Truth Unites - Bart Ehrman Agrees With Wes Huff on the Isaiah Scroll?

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

Gavin Ortlund discusses Bart Ehrman’s agreement with Wes Huff on the remarkable stability of the textual transmission of the book of Isaiah, and argues for a more fair and charitable approach to evaluating Christian apologetics, scholarship, and counter-apologetics.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Well, my friends, the great Isaiah Scroll has risen again. Many of you remember this discussion back in 2025. The famous word-for-word discussion, some of you are aware of this. If not, you'll get caught up to speed in this video. It looked like this debate had finally come to rest, but Bart Airman had other plans, and he has released a video just yesterday, I think, that he's responding to this same portion of the Joe Rogan-West Huff interview. This is about two minutes, but it's worth watching to the end.

Give this a watch. When you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that's in the Bible? So that one is fascinating. So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages. Whoa. Yeah, so it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years.

And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text. Word for word. Word for word. Wow. Yeah. So this is the great Isaiah Scrolls. Yeah.

Well, that's true. Yes. I think we said this on the podcast recently that the Isaiah scroll is quite amazing. And it is comparable to Maseretic. The problem is that you have other scrolls. like the Jeremiah scroll that's not nowhere close. And so it's, you know, he's right, he's right to say that. I think if you don't point out that it's a, he did say,

he said it's not true of all the other scrolls, but in fact it's not true of any of the other, I don't think. But so it's, yeah, so, you know, that was right. That was actually my second follow-up question was, why does he not talk about the preservation of any of the other Hebrew Bible scriptures found in the Dead Sea Scrolls? And I assume it's because... Well, I mean, he had three hours, so I guess he would have had time.

But I think it wasn't... I don't know. I mean, my hunch is, of course. I mean, usually with apologists, they want to show that we still have the exact words that Isaiah wrote. And so if you've got a manuscript that's a thousand years earlier, then the other one we had, then you've got thousand years of it being written the same way. He doesn't comment on, you know, how much it got changed before the Dead Sea Scroll version of Isaiah and during those 700 years, how much scribes change it then.

But it is a remarkable thing that you have this scroll. And so, you know, I agree with that. It's just you don't want people to get the wrong impression from that. That's the only thing. Now, when I watch this, I have to confess, I laughed. I was thinking, why didn't we get Bart Airman into this discussion the first round? What I've suggested in my prior videos is actually word for word overstates the case, but the broader substantive point is correct.

The textual transmission of Isaiah is remarkably stable. And that is why Airman's response is so interesting, because he's hardly an evangelical apologist with an incentive to exaggerate this evidence, yet he recognizes the legitimacy of the underlying point. And this is what I pointed out in my follow-up video on this topic, that this is commonly recognized that the Dead Sea Scrolls testify to the care with which the book of Isaiah was transmitted. And I pointed out some examples of scholars noting that, speaking of it as a matter of wonder.

The agreement between Masoretic text and the various Qumran documents is striking. We have an amazingly accurate preservation over these two millennia