's all these documents that exist out there that people run with, really without spending any of the academic work or digging into the veracity of these, right? To me, it makes sense because we live in this sort of, we digest information in 30 seconds or less, right?

It's the idea of let's watch the reel. Let's watch the YouTube video that's 90 seconds. And this has got to be good information. but I thought it was really powerful some of the work you did. And I want to start with Billy Carson because he makes a bunch of really crazy and wild claims. And we haven't talked about this on the show, the Emerald Tablets, which maybe we've referenced before.

But can you talk a little bit about some of the things that were said? And then your take on that. And then I'd love to get to the Gospel of Thomas and some of the MCGs. These other documents that have sort of come to the surface really in the last few years that people are pointing at and saying, this means this. And this is something that you need to understand and believe to be true. And yet without really any, I would say provenance, right? If we're talking like in the art world, like you have this sort of, you have this tracing of where this stuff came from.

You can verify that it is what it is, right? If you're looking at like a Van Gogh or a Picasso or something like the Mona Lisa, we can track the provenance. We know exactly that it came from the artist and here's where it's been. Right. And so you can say, this is authentic. This is actually the correct. or this is the original painting. So this idea of imply trust in the accuracy.

So I know one of the ones actually, the reason I reached out to you was sent to me by a buddy, shout to Todd Smith out there, but it was on you critiquing Billy Carson in his expose on the Emerald tablets. Yeah. Yeah, Billy Carson is interesting because he takes a lot of the right words and uses them in a lot of the wrong ways.

Which if you're an average person just scrolling through Instagram, Rails or TikTok, it can sound very persuasive because he's throwing out the Sumerian tablets and the Emerald tablets of Thoth. He's talking about the Book of the Dead, and he's talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And if you have no framework for what these things are, the confidence that comes across a guy like Billy Carson can be very persuasive. Unfortunately, and I struggle to, give someone like Billy Carson the benefit of the doubt. I want to, but I have colleagues who read Sumerian cuneiform. Like there are people who actually read this stuff. And the things that Billy Carson says are either almost slightly true but misinformed or completely false. And it's very tricky because you're kind of weeding through. He'll get some things right, but not quite in his

conclusions about them. And then other things are just, I have a hard time believing that he doesn't just make them up. I mean, he's written a whole book on the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, but the Emerald Tablets of Thoth don't exist. They're not a actual document. If you went to Egypt and you asked an Egyptologist, where do I go to look at the Emerald Tablets of Thoth?

He's going to say, nowhere, because they don't exist. Yeah. They were invented, if you want to put it that way, in 19, by a guy named Maurice Doriel, who was a kind of lay archaeologist who went to Egypt. He went to the Great Pyramers of Giza and said that he discovered this artifact. And then he produced a supposed translation. But he never actually produced the tablets. And the content within the tablets contradicts large swaths of other things that we do know about ancient Egypt.

So not only are they, is the translation that, sure, you can go on Amazon, you can buy a translation of the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, but what you're getting is just the production that Maurice Doriel in the late 1920s came up with. But this isn't actually a legitimate ancient Egyptian document. There are plenty of those. In fact, we have tons of stuff from ancient Egypt. but this is on the level of, you know, just modern day fabrication. It doesn't exist. It does sound a lot. Honestly, what I think of firsthand when you hear this is the Book of Mormon.

It's a guy finds these golden tablets and then there's this translation and there. No one's produced the tablets yet, right? And then it's just like, well, trust me, this is what it says. And you go, this sounds a lot like, I mean, like that. I think there's a parallel there in that you do have examples of people saying they discover things and then when actual academics are like, okay, well, that sounds really interesting. Let's look at it. They go, oh, oops, we don't have it anymore.

