The Michael Knowles Show - Wes Huff DEBUNKS Top 10 Bible Lies with Michael Knowles

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

Are some of the most popular Bible “facts” actually fiction? Michael Knowles sits down with theologian and apologist Wes Huff to debunk the top 10 Bible myths that just won't seem to die.   Whether you’re a skeptic, believer, or somewhere in between, this episode will challenge what you think you know about Scripture—and equip you with truth, history, and theological insight.   - - -   Today’s Sponsor:   PreBorn! - Help save babies from abortion at preborn.com/KNOWLES Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I am occasionally accused of belonging to a church that added books to the Bible. I think it's more complex than that. Augustine considered the larger canon of Scripture, and Jerome considered the shorter canon of Scripture. Does that ever shake your confidence in principle in the inerrancy of Scripture? You know him from bodying heretics on the Internet. If you don't know Wesley Huff, you certainly should. He is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada.

a great pity that he has to live up in America's evil top hat. He was also born in Pakistan making Wes my favorite Pakistani. Wes, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'll take it. I don't know how many about Pakistanis you know, but I'll be your favorite one if you really want me to. You've increased my number of Pakistani friends dramatically just by coming on the show right now. Yeah, doubled them. Wes, a lot of people, I think, were first introduced to you because you absolutely destroyed this kind of new agey hair. on the internet. And we don't need to get too into it. It's a magnificent multi-hour conversation that ends in pyrotechnics. But it raises a lot of questions for people. A lot of people

believe things about the Bible and Christianity that are just not so. Some more outlandish than others, but some of these legends recur and recur. So I was wondering, since you are an expert in ancient texts and obviously apologetics. If you could, well, if I could tee these up and you could just completely knock them down, the first one, I've heard this for some time, have you ever heard the story that Christ traveled to India? And I've heard some of the ways I've heard this told

is Christ went to India and studied with some Buddhist yogi or something and learned the sitar like George Harrison and then came back to the Holy Land. and that's how you explain Christianity. Yeah, well, this one actually comes from, there was an individual in the 19th century, a Russian individual named Nicholas Notrovich in 1894, who wrote a document where he claimed that Jesus traveled to India and Nepal.

He said that he went to this Nepalese monastery and that the monks told him there and he found documents that talked about Jesus of Nazareth, who went there and learned Hinduism on his ways through India and learned about Buddhism. And that's where when he eventually comes back at around the age of 30, he gets his esoteric teachings. I mean, unfortunately, for that, you know,

this comes from the idea that there's somehow lost years of Jesus because the Gospel of Luke in particular, it has this story of Jesus being a 12-year-old. But other than that, you get his birth story and then you get him being a traveling itinerant Jewish rabbi as an adult. But even if we look at what we can see from the historical, historical sources from the Gospels. I mean, Luke tells us that narrative in chapter 2 versus 41 to 52 where the 12-year-old boy Jesus goes to the temple and, you know, Mary Joseph promptly lose the

son of God. And it says there that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. And so that implies that he's at least there doing that, growing old as a human being. Matthew's Gospel actually in chapter 13, when Jesus goes back to Nazareth to teach, the crowd, they respond by saying, isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't this Mary's name? Isn't his mother's name Mary and aren't his brothers, James, Joseph, and Simon and Judas? And so that at least implies, you know, this is the equivalent I've heard it said of someone saying like, hey, isn't this the guy who we went to prom with? Like, they know who Jesus is, right? So they're very familiar with him. So if he had left and become some sort of traveling Jewish sage who learned Buddhism

and Hinduism, you wouldn't get this kind of response because what we see when we eventually do get Jesus as the adult is that he is a first century second temple Jewish rabbi. We're not seeing multilingual cosmopolitan ecumenist guru. We're seeing what we should see in terms of his teaching and in terms of what exactly fits for the time frame. Jesus is a person of his day in terms of being a first century Jewish individual. He's communicating Jewish things and his influence. influence is the Hebrew scriptures. And that makes sense. Yes, on the Emmaus road, I recall our Lord

opening up the scriptures, not the Bhagavad Gita. And even, you know, as you mentioned, you know, Christ grows in wisdom and in stature. He is subject to his mother and stepfather after they find him in the temple. So there's another irony, which is there's a story that St. Thomas the apostle goes to India. And I've actually been pretty close to where. he was. He should have landed down by the tip and he died in Chennai, India on the other coast. And I think there's a mountain there, Mount St. Thomas, I believe, where his body supposedly is. And there will be people who question this. They'll say it's so ridiculous to suggest that the Apostle Thomas actually made it all the way to India. But it's not at all ridiculous to suggest that

Christ himself about whose wanderings we know quite a lot more that he went to India and learned how to become a yogi or whatever and then came back and somehow no one knew about this for 1800 years. The next one. The notion that the Genesis creation story is copied word for word from the enuma elish. I'm probably mispronouncing that. But this notion that the Genesis story is totally derivative, even a copy from a pagan tradition. And so, you know, there's no reason to really give it any credence in a particularly Christian way.

Yeah, well, you didn't mispronounce it, so you're not off to a bad start in that regard. All right. But the Anuma-A-Lish is the, it's a Babylonian origin story. And I think that's important to highlight that, you know, Genesis 1 is a creation story. The Anuma-A-Lish is the Babylonian origin story. Now, there's a subtle but important difference there because the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures, they believe that matter and the created order was more or less eternal. and deities come from the creation, whereas in the Bible, creation comes from the one true deity.

And that's important to note too, Michael, because the Anuma Leish is polytheistic as its assumption. The idea of a single creator god who not only makes everything but exists outside of time, matter, and space, that's a feature that separates something like the Anumaeelish and the Book of Genesis. And in the Enumelich, the slain gods, because there's this big battle, they become, things like the earth. And humanity springs from the dead god. So a Tiamat, the sea goddess, is slain by Marduk, and her body is split into two and half becomes the earth and half becomes the sky. And that humanity is brought forth from the blood of Kwenku, Tiamat's advisor, who also loses the battle along with her. So we also have no linguistic parallel. So you can see the content

is very, very different. And so if we're ascribing a word for word or a plagiarism, I mean, all you have to do is read each text and see, listen, that's not what we're dealing with here. And then if we look at the languages themselves, you know, the Acadian and the Hebrew of the Anuma Alish and then Genesis chapter 1, the parallels, such as copying or plagiarizing for something like the Anuma leash in the Akkadian text and then the Hebrew Genesis, I don't think evidence literary borrowing and there are no legitimate connections between the content. So though both are Semitic languages originally, as they're written, I don't think we have an issue of causation, right? We have an issue of correlation in sort of broad ideas that are general ancient themes.

But in terms of trying to establish a correlation versus causation issue, if we want to say that something like the Anuma-Aleesh is word for word of Genesis, we need to establish a causative link. And we just don't have that. So why would people say this? Is the answer as simple as just sheer ignorance and presumption? Is there any other reason why they would draw this parallel? Yeah, I think it's a bit of that. I think it also is it's not that you can't draw parallels. There are generalities that we can find.

It's similar to when people say that Jesus is also copied from ancient pagan deities in that this is sometimes called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, where you have this image of a Texan who is firing shots into the side of a barn. and then he promptly goes and he draws a target around the closest cluster of shots, making himself look like a great shot, right? And so if you find enough of these parallels, you can draw conclusions, but that's not honest with what's going on. So you can say, okay, well, here we have an origin story or a creation story.

So I would make the differentiation between those two. You have certain themes that come up. There's chaos being ordered, which is pretty much common to any ancient Near Eastern story. and you have the waters being kind of the first, the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters of the deep. And then you have similar waters in the Anuma leash. But these are generalities that when you get into the specifics, you know, sometimes I like to say, Michael,

that arsenic and Advil both come in pill form. But it's not the A on the pill that, you know, makes me choose one or the other randomly when I have a headache. It's the differences that make the difference. that make the difference. And in this case, there's a little bit of ignorance, there's a little bit of cherry picking, and there's probably a lot of wanting to downplay what Genesis actually is and its implications for the rest of the story that plays out. All right. Well, to get to the rest of the Bible, what about the claim that the Ethiopian Bible

is the oldest Bible that we have and therefore, I actually don't know that this would necessarily follow even that dubious premise. Therefore, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the first church, perhaps even the true church. I like the Ethiopians quite a lot, but that seems like a bold claim. Yeah, so there are a number of assumptions going on there. I mean, the first copies of the Bible that we have in terms of Old Testament, New Testament, the Old Testament is Hebrew, the New Testament is Greek, and we have Old Testament Hebrew copies like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Greek translation of the Old Testament in the collection of the Septuagint, and then we have the Greek New Testament. So the Ethiopian Bible is written in a language called Ge'ez, and our oldest copy of that comes in the form of a collection of manuscripts called the Garima Gospels, from potentially as early as the 4th century, but the extant manuscripts go anywhere between the 4th and the 6th centuries. But this is only the four Gospels.

And they're very much a translation from the original Greek into the ancient Ethiopic language of Gaez. We, of course, have copies of each individual book of the Bible that exist in independent scrolls and books that predate these by centuries. So both, you know, in the form of the Hebrew Old Testament and even the Greek translation of the Old Testament and then the Greek New Testament. The earliest copy of a Genesis to Revelation Ethiopian Bible actually comes in the ballpark somewhere. between the 14th and 16th centuries. So we're talking middle ages. I hear this online. No, no.

I hear this online a lot. I, to be totally honest, don't know where it originated. But there's a picture of an old Ethiopian guy holding what looks like a very, very old manuscript. And then you always see the headlines of, you know, first Bible ever discovered. We actually know the story of how the Ethiopian Bible kind of originated. There is a, there is a document that a number of documents. actually that tell us that Syrian missionaries brought versions of the Greek translation of the Hebrew

Old Testament and other Jewish literature and the Greek New Testament down to Ethiopia into what was then called the Kingdom of Aksum, where it was translated into Gaeas in and around the 4th century. So we have that cataloged and we can pinpoint where the Ethiopian Bible actually found its inception. And it is very much a translation from the Greek that pre-existed it and did pre-exist it, arguably going back to the originals by the authors we see in our New Testament in the first century. Yeah, this one was a bit of a head scratcher when I read it because of the fact that I'm certainly not a Bible scholar, but because the Ethiopian Bible is translated from the subtoagint. That means the subduigent pre-exists the Ethiopian Bible. I think people just like it

because Ethiopia sounds kind of exotic and because they like the idea of the book of Enoch, which is included in the Ethiopian canon, but not in the Western canon. Maybe we'll get to that in a little bit. Before we get to that, more legitimate and substantive question, though, I want to raise another really stupid point that people bring up, namely that magic mushrooms, you know, like psilocybin or what, you know, kind of spooky psychedelic stuff is actually at the heart of the origin of Christianity. I don't have a bong on set that I can rip before we delve into this very silly suggestion, but have you heard it before? Yes, I have. It seems to have started with an individual named John Marco Allegro, who was a legitimate Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. So this was an individual who

worked on part of the original editorial team that was evaluating the Dead Sea Scrolls when they were discovered, you know, between the late 1940s and the 1970s. And so this was an individual who actually had credibility in terms of his credentials. However, he wrote a book called The Sacred mushroom in the cross where he really starts to go off the rails. Now, this was, Wes, if you don't mind the interjection. That book came on like 1970 or something, right? So we're kind of reaching peak, hippie, psychedelia, druggy. So I'm not downplaying his credentials.

I know the guy's a real scholar on the Dead Sea Scrolls. But, you know, that time period, I mean, who wasn't taking magic mushrooms back then? Right. Well, I wasn't around, so I wasn't. So I can at least exclude myself from that group. But yeah, it's interesting because I've read Allegra's work. And he and actually his fellow contemporaries chastised him quite a bit because a lot of his thesis was predicated on etymology, which is the study in origin of words.

And he connected particular important words in the Bible, like the word Christ. And then he kind of made these causation links that he saw to a few other religious texts. and then to some of these ancient fertility cults having what he described as hallucinogenic experiences with plants. But based on this, he came to this conclusion that Jesus did not exist. And the gospels were more or less a hoax and that what Christianity turned into is nothing more than a misunderstanding of ancient fertility cults, that the object of worship was a psychedelic mushroom. And one thing to keep in mind is that no scholar from any background. Now, I mean this, honestly, religious or secular, either in Allegro's Day or now, accepts Allegro's

theories and conclusions based on the actual arguments that he makes. And because his theory is fringe doesn't necessarily mean it's false, right? Just because nobody else in the world or academia is on your side doesn't mean it's not true. But I think it should raise flags for like the entirety of ancient historiography, linguistics, particularly though I think philology because if you talk to people who study things like languages like Assyria or sorry Sumerian not Assyrian you'll see that Allegro's conclusions are really problematic and they're problematic because they just don't connect where they should and even Allegro's daughter wrote a book where she went through her dad's notes and

kind of highlighted some things that actually revealed that Allegro didn't really know Sumerian, that he was kind of jumping to these conclusions, and he was really using words that sounded similar and then trying to make connections, because Sumerian and Hebrew are not related linguistically in any way. Sumerian is a language isolate. Hebrew is a Semitic language. And so it's kind of the equivalent of, you know, Stephen Seagal, the martial artist, has the last name Seagull. And the seabird, a seagull, well, they sound the same. So, you know, actually, all seabirds are martial artists. Yes. And there is no such thing as an historical Stephen Seagall. He's never really existed. He really is a figure that was created in the imagination of people

who worshipped birds. Is that about right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think you're on the right track. I see where we're going. Yeah, we're off to a good start. Yeah. So it's that type of level of argumentation. And, you know, he was a smart guy. And so you read his book and even myself as someone who's very interested in this, who study these things, often found myself getting lost and trying to make the connections. So I think Allegro, unfortunately, as the sort of inspiration and origin of this myth, if we want to call it that, was just not just off base, but actually he was all of his underpinnings for his arguments were faulty. especially if the centerpiece of it is that Christ never really existed, which I've heard before,

it seems to me we know more about Christ as an historical person than just about anyone else of his era. I mean, not literally anyone else, but we know a lot about him. Do any serious people seriously doubt his existence? I mean, I think I can comfortably say that of people who have accredited PhDs in some relevant fields, historiography, New Testament studies, biblical studies, classics, that would touch on historical Jesus. You probably can count the people who doubt his existence on two hands.

And that's probably for everybody who's currently holding an accredited degree in those fields right now. So it's not that nobody does, but it's that it's the evidence, like you said, Michael, is just so overwhelmingly substantial that even if you want to be a hyper-sceptical scholar and say, well, we really can't know anything other than he was probably baptized by John the Baptist and he was crucified under the leadership of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, but really nothing else we can say about him. I mean, that's still granting that

he existed, that he was, you know, an influential Jewish rabbi and that he was crucified. And so, you know, the bear, bear, bear, bear, bear bones of that, and I think we can obviously say far more than that historically. To doubt his existence entirely is really a pretty, pretty fringe. Okay. Now, speaking of life, death, resurrection, there's a related concept that comes up in the fringes here, which is reincarnation, not resurrection, but reincarnation. There's some theory floating around that the early church taught reincarnation, but that this truth, of the faith was condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in the 6th century. I was not there at the council. I don't think reincarnation was condemned there because I don't

think it was ever taught in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong. No, you're right. It is an interesting accusation because we know approximately what the Second Council of Constantinople was. It was called for the goal of doubling down on the Calcedonian Creed, which affirmed dogmatically that Jesus was both fully God and fully man, combating the heresy of Nestorianism, which taught that Jesus's divinity and humanity were separate and that Jesus was actually comprised of two separate persons, the human Jesus and the divine Lagos. And so you would first have to establish that something like reincarnation was even on the table for this conversation. And also you have to account for all of the manuscripts of the Bible

that predate the sixth century and would not have been known at that time because we have copies of, say, the gospel of John, the gospel of Matthew, certainly all of the Pauline epistles, that were buried in places like Egypt and Syria hundreds of years before the Council of Constantinople ever happened. So if we're pulling out a doctrine, we really have to ascribe some sort of almost omnipotent ability for the individuals at this time to go find these manuscripts. alter them, put them back in the sand for us to find, you know, in the 19th century, and date them to that time and do this systematically throughout all of the ancient world. And I think this brings up an interesting point, Michael, these types of accusations, you know, reincarnation not being

compatible with historical Christianity or ancient Judaism aside, what this assumes is impossible because we know from the dissemination of how the Christian documents were copied and then spread throughout the ancient world, that it negated any one group or one person controlling the text of those documents at any one point in time for this exact reason, because the early Christians were very eager to get these documents in the hands of people. And so, with only a couple hundred years, you have copies up into the British Isles, you have copies of these books all over North Africa, the Middle East, into Asia and Europe. And so we just find copies, even if they're fragmentary of the documents of, you know, the Old and New Testaments all over the place.

And so if anybody, you know, pick a council, Nicaea, Constantinople, you know, you can insert any name of any ecumenical council that took place. If you want to say that they did something in terms of editing, a doctrine or a concept, you have to account for Christians writing in previous centuries, the manuscripts of the Bible. And, you know, it's just, it's an impossibility. Yeah, it must have been a real hassle, you know, to send the various bishops all to the ends of the earth to secretly edit all of these manuscripts. But on the point of reincarnation, I have a friend of mine who's Jewish, and she's relatively conservative. I don't know exactly what flavor of Judaism she belongs to. But she told me that Jews believe in reincarnation.

And I thought, that's new to me. I mean, you know, I guess my only text is the Hebrew Bible. I haven't, you know, read like the Talmud or really no one's read the Talmud. You know, it's very, very long. And then I looked into it and it seemed like maybe there was some kind of Kabbalah concept that maybe touched on reink, but I don't know. Have you ever come across that or do you kind of limit your scope of inquiry to Christianity? I mean, it's certainly not a concept that would have squared with ancient Judaism. So like pre-70 AD before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, you have a very strong line of thinking of the resurrection, right?

which then leads into what we believe as Christians about the resurrection of the dead. He even reads something like in the Maccabees, first, second and third Maccabees, when the Jews are being slaughtered and we have instances of, you know, them being their hands being threatened with being cut off and them folding out their hands and say, you know, cut them off, I'll get new ones in the resurrection. That doesn't, the resurrection is not reincarnation. Those are fundamentally different ideas. And I can say, especially during this period, during like the Hasmanian era, when you have stories like first, second and third Maccabees taking place, the understanding of the resurrection of the dead is very concrete.

And that plays directly into what we see in the New Testament theology. So I think at face value, I don't know about, say, like, mystic Judaism. Yeah. Yeah, rabbinic Judaism. I'm not an expert in that necessarily. Maybe some rabbi in the Middle Ages gave credence to it somewhere. But in terms of ancient Judaism, I think what we see, especially in understandings of what takes place in the afterlife, I'm not sure. I'm not sure that's compatible.

Right, right. Maybe if our Lord had gone to India and studied under some yogi, maybe then he could have believed in reincarnation. But alas, it didn't seem to happen. Okay, what about this one always comes up? because, as you know, I'm a mackerel snapping papist myself, and I am occasionally accused by some of my Protestant friends of belonging to a church that removed, or rather, that added books to the Bible at the Council of Trent,

that there were really 66 books of the Bible, and then the dastardly Catholics added extra books, so they got it up to 73 at the Council of Trent in response to the Protestant Reformation. Now, you are not a mackerel snapping papist like me, but you are a great scholar of these texts. So what say you? Yeah, here's what I would say. I would say throughout the tradition of canon list that we find between like the second to the fifth centuries,

there is certainly precedent for both the Protestant and Roman Catholic canon traditions. I would say that to say that Roman Catholics added books or that Protestants removed books is probably not being honest with the data. There's a long conversation that happens. Everybody agrees on the 66, right? We can all agree. In the Reformation, what basically happened is that the Protestant reformers said, let's cut out the noise and agree on the minimalist canon that we all agree on.

But you can find individuals throughout church history, individuals like Pope Gregory the Great, who wrote a commentary on Job, who says that Maccabees is not scripture. And, you know, even in the Reformation, the people who put Jesus, the people who put Martin Luther on trial, guys like Cardinal Humanees and Cardinal Ceyatan, in their own writings, say that what later become the Duderow canonical books,

they have that title, are not scripture. And neither did De Starius Erasmus, who compiled the Greek New Testament that actually was used, then to translate things like the Luther Bible and then the later King James Bible, as its base text primarily.

He didn't believe that the other books were scripture. So in one sense, at Trent what you get, from the Roman Catholic tradition is the official infallible ecumenical decision of what is Scripture. However, I think that it's not that there isn't precedent to point to individuals in the ancient world who actually talk about these as Scripture. I mean, the famous ones are that Augustine considered the larger canon of Scripture and Jerome considered the shorter canon of Scripture. And so we have these conversations all throughout history. But I think in sort of the polemics of Roman Catholic

and Protestant divides, I think we're not really playing very fairly when we just accuse each other of adding books or taking out books. I think it's more complex than that, even though I would say that I am fine and actually more than fine with having just 66 books in my Bible today. But I think there is, you know, as history always is, it's much more complicated than easy, pithy statements. Although easy pithy statements, I think you and I, Michael, both very much a preach. I do. I love them. And, you know, I actually, it's funny you mention St. Jerome, because across from me in my desk in my office, I have Caravaggio's St. Jerome writing because there's a skull there, and it's a memento mori that I need to stop wasting time and actually do my work. And it's not the most effective painting, but it's pretty nonetheless. And St. Jerome, famously, the translator of the Bible, did not agree with the inclusion of some Deuterocanical work. I think including Jude, you would know better than I, but I think he didn't think that Jude should be canon. But then what do you make of this? What do you make of the Senate of Rome?

which is usually the example that's cited. But then other ones after Rome, you know, hippo, Carthage, much later on, the Council of Florence, all occurring before Trent, but starting really with Rome saying the Deuterocanical works, which the Protestants would call the Apocrypha, that they are in the canon. You know, that's not just some pope or even some saint, or even the great saint translator of the Bible, Saint Jerome. Does that not, is that not binding, you know, to say, look, at Rome and later, affirmed by these other synods and councils, we include these books, even if some great

scholars and churchmen and saints didn't totally buy them. Yeah, well, I think what I would say is that, you know, you have these ancient canon lists. And actually a friend of mine, Dr. John Mead, has written the official documents on ancient Christian canon list that's published by Oxford University Press. And I would really encourage everybody to look into, you know, to really dig into the matter if they're really interested in this in how the early Christians have a conversation about these things. The Council of Rome is not an ecumenical council. It's a local council. And so it has no kind of official binding in terms of that. I think what we can say is that early Christians provide these canon lists to provide at least some degree of clarity. I mean, another one that's pointed too often

is Athanasius' festal letter, where he provides a list, which more or less agrees with the Protestant list, in terms of some of these disagreements. I think if you, were to go back in time and ask these people, were you choosing the official canon of Scripture? I think that they would be a little bit uncomfortable with that and saying, you know, these are the ones that we hold to as that which we derive doctrine from, that which we pull theological dogma in terms of faith and practice for the church. But I think without, you know, going back in time and hopping in my time machine or reading their minds, I think they would be hesitant to say, well, we are making any type of a

official delineation on this. And one of the reasons I think we can know that is that during Trent, you still had back and forth with people who were likewise uncomfortable with kind of the official pronouncement because there was even disagreement going on during that day. But the historical precedents for both canons, I think, is there. I think that it's more on my side than is on your side, Michael. But that, given that, I don't think we're being fair if we just kind of say, well, it's this counselor, it's that council, or officially until you get to Trent, and then you have, from a Roman Catholic perspective, an infallible proclamation on what is canon. And even, you know, Deutero-canonical, that's second in terms of reception, not an authority.

Yeah, yeah. Now what about speaking of books that are, well, a book that is not included in either the Protestant canon or the Catholic canon, but it sometimes comes up. What about the book of Enoch, which I don't know. every time I speak to people, especially people who are a little bit hippy-dippy, they love to bring up the book of Enoch, which relates to this other thing that I don't really know that much about, the emerald tablets, the emerald tablets, which I really only know with reference to like medieval alchemy and all sorts of weird esoteric writing. But the claim that is the full statement, that the emerald tablets should be observed because Thoth, is linked to Melchizadec and Enoch, the putative author of the book of Enoch, the book of Enoch included in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, but not in the Catholic canon or the Protestant canon.

Enoch is actually related to Hermes Trismegistus, this Egyptian kind of mystical figure who crops up in all sorts of writing throughout the Middle Ages and onwards. Was that confusing enough? Yeah, I think I got a little bit busy from all of the connections that are being made across large spans of time. What I would say is in terms of reliability, Enoch has far more ancient historical reliability

than the Emerald Tablets. And I'm impressed that you know about at least the alchemyic tradition of the Emerald Tablets that come out of the Middle Ages. That's actually, though, completely different from the Emerald Tablets of Thoth. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth were invented in 1925 by this guy named Maurice Doriel,

who considered himself a self-taught, Egyptologist, and he actually claimed in 1925 that he went to the Great Pyramids in Giza and discovered this artifact in the pyramids that he called the Emerald Tablets of Thoth. And then he produced a translation of said document. Now, his tablets disappeared, which is always convenient when these people come up with these things. And so no one could evaluate them. All he had was his translation. But he never actually produced any evidence of the tablets, merely told people that he did.

And no archaeologist or Egyptologist today thinks that the Emerald Tablets of Thoth are anything of note, that they're just a fabrication of this guy's imagination. And actually later on, he changed his story and said that they were by divine dictation by some sort of spirit guide. Classic. Many such cases over the course of history. Now, how did they relate, the thing that this guy made up in the 20s, how does that relate to the Emerald Tablets as this kind of weird quasi-magical, you know, alchemic? text from the Middle Ages. Or it just doesn't relate at all. So I think what there are,

there's this tradition of an emerald tab. Now, that's the emerald tablet. So it's a singular. Whereas the emerald tablets of those are plural. So Marie-Storiel said that he found multiple of these and he translated them into these documents. But the emerald tablet in terms of the alchamaic document is a single tablet.

And that has, it pops up in the like middle, middle ages and there's different versions. And there's different versions. versions of it, that claim to go back into antiquity. But like everything else, in terms of the tradition of alchemy, they're really not. It's a little suss. Yeah, that's right.

So Thoth is the god of knowledge in ancient Egypt. And so I think what the connections are between like Malkisadec and Enoch is that you have these traditions of people within the ancient world. you know, Malkisadek in Genesis is then played upon to, by the author of Hebrews to say that he has no beginning or no end. Maybe that's the connection. Enoch is this kind of elusive character. He's the great grandfather of Noah.

It says he walked with God and he talked with God and then he was no more, sort of alluding to the fact that never died. He was taken physically to heaven. But maybe that's the connection. Other than that, I really couldn't draw any linear lines between the dots because I think the Emerald tablets are made up anyways. What about, okay, that's good. That all makes sense and affirms my priors, which is what I look for in any good answer.

But on Enoch himself and on the book of Enoch, and getting back to the question of the canons, why is Enoch not included in the Western canon? Why is it only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church? And why, one, who wrote it? Was it Enoch or is it pseudipigriful? And two, if it's not included in the canon, then if you accept Jude, for instance, as the Catholics do, doesn't Jude refer to the book of Enoch? And so if Jude refers to the book of Enoch, a book that is not canonical, then how can that be

canonical? And what are we left with? Yeah. So the book of Enoch that we have, which is usually first Enoch. There's actually a first, second, then third Enoch. But when you talk about the book of Enoch, you're usually talking about first Enoch because that's the one that has, you know, the book of the washers, the book of the giants. And so that's the one that claims to be talking about Enoch, the grandfather of Noah. Now, we know from the Jewish tradition that there is no overt indication that anybody actually considered it as having origins in divine inspiration. In fact, if you read some of the early Jews who wrote about it, guys like Josephus, Josephus very overtly states that there were no books that were written before Moses that hold authoritative precedent. So,

it could not have been written before, you know, Moses compiling the Torah. So it couldn't really be written by Enoch? No. And there are actually problematic texts within the book of Enoch. Enoch 71 called Enoch, the son of man and the ancient who comes to the ancient days, alluding to Daniel chapter 7, which is exactly what Jesus describes himself as when he stands before the Sanhedron at the end of the gospel of Mark. So in that sense, I think there's kind of maybe heredical.

problematic sections of Enoch that describe things to Enoch that we would say are only and can only be described of Jesus. At the exact same time, first Enoch is kind of hodgepodge in what we have today in that the earliest sections in Aramaic and Greek that are part of, say, Dead Sea Scroll fragments are in fact ancient. They're, you know, second century BC. But there are sections in Coptic that are contemporaneous with the New Testament authors. And it comes all together in what we call First Enoch. But it is kind of an amalgamation where we can say there are some books, Book of the Watchers, Book of the Giants, those are genuinely ancient.

But they also show indications internally of coming from the Hellenistic period. They refer to timekeeping that appears to be influenced by the Greek timekeeping. It also refers to places that only exists after the Exodus period. So it talks about Mount Sinai, which would not have been, you know, known in, you know, a pre-flood era. So I think there are some things, you know, it's very interesting. It's clearly a book that is written by ancient Jews that are trying to figure out, okay, what's going on in Genesis chapter 6 with the flood? What's going on with the supernatural creatures that we refer to as angels and demons and seraphim? and Nephilim. So in one sense, there's kind of some like thinking out loud that's going on in

the book of Enoch. And it clearly is a very popular book. It's debated whether Jude quotes it officially or just alludes to a something that's going on there because what Jude includes is not necessarily a quotation that we can find from any of the Enochan documents. But he's clearly referring to something that his audience is aware of. But I would also point to the fact that Paul quotes Greek philosophers. He quotes Menander as he quotes a poet to Zeus. And so you don't have to be quoting something that is scripture to be using a piece of literature that's applicable to your audience. Yes. Yeah. I think that that's kind of what really knocks it down is pointing to the book of acts and saying, well, I don't know if Paul can quote pagans, I think, you know, clearly a canonical book,

can refer to something that's not canonical. Now, speaking of the pagans, what do you make? And we alluded to it a little bit earlier of the claim that you hear ad nauseum, especially around Christmastime when people bring up, you know, the Feast of the Unconquered Sun or Mithras or whatever, Saturnalia, that our Lord is actually just a copy or a composite of pagan gods, Mithras, Horus, Dionysus, I don't know, whoever else. What do you make of it?

Is our lord just a facsimile of a pagan demon or something? Yeah, well, the simple answer is no. But the longer answer is that in order to establish that, you really need to show, once again, causation, right? Not just correlation. We can find correlative patterns all over the place. We could pick on them and capitalize on them. I am using a microphone.

Michael, you are using a microphone. I am in an office studio. Michael, you are in an office studio. I bet you have a laptop in your room. We're both wearing shirts and pants. You know, ah, interesting. You don't know that for fact, Wes. You know about the shirt.

You don't know that for a fact. We don't know that about either of us. Let's just assume that we're both wearing pants. We both are drinking from tumblers, mugs, you know. So we could draw all these correlations and say, well, Wes Huff doesn't actually exist. He is just a copy of the far more popular, far more influential. Michael Knowles. He's just a Protestant version. And the Protestants wanted their own Michael Knowles. And so they created this fabrication. People say this all the time. I see it all over

the inner. They say this Wes Huff. And he's just, he's got that Jordan Peterson accent on there to make him even more popular. Yeah. Yeah. Take all the best bits. Okay. And so, but that's not a coherent argument. It's just correlations. It's if you want to find parallels, you know, had parallels all over the place. I've even seen some as simple as Horace gets in a boat and Jesus gets in a boat. Gotcha, Christian. And so we really need to, we need to show causative links. And a lot of these really fall apart when you start looking at the specifics. You know, okay, what's going on with Mithras? Was Mithras virgin born? Well, all of the stories that we have say, you know, either nothing about his birth or that he came from Iraq. Well, not really what I consider a virgin,

you know, birth. Or, you know, he was created. out of nothing from Zohorah Mazda. Okay. Well, you know, that's not what I believe about, you know, the physicality of the incarnation. So it's in the specifics where these things die in that you can find all sorts of parallels. But once again, Texas sharpshooter fallacy. If we want to paint those targets around those closest clusters, we can do that. But it's going to ignore all of the shots that are all the hundreds of more potential shots

that are all over the other side of the barn, as opposed to the five shots that I'm drawing my target around. There's so much more to say first, though, but at preborn.com slash annoles during this holy season, I would like to take a moment to think about something amazing, and that is you. Psalms tells us that God carefully knit you together in your mother's womb. You saw who you were meant to be before you even existed. At preborn ministries, they believe each person is made in God's image and that all life is sacred and eternal. Maybe not all pregnancies are planned. That's okay.

whether planned or not all life has value and God has a purpose for everyone each day that they're here. Today, I invite you to thank God for the gift of life and to remember the babies still in their mother's wombs. Their lives matter too. Last year alone, preborn's network of clinics helped save over 67,000 babies from abortion. Your tax-deductible donation of $28.00 sponsors one ultrasound, which doubles babies' chance at life. When a woman sees her baby on an ultrasound, she becomes 100% more likely to preserve her baby's life. How many lives can you help save today? To donate, just out pound 250, say keyword baby, or visit preborn.com slash Knowles. To make a donation, I strongly encourage you to give what you can, whatever it is. I don't care if it's $2, whatever you can, go to preborn.com slash knolls. Thank you for

supporting this life-saving work. Okay. Now, what do you say about a similar claim, that the Trinity is not in scripture, that the Trinity is actually just invented centuries later? And, I mean, You know, you do actually hear this from people who today would call themselves Christian. Small group, but still you do hear that. Who deny the Trinity, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the central mystery of the faith. 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. Yeah, I would agree. I don't think you can have Christianity without Trinitarianism. I think the father sending the son in the power of the spirit and the self-giving of himself and then empowering believers to then live a Christ-filled life is essential to the Christian faith. I don't think you can have anything other than that and it be historical, biblical Christianity. Now, this accusation often goes in kind of the vein of people saying that the word Trinity is

not in the Bible, which I'm totally fine with because the word monotheism is not in the Bible either. And the Bible is clearly monotheistic, right? So it's not that we have to find. It's kind of the fallacy of specificity in terms of language. The early Christians are coming up with ideas. Okay, the father is described as Yahweh God, the son is described as Yahweh God and the spirit is described as Yahweh God. We don't believe in three Yahwehs, right? Only one Yahweh. Here, Israel, the Lord is God. The Lord is one God. So how do we then parse this out in a way that is coherent that is theologically and philosophically valid? And so that's what you get in terms of the Trinitarian conversations. But I think it's all there. One of my favorite ways of describing this

is by the scholars Rob Bowman and Ed Kamjowski, who actually just published an updated version of their book, Christ and his critics, in that they come up with his acronym H-A-N-D-S. that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat of God. And if you go through, you can find all of those in describing God, the Father is given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat. The son is given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat. And the Spirit is given the honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat.

And those are things that are only given to God we see throughout the Old Testament. And I would even argue that God is complex within his unity in the Old Testament too. and that the ancient Jews would not have had a problem with this because you get passages where Abraham is dialoguing by the Oaks of Mamra with Yahweh. And then Yahweh goes on after the two other angels have gone down to Saddam and Gomorrah. And then it says, I believe it's in Genesis 18 or 19 where it says, Yahweh on earth rains fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven. You're like, wait, hold on.

There aren't two Yahwehs. So what's going on there? And throughout the Old Testament, have the presence of God in the Shachaina glory on the ark. And yet, God is ruling and reigning in heaven. So there's a tangible presence that is on earth and there's a presence that is ruling the universe in glory. We would say as the father, right? We could argue that that's like a pre-incarnate. It's a pre-it's a Christography, right? You have theophanies. You have Christophonies. And so I think God within his complex unity is described all throughout the Bible, all of the books of the Bible, old and New Testaments, but then it's found in its culmination in describing, right?

John 114, you know, the word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us, but then John 118 that no one has ever seen God at any point in time. And yet the one and only gone, he has made him, who is in the bosom of the father, he has made him known. He's exegeted him, is actually the word in Greek. He brings out who the father is. And so the Trinity is all there, right down to Jesus' baptism, where the father is heard from heaven. The spirit descends, and then you have the son being baptized. And then we're told to then baptize in the onama, the singular noun name of the father, the son, and the spirit. And so you have the one name, but then three persons are described.

And it doesn't really seem to matter if the word Trinity shows up. Because you know what else is not named in the Bible? It occurs to me. The Bible. The Bible is not named in the Bible. There's no list of canon in the Bible. And yet we all think that the Bible matters to the faith, don't we? Yeah, I think we, you know, these demands of specificity miss the point in that we can come up with language.

I believe in the hypostatic union. And we, that doesn't mean that I'm going outside of the Bible and that I'm limited to biblical language. I think that's a rather foolish argument to, you know, constrain our ability to describe what's going on in scripture simply by scripture. That doesn't mean that scripture isn't sufficient. It just means that there are ways that we kind of come up with how we describe the truth that's in there, but describe it in a way that's understood. Now, okay, now on inclusion and exclusion from the Bible, what about the claim that the story of the woman who's caught in adultery who's about to be stoned is not found in the earliest copies of scripture that we have? Yeah, so that is actually true. And I would say, you know, I have an article on my website called my favorite verse in the Bible that's not in the Bible.

And that's this passage, right, John 753 through 811. It's known as the pericapae adultery. And it's not found in any of the manuscripts prior to the 5th century. And the first time it appears is in a document called Codex Beza. And it does in a few important medieval manuscripts that contain the story. Like there's the 12th century minuscule 1. The story is placed after the Gospel of John is finished. And then the scribe in minuscule 1 has an explanatory note stating that the story

isn't found in any of the manuscripts that he has. and it's not in the possession of the references of the church fathers. And I think he mentions John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria. But he says he's aware of this story and he thinks it sounds like an authentic Jesus story. And there does seem to be precedence in a few quotations from the early church fathers. So what do we think is going on here? Well, I don't think John wrote it. I think the language and the syntax and the way that it breaks up the text between the end of chapter 7 and the beginning of chapter 8.

Now, remember those chapters and verse divisions are later kind of, descriptions to the text to make it easier to read. Nonetheless, I think it still breaks up the narrative. However, I think what we see within that story that has early precedent within the early Jesus community for some early Christian writers who appear to be quoting it is that it's probably an authentic Jesus story. It just wasn't written down by John. And so in that sense, I treat it like I treat some of the patristics, the early church fathers. I think it has value and it has meaning. And even John himself says that he didn't write down everything that Jesus ever did. And if he tried, you know, the sky.

The whole world, right? Yeah, it wouldn't be a scroll long enough. So I think we can see from the pattern of what rings true of an authentic Jesus narrative that the story of the woman caught adultery fits. However, because I do not believe John wrote it, I would kind of hesitate in calling it inspired scripture because I think what God inspired John to write is what was inspired for the gospel of John. However, I am fine with holding it as a story that rings true. I don't actually think we lose anything of the character of Jesus in terms of his forgiving of sins or his care or his humility in terms of that. But it appears to be a beloved story that crops up very early within the second century, but that we have kind of a spotty manuscript history of this

particular texts throughout the manuscripts and scribes are always putting asterxes beside it and saying something's going on here that we're not totally sure. But scribes usually include things rather than take out things to be safe. And so I think, you know, if I'm preaching at my church and I come over it, I'm going to have a story, I'm going to have a sermon that explains something like textual criticism, how we know what the original text of scripture is and how, you know, these things kind of play out in history. But Michael, I think this is very encouraging that we know exactly what is and isn't in scripture.

The only reason why people even doubt the story of the woman caught adultery is because we are able with such a high degree of confidence to be able to pinpoint what is and isn't scripture or what kind of has a question mark over it. And the vast majority of these are one or two words long. And if you're curious about them, modern English translations have trans have, citation notes at the bottom of the page that will tell you what's going on. If you open up to the, you know, John chapter 7, the beginning of chapter 8, your Bible is going to have a citation note there that's going to explain what's going on. So we're honest with the text. And as someone who

studies manuscripts and the text, I have an incredible level of encouragement and confidence to know exactly what is and isn't authentic, even if there are some question marks around certain texts because we have such a rich manuscript tradition within the history of Christianity. Does this cause any problems for you over, say, the inerrancy of scripture? Because for me, as a mackerel snapping papist, I do not exalt private judgment all that high. And where there's a conflict between my private judgment, the magisterium of the church, I defer to the magisterium. You know, listen, I'm not being falsely modest. I'm not the dumbest. in the world, but I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the world. And so if, you know, going back to

the Council of Rome, as we were discussing earlier, and then all the way up through the Council of Trent, if the church tells me, this is the Bible and I can know with certainty that this is the inerrant word of God, I say, okay, I don't need to worry about it anymore. You, delving, you know, professionally into all of these, the minutia of the minutia of all of the textual questions that arise in ancient manuscripts, does, when you come across something like, you, when you come across something like the woman who is caught in adultery that doesn't necessarily appear until centuries later. Does that ever shake your confidence in principle in the inerrancy of scripture? It doesn't because that which I believe is inspired and inerrant is that which was originally

written. And I believe that we can get down to what that is and isn't. I think that we have such a rich tradition that the tenacity of the scribes all the way out throughout history is able then, in 2025 to have me be able to say, I have an incredible level of evidence on my side to ascribe this as what it is. Now, I think you likewise, Michael, can take an ecclesiastical position and say that, you know, there's a rich church tradition that has accepted this. And there are even some Protestants that would take that position as well and ascribe, say it's not necessarily what John wrote. There's a reception history that is included within that conversation. Now, I take a differing opinion on that, but I understand

that. And I think that if that's the position you're going to take, you also have a lot to go on with that in terms of it being attributed very early on within the early Jesus community with individuals who are then likewise quoting it as something that is authentic about who Jesus is. So where I would say I'm interested in what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote as opposed to scribes later on, I still think both you and I, even though we might take different methodologies to describe what is inspiration, both have a lot of evidence in our side for the positions that we take to actually have confidence. Right, right. And I love your point, too, which is even if you don't take it as a matter of magisterial authority on any matter of your faith, we know so much about these texts,

so relive, the phrase you use the tenacity of these scribes that you really can't question a lot of this stuff. If you look into it, you're going to get the right answer. I have a little rapid fire around because we could be chatting for hours. But this pops up every now and again. Mostly on Twitter. I'm not saying this pops up in the scholarly community. But does the Bible teach that the earth is flat? No, I don't think it does. I think you have a language of perspective that goes on. within the ancient world in terms of like talking about the four corners of the world or the four principal winds or the pillars that uphold the earth or god using the earth as a footstool, I don't think because we're operating with phenomenological language, that that then means we have

to take a hyper-literistic interpretation in the same way that if you, Michael, you know, prior to the program were telling me about amazing sunrise you saw and how beautiful it was, I wouldn't go, are you kidding me, Michael, you're an idiot. The sun does not rise. It doesn't rise. The earth is going around the sun. The sun isn't going around the earth. Are you an idiot?

Don't you know it? Are you a heliocentrist or, you know, what's going on? Come on. You know, we use phenomenological language to describe things. And I think scripture in particular is largely, it's a looking from the earth up to God. in terms of understanding. That doesn't negate that it is divinely inspired. But you look at something,

here's a good way of putting it. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are looking at who Jesus is from the earth up. And they're emphasizing certain things, which are emphasizing humanity. John is looking from heaven down. And that's why he starts with, in the beginning was the word, and the word was God,

and the word was God, and talks about the Logos being, you know, the creator of all things, and nothing that has been made was not made without him. And so, but we have, of Scripture that are looking from the ground up. And that doesn't compromise its inspiration, but it does mean that it's using language that we understand within our human context, whether that's the ancient Near East or it's Greco-Roman antiquity or, you know, how we often

talk about things like sunrises or sunsets today. That doesn't mean we're making a statement about cosmology when we're talking about a sunrise. Right. So I think we need to be clear. What is being said and communicated because some things are prescriptive and that they tell us what to do. Some things are descriptive in that they're telling us what is happening. And some things are emotive. The Psalms and Proverbs are communicating something that is not necessarily meant to be, you know, the same thing as Leviticus or the same thing as first and second kings. So it's a matter of really understanding the genre and then extrapolating that in a way that makes sense of ancient. literature that is being written by ancients, but though it is not written to us, it is written

for us. And so understanding what is written to, allows us to be able to understand us today and apply to our lives. You know, there's a good line from Cardinal Barronius on the topic of geocentrism and heliocentrism, which is that the scripture tells us how to get to heaven, not necessarily how the heavens go. Even there was one time a guy came up to me, said, Michael, you really like Dante. and I said, I do really like Dante. And he says, well, do you accept Dante's cosmology? I said, well, you'll have to be a little more specific. What do you mean by Dante's cosmology?

He says, well, do you believe the earth is flat? I thought, wait a second. Not only, I think, are you misreading the Bible here? You're misreading Dante because Dante understands the earth as a sphere. And in Dante's cosmology, Satan falls, goes through the earth, and it causes Mount Pergatory to emerge on the other. side. So even if you're taking it on like a beautiful medieval poem, most people have known since antiquity that the world is round. I'm going to be pilloried in the comments for suggesting

that the world is not flat. Next one, the Bible says that dinosaurs did not exist. If you believe in dinosaurs, you cannot be a Christian. Well, it doesn't say that they don't exist. It just doesn't talk about them at all, right? So absence of evidence is an evidence of absence. And so just because the Bible is not talking about something very specifically. It doesn't mean that it didn't exist. And I think if this is a question about, you know, the age of the earth, then that's kind of a different discussion as it comes to what we're looking at within the pages of scripture. But there are lots of, say, other creatures that the Bible doesn't talk about, that even if you take a young earth perspective, a creationist perspective and say that the Bible is only, you know, that the earth is only 6,000 years

old, and that's how the Bible kind of communicates it, then I don't think you necessarily have to have the Bible talk about dinosaurs specifically. So I don't really find that an overly convincing argument. The Bible isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of everything that has ever happened or been done. The Bible tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know, and maybe we want to know about dinosaurs, but that is not the purpose of the Bible. Also, it occurs to me, the modern people now, they're trying to argue that dinosaurs were basically just, chickens and they had feathers and everything. And there is at least one chicken in the Bible. They caught crows, obviously. So I don't know. Maybe there's a little evidence, even for the

modern people and the Darwinists. Anyway, who knows? Final one. Final on the rapid fire. I really, really, really hate this one. Most of these don't bother me because they're just kind of silly or whatever. This one really actually bothers me and it's popularized, even in Hollywood movies, that our Lord was married and in fact married to Mary Magdalene. You find that anywhere in the Bible? No, it's not in the Bible. It's kind of a hodgepodge. There was a book written called Holy Blood and Holy Grail.

They kind of first surmised this theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. There's also kind of a Nicholas Notrovich, who we were talking about previously, who came up with a theory that Jesus went to India. Some of his followers in the form of like Amadea Muslims who don't believe that Jesus was crucified and that he took off to India and he lived and he died there, that he got married and he had children. There's kind of a narrative there as well. Most often in circles that I'm in, you have kind of the connection points between the Gospel of Philip, which talks about Mary in a very kind of almost romantic way with Jesus. And then there was that

discovery a few years back by Karen King at Harvard University, the famous Gospel of Jesus's wife manuscript, which was outed as a clear case forgery. It was the individual who forged it, although he did use authentic material from the fourth century, he made a bit of a mistake in that some of the wording that he was borrowing from the Gospel of Thomas, he was using an online PDF version called Grandin's interlinear of the text. And there was a typist error in this PDF document of this transcription of the Gospel of Thomas, and he includes it in his forgery. And so we are able to actually pinpoint and say,

hold on a minute. Mistakes in PDFs don't usually make themselves into ancient manuscripts. Are you sure it was not an ancient PDF? It could have been an ancient PDF. Yeah, yeah. It's a PDF papyrus document for, I don't know, the folio. Folio of it.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So usually people who want in the more conspiratorial side, they'll combine these texts of, there's an interpolation in the text of the Gospel of Philip where it says that Jesus loved to kiss her on the mouth, but her and mouth are kind of in holes in the manuscript. And so they amalgamate those and they kind of put this together and put Mary's name in there. And then when the gospel of Jesus' wife came out, this was used as part of this kind of a multivalent argument that, you know, this is also evidence that Jesus was married. There's no

historical evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or anyone else. Otherwise, he was a single celibate individual who was crucified in and around the time of 33 AD. And that's all she wrote. That's what we know. And so in terms of anything else, it is either conspiracy or speculation and it's not historically reliable. Wes, I really like on that phrase, that's all she wrote. I really like that whenever any of these stupid ideas come up, I can turn to you. I'm not saying that you can do it with perfect AI robotic precision, but you seem to know just about all she wrote about these topics. You seem to have compiled into your mind basically all of the manuscripts.

Well, I appreciate that. My wife is sick of listening to me talk about this stuff. So as long as people like you are still calling me, then I will have an outlet to be able to because we have a no Greek at the table rule. Who doesn't? Who doesn't? I know. We all do. We're all there. But I appreciate that. I can indeed tell you that there are topics.

I'm a Canadian who doesn't watch hockey, so don't ask me hockey questions. Let my country down on that one. But if it's to do with ancient manuscripts or historiography or linguistics, I do my best because I'm just that type of nerd. No, it's really marvelous. It's good. And maybe I'll institute that rule at my own dinner. the no Greek at the table, which will be just a terrible problem on Suflai night, if I want a little Uzo after my dinner.

But, you know, say lavi, I think it's probably right. You know, you keep your scholarship in the scholarly realm and something you've done that's really wonderful. You bring that scholarly realm out to the public to correct so many errors on the Internet and elsewhere. So, Wes, thank you very much for coming on. Everyone should go obviously follow, Wes, if you haven't already. and you should go watch that previous Smackdown that Wes did online, which was great.

Wes, I really hope that we can have you back very soon. I know you're busy and you're producing children. Well, your wife is producing children, but you're involved in it too. So the next time we can get you on to talk more ancient Christianity and debunk more nonsense, I very much look forward to it. I do too. All right, thanks, sir.