Right. You know, the emerald or the golden plates got taken up to heaven by an angel. Okay, well, that is convenient. Very convenient. Yeah, you're like, well, nobody can fact check you. You're like, trust, trust me on this one, right? You're like that. Introducing the new best skin ever

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At only $12, it's great for affordable touchups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. Yeah, yeah. But someone like Billy Carson, he makes, he doesn't just make passing references to the Emerald Tablet's Thoth. It's essential to his thesis. And it's not persuasive to anybody within the field of archaeology, Egyptology, historiography, you know, classics, any of these.

Because we know these things. We know where these documents are. and I want to be, I want to be charitable when I interact with people who are making claims about ancient history. But when you, you base your entire thesis on something that is, a known, you know, it's not,

this is not a hidden thing. It's a known fabrication. Nobody thinks this exists. Then it's hard then to give you the benefit of the doubt in all the other things you're saying. And unfortunately for Carson, he then goes on to say a lot of other wild things that are just not based in reality either.

I was going to say, can you, for our folks who listen to the show who aren't familiar with the Emerald tablets, can you surmise real quickly what's in that fabrication or that document that, because it does, just for a tiny bit of foundational knowledge here?

Yeah, so the Emerald tablets are, once again, claimed to have been translated from hieroglyphics, and it's a pendium written by, claiming to be written by Thoth, who was the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom and talks about how he enlightened the humanity and 35,000 years ago helped do things like establish the building of the pyramids and all these things. And so Carson makes a lot of this in terms of, you know, the provenance of. of how old it is, you know, well, 35,000 years ago.

Well, that's really old. And, you know, it mentions the pyramid. It mentions some other, you know, bringing of knowledge to people, which kind of has parallels in some of the other Atlantean theories. And so he draws on that as well saying that, you know, Thoth was an Atlantean and then draws connections between some of the other Sumerian literature. And then claims that he, you know, Billy Carson himself can read a little bit of Sumerian,

which as someone who has tried to learn Sumerian. So I actually got interested in Sumerian. This is a bit of a side when I was doing some research on John Marco Legro and the sacred mushroom in the cross. Are you guys aware of that stuff? No. Oh, you'd find that really interesting. It was a Joe Rogan really likes to talk about it where there was this. He was a legitimate Dead Sea Scrolls expert.

He was part of the original team. And he kind of went a little off base. and in the later years of his life actually claimed that Christianity was an invention of a psychedelic mushroom cult. And so he traces some of these words etymologically in the Greek of the New Testament and the Hebrew of the Old Testament into Sumerian.

And so I was fact-checking some of these things and I was consulting with some people who I know who are a seriologist and can read Sumerian. And they were saying, no, this doesn't make any sense. But when I was trying to make heads or tails of Sumerian, I was like, man, I can read some ancient languages. Sumerian's a tough one. And so I would like to give, once again, Billy Carson the benefit of the doubt and say he knows some Sumerian. But as someone who tries to read ancient languages and does so for my academic career, I have a really hard time believing that.

And then to make those connections between the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in the Emeraldobes, of Thoth, which don't exist. There's just, there's too many intersections of silliness. I'll put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think you can, you can amass a lot of followers these days. And it's harder to, I think when people are actually become fans of your content, you have to have some, you know, credibility. And I think there's a, I mean, we get thousands of videos sent to us on a, on a daily basis and we have to kind of sift through it all. And we're trying to bring as much credibility to these topics as we can, whether it's alien abduction, Bigfoot, or whatever. It's like, what's the actual data? And we bring a lot of doctors on our show who have thoughts on Bigfoot. And believe it or

not, Wesley, some of people have had encounters that they're here to talk about some theological subject. And they're like, well, my grandpa has this story and I believe him. And it's like, Right. You know, and so I think one of the things we do on blurry creatures is try to go through the data and be as scientific as possible and not just sensationalized materials. But, you know, you can get millions of followers doing that. And to me, Nate, like that sort of methodology, West, like of having just enough truth that it becomes palpable really is like kind of the blueprint for deception, right?

You just have just enough truth that it feels like it's the garden story. It's the garden story over and over again. It 100% is that. And that's the original lie, right? Yeah. That's the original lie that Satan told even the garden, right? If you eat the fruit, you will be like God. That's true.

But it's not what he said. It's what he didn't say. How are you going to be like God and knowing what is good and what is evil? Well, it's not enlightenment in the sense of becoming God. it's understanding what it means to rebel and try to call the shots on your own terms. And so it's just that tiny kernel of truth, but that ultimately, I mean, leads to the entire fall of creation. We see that on a mass scale today. I mean, I think that news is, it's like two truths and you've got to figure out which one's the lie. You know, they look and they smell exactly the same. That problem rages on and it's only getting worse. Pick a topic, you know.

And I can understand that. I can understand like that we live in this age of almost information fatigue. Yeah. Because we know, we know so much about so many topics, but we don't know any one topic very deeply. Because we just assume that I can pick up my phone in Wikipedia and I can get a synopsis, right? Or chat GPT can give me just the bare bones of what I need to know.

Here's your book report. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Yeah. But then we forget. And it also is compounded by the, the fact that we should be doing our own research, but also there are experts who have devoted

their lives to it, but experts also say stupid things. And so I totally have sympathy for the average person who is scrolling through TikTok, because exactly what you said, Nate, it's so hard to try to sift through all this stuff. And when you're encountering people like Billy Carson or others who are saying things very confidently. And they're, you know, throwing out these terms, you don't necessarily know, okay, well, I'm hearing about, you know, ancient Greco-Roman history, and I'm hearing about Sumeria, and I'm hearing about Egypt, and I'm hearing, where do I go to try to find the information for that? Now, some of that can actually be debunked. You can look at the April Talmas of Thoth on Wikipedia, and it will

actually tell you that it doesn't exist. So in that sense, that's great. But some of these things require a further level of digging. And it's disorienting when we hear all these things. And they're kind of intermeshed with some good information, some bad information, some just made up information completely. And I can understand why then people are like, hey, I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to take everything. or I'm going to take nothing, you know, those kind of. Yeah, so it becomes a zero-sum game, right? You're like, yeah.

And that's, so on that note, though, Wes, you've also done some work on some other documents that have really come to light in the last few years. And one is the Gospel of Thomas. And there's a few others. I would love for you just to kind of run through a little bit of the things you found because whatever, this is the same story as Billy Carson, right? Inevitably, these things pop up. The source seems like it's trust.

worthy because people are talking about some of these documents as matters of fact. They get discovered and if discovery feels authentic, but you've done some really good work, I know, especially in the Gospel of Thomas. And I know you're going to, at the end, we'll ask you to point people to the work you're doing. But I spent time watching it here. I've been mostly in fraternity leave the last month with a newborn. And we were emailing and he sent me some of your videos, which I thought were fascinating. Because I didn't know a lot about the Gospel of Thomas specifically, and heard it.

thrown out there. And you start to wonder, like, why is there a gospel in quotes? I use that in quotes where you guys are listening, not looking at us right now, but of Thomas that isn't in the Bible, right? Thomas was a disciple, right? So you can start to go down these rabbit holes and people that don't spend enough time looking go, yeah, this is a disciple. His book must be real, you know? His book must be trustworthy if he's someone who walked with Jesus. So tell us a little bit about that one, because I think that one's fascinating. Yeah, so we do have these other Gospels, right? The Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas that have these names that are associated with individuals who we read about in the biblical Gospels being within these inner

circles of Jesus. And so what do we do with the fact that, sure, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But then you have the Gospel of Thomas. Well, Thomas was a disciple. So why do we reject Thomas and not have that in our Bibles, but say that these other ones are credible, especially when Mark and Luke aren't disciples. Thomas is a disciple. So the short description of that is that when this was discovered, so just to back up, and I share this in the Can I Trust the Bible, episode one, the write books episode, where my colleague and I, Andy, we went out to Egypt, we went to Nag Hammadi,

where the Nag Hammadi Library was found, which included documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip and told that story, how and when it was discovered by these Bedouin farmers in 1945 and eventually landing in the hands of academics and being analyzed. And lo and behold, you know, it's this document that claims to be written by Thomas, the disciple of Jesus. Now, when we actually analyze the content of Thomas, we find that both there are some external factors and some internal factors that are very problematic for it. Although there are actually there were actually fragments of the Gospel of Thomas that predate the 1945 discovery. We had actually three Greek fragments, which were found at a place called Oxirincus in Egypt,

which we also go to in episode two of the Canada Trust the Bible series. But Oxirinkis, Pioxi 1, P.Oxie 654, and Pioxie 655, which are just the category numbers that are irrelevant to the average person, are these fragments of what, we, when we found the complete gospel of Thomas in 1945, confirmed, okay, that's what these actually are. We weren't really sure what they were before. They were sometimes just labeled as another story of Jesus or something like that. But then we find this gospel of Thomas and we're like, oh, that's what this is. So the one discovered in 1945 is not in Greek, it's in Coptic, which is sort of a downstream version of ancient Egyptian.

and it is not what we think of when we typically think of a gospel. So when we think of a gospel, we're probably thinking of something like you have Jesus's birth, you have his life, and then it includes his death and his resurrection. The gospel of Thomas is not that. It's a sayings gospel. So it's just a list of 114 sayings between Jesus's disciples and Jesus. And it has, although it's very, very early, it's from the second century.

It has some content in it, which associates it with a group that developed within the second century called the Gnostics. And the Gnostics were a religious sect. It's kind of problematic even to group them in one single group because there were no one group called the Gnostics. There are a bunch of different kind of ideologies that existed within the ancient near East and particularly later on when it incorporates Jesus. into Greco-Roman antiquity. And they even disagree with themselves. You know, the Gnostics contradict in some Gnostics Gospels contradict other Gnostic Gospels. So it's not this cohesive unit. But nonetheless, aside from all that, this umbrella term of philosophical and religious sex, we can say that there are some kind of unifying factors, particularly that the Gnostics,

unlike biblical Christianity, didn't believe that salvation is something outside of yourself, done on your behalf by the finished work of Christ on the cross, which is what we believe as Christians. So along the lines of, you know, 2 Corinthians 521, Hebrews 1010, that for our sake the father made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God and that by the will of the Father,

we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Christ Jesus once for all. The Gnostics didn't believe that. They actually believed that salvation was something inside of you. So it's not just that Jesus is God, but hey, Nate and Luke, you're actually God and you unlock that reality by knowledge. And the Greek word for knowledge is nosis. So that's why we give them this kind of category. And so you read the gospel of Thomas or you read the gospel of Philip and you find these

sayings that are very strange and they're strange on purpose. And they range from like, the gospel of Thomas is not the strangest by any stretch. There are some where you read it and you're like, I don't know what's going on here. It's almost jibber jabber. But that's done on purpose because the idea is, ooh, if you're enlightened, you're going to understand this. Okay.

And so you're in the club and you've unlocked your divinity. And part of that was realizing kind of like modern Eastern myth mysticism. It sounds like New Age a little bit. And I think this is why modern sort of new age groups have latched on to some of these documents is because they do have these themes that you have, the divinity locked inside of you and you can release it and like Buddhism that the physical world actually is an illusion and it's by the secret knowledge that you realize the physical world is an illusion and your spirit which is trapped in this meat prison of a body it's actually

then released into the universe there are these kinds of ideas which you can see why sort of this kind of esoteric modern new age loves of stuff has latched on to some of these. Unfortunately, they latch onto that stuff. They don't latch on to other things, like a highlight in the Can I Trust the Bible series, where the last line of the gospel of Thomas has Peter saying, hey, Jesus, you need to kick Mary out because women are not worthy of life. And Jesus's response is not, hey, that's a weird thing to say, Peter. It's, hey, Peter, don't worry, because I'm going to make her into a man like you men. And then the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, every woman who makes yourself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

And so it's like, you know, grab onto the stuff you like, but I don't know if you want to grab onto that one. But you have this kind of stuff. And that goes part in parcel to. There's a, there's kind of an anti-feminism vibe in a lot of the Gnostic literature because they believe that the physical world was evil. And the creator of the physical world was this evil demiurge who was encompassing of the feminine in their philosophy. So there's actually a strong strain of antagonism towards women in a lot of the Gnostic

literature. It also sounds a lot like it kind of makes you think about like this whole Christ consciousness movement that's also kind of happening here that you've got. It's not really, we don't really need to believe in Jesus as our Savior, but we can all sort of tap into this Christ consciousness. And we've talked about this on the show. It feels like in some ways atheism is on it is dying. Right. So all these folks out here are spiritual. You see it online around. I'm spiritual, you know, and in that, they're grabbing onto things like the New Age and to mysticism and Eastern stuff because subversely empowering, right? Because it just tells you you're the same way the garden. You're, you can be like God. You can be at the gods. You are a God. It's lower G God. And you just have to

unlock that. And then it's this whole deception on Christ is just an enlightened teacher, like the other ones that they'll want to name and you just kind of and it turns to the universalism and new age and all these different things which ultimately just find their roots in the occult. Yeah. I mean, that's fascinating because, yeah, because it is also deceptive, right? Because you have the pseudographical document that names itself after a disciple, which we know that all those things were done to garner credibility, right? Yeah, and that's a level of kind of shoehole.

and credibility into the document, right? It's, it's appropriating a level of credibility that it doesn't have, but it's kind of kidnapping the credibility that the Christian community already has associated with these individuals, right? Because nobody's going to, I mean, there actually is a gospel of Luke, so I can't use your name as an example. It's a good one. Nobody's going to read, right, the gospel of Bob, right?

Because they're like, well, who's Bob? I don't know who that is. He wasn't there. Yeah. Nobody trusts Bob. So they get a name that somebody does know, right? And they often choose disciples who are not the main disciples. So Thomas or Philip or and these characters often in some of these Gnostic Gospels work as fodder,

where the big name ones, you know, Peter James and John, when Jesus is interacting with them, Peter James and John are getting all the wrong answers. But then Jesus goes to Philip and Philip, oh, Philip knows. He understands. And then Jesus pulls him in secretly and reveals the secret knowledge to him. So it's almost it's it's kidnapping credibility in one sense, but it's also trying to read the skepticism onto the individuals associated within the biblical documents too. And in terms of kind of the wild nature of the content of some of these,

the people who we were talking about before who might doubt that Jesus ever existed, sometimes read the biblical gospels and go, this miracle stuff, that obviously plays against his historical reliability. That's obviously embellished until you go and you read the Gnostic Gospels where all sorts of crazy things are happening. So before the program, we mentioned, we're talking a little bit about some of the infancy Gospels that exist where they try to fill in the gaps where the biblical Gospels don't tell you much about Jesus's childhood. We have this one story in Acts. Jesus is 12 years old. He goes to the temples and Mary and Joseph lose the son of God, right?

on their way back. The worst parenting move of all time. You're going to be memorialized forever, right? Yeah. Yeah. If you think you're a bad parent, just remember that Mary and Joseph have lost the incarnate word of God. Lost the son of God at one point.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but we don't other than that have really anything about Jesus' childhood. And so there's later literature that's written in centuries after Jesus' death, but they try to tell some of these stories. And if we're talking about embedding, I mean, Jesus is, he's doing all sorts. He's really naughty is what he is. He's pushes a kid off a roof and the kid dies and then he resurrects him back to life. There's one story in the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas, not to be confused with the gospel of Thomas, that actually makes its way into the Quran where Jesus is making clay birds beside a river. And then he breathes on the birds and they become, well, so back up. The Jewish officials see him making play birds and it's the Sabbath. And so they get really mad at him. They go to find Mary and Joseph,

basically to get him in trouble. And then Jesus breathes on the birds. They turn into real birds and the evidence flies away. And that story is in the Quran. It's one of the stories in the mentioning of Jesus in the Quran, where the author of the Quran clearly did not know the difference between apocryphal and canonical. And so incorporates it because they didn't know any better. But you read some of these other stories or stories about Peter staying at a house and the bed is full of bedbugs. And so he rebukes the bedbugs in the name of Jesus and they file out one by one outside of the room. They're like, you read these stories and then you go back to the biblical Gospels and you realize, oh, they're actually kind of matter of fact.

Like, they're really trying to give you a clear picture and not go over the top, whereas there's letter writings that are, have no qualms about going over the top. And that kind of level, if we're talking about the hyper-skeptic, that actually lends credibility to these early documents as historically reliable. But in terms of the people who want to incorporate those, there's a complication in regards to just historical reliability and verification. These documents are clearly embellished. They're full of all sorts of other things. They're portraying Jesus as a pagan mystic, which, and showing no evidence of first century Judaism, second temple Judaism, anything like

that. They're making Jesus palatable for a pagan Roman audience. And so by that nature, they undermine their credibility. So good, man. Honestly, it feels, West, like there are deities or spirits over certain ideologies. And I don't know, they masquerade with this, like, I see it as like a 4D chess move. I don't see this as just human beings getting creative. It seems like they're getting some of this. They're using the occult practice to get some of this information.

They're mixing it in and they're putting it back out there. and people are running with it, and you have these huge groups of people that embrace it. And depending on how spicy it is, he can really take off, you know. It can really become a thing. And maybe you can sell five copies of your book or you can sell five million, you know.

And I think depending on how seductive the spirit is behind some of these movements, determines its popularity. But it seems as though there's a lot of these rabbit holes that it reminds me like Dan Brown, Nate, like where you have this whole idea of this secret bloodline that the Holy Grail is actually like this child, right? You have this and that idea runs wild.

It's a novel and people start to believe this narrative. Yeah. I guess why I really appreciate your work in the things you're doing because I feel like in a time where people are, are looking for evidence and can find it in all sorts of semblances, if you will, online, that the more that we can provide this evidence for the text that we base our faith upon, the more we can be assured that we are not being deceived in a sea of deception. It's always been that way, right?

So I'm not saying this is new. it's always been the sea of deception meant to to to draw the image barriers of the most high God away from him right this has been this is this is this is genesis beginning this is the beginning of the beginning right but it's we live in unique times where I feel like you like we talked before TikTok YouTube these people can digest things in such short short pieces they didn't they don't follow up or look for the evidence in it that I just feel like the work and that's why I really appreciate it. work, man. It's been really a pleasure to have you on because we shouldn't be afraid to look for the truths, even in our own faith, right? We shouldn't be afraid of that. In fact, in fact, what you contend, and the evidence shows, the mountain of evidence shows is that

not only can we trust the Bible, but it stands up. Archaeology, you know, linguistics, documents, it all stands up. In fact, in a way that you really can't replicate, as we just talked about earlier in the show, with things like Robin emperors. Who is the leader of the entire world, right? It's, I love these conversations.

I'm a history nerd, and Nate knows this. Like, whenever we get into history, whether it be biblical history or archaeological history, ancient history, these are my favorite conversations because I just, I feel like we don't look. You know, it's the old adage, right? if we don't if we don't learn history, we're doomed to repeat it. And I, and I, I do think it's so important to also know why we believe what we believe. Yeah. No, I really appreciate that. And, and that's what I'm dedicating my life to. And I'm under no qualms that this isn't also a spiritual battle, right? Right. What does Paul say to the church in Ephesus for we're not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the

present darkness against the spiritual forces of the heavenly places. And so Satan and the demons have been around at confusing people and misleading people for a lot longer than, you know, the Billy Carson's and the Richard Dawkins and the, you know, whatever, whoever you want to insert there. And so there's a level of, yes, I'm a historian. I'm a linguist. I'm a paparologist. I'm a, you know, insert all these kind of academic categories. And man, I, I'm so appreciative. And it's a true honor and privilege to be able to study those things and to do things like handle near 2,000 year old manuscripts and see the verification. But one of the things I say in the presentation that I give on the reliability of the Bible

is, man, if my presentation had you walking out of this room merely believing that the Bible was a collection of historically reliable documents that probably came from eyewitness testimony, then I think I would have failed because the Bible is no. less than that, but oh boy, is the Bible more than that? Because the Bible contains truths that go far beyond the material world, right? You matter more than you are matter. And we don't just believe in a physical world. We believe in a spiritual world, which is stuff you guys highlight on your podcast. And also, when Jesus asks his disciples in Mark chapter 8, who do you say that I am? That's arguably the thesis of the entire Bible. The whole 66 books is point.

pointing to Jesus because Jesus is, I mean, you can find him in Genesis, right, in the promise of redemption. And then he's predicted by the prophets. And then he shows up on the scene, first century, and he predicts his own death and resurrection and makes audacious claims, claims to be God himself. And then he pulls off what he claims, right? And I would argue the people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead. And so that means we need to take that seriously. There's this great quote by C.S. Lewis where he says, Christianity, if true is of infinite importance, and if not true is of no importance, but the only thing it can't be is moderately important. It's either everything or it's nothing. It is a zero-sum game.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And so, I mean, I think we live in a day and age, like you said, Luke, where we're so privileged to be able to actually dig into this evidence and see these documents. And information fatigue aside, I think it's really. important that we're conveying just the mountains of evidence as clearly and as concisely as possible because people need to know this stuff because people need to be saved and delivered from sin and hell and the consequences of knowing the proper historical information don't just stop here on this side of eternity but they go into time without end there's a mic drop there I love that I uh

Well, man, thank you for this, Wes. We'd probably love to have you back at some point to continue conversations about it. I mean, I think we could talk for hours about this, but because your work is public and because you're putting it out there for folks to see, like we want to just give you a shot to chance to tell people where they can find what you're doing, what you're working on, your videos. You know, folks listening, you can get out there and look at Wes's work because this has just been a, you know, a quick 90 minutes, if you will, of, you know, scratch on the surface, an overview of what you've spent 10,000 hours doing. And so if folks want to engage, where can they find what you're doing, Wes? Yeah, well, right off the top, thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it.

As many opportunities as I can to talk about this stuff I try to take because heaven knows my wife is sick of it. So somebody's got to listen to me, right? I have the same thing at home here with blurry stuff. Yeah. Yeah, so if people are interested in what I'm doing, they can head over to Wesleyhoff.com, W-E-S-L-E-S-L-E-E-O-F-F-F-F.com. That would be the easiest place.

That's where you could find all my social media handles, the infographics, videos, articles, blogs that I produce. I also work, as was mentioned, as the Central Canada director for Apologetics Canada. So you can go to ApologeticsCanada.com, and you can find out where I'm speaking next and what conferences we're running if you happen to be in Canada and happen to be in Ontario, we're going to be running a conference in Burlington in November,

so that's kind of the next upcoming big one that we're doing. But we run three conferences a year across this country. So apoliteticsCanada.com is a place to go. Otherwise, you'll find all of the other stuff that I do at Wesleyhoff.com. Awesome.

Thanks, brother. Thanks, man. It's great. It's good to get you, man. This has been a pleasure. Yeah, likewise. And a privilege, because I really, I really love just all the history and the documents. And just the defense of the faith, right?

Like, I just think it's such an important topic. And I think easily people are pulled in directions by persuasive deceptions. Thanks, man. This has been fun, dude. And I, yeah, I love it. Well, we actually may be getting to Canada at some point in the next couple years. We've talked a little bit about doing one of our little conferences up there. But if you ever come down to Tennessee, you end up this way in Nashville, West, better hit us up because we're both on opposite ends of Nashville, Tennessee.

Nate's north and up south, but we love to see you, man. So we just appreciate the team. That would be great. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, Wes. Appreciate it, bro. Thanks, man.

Yeah. Cheers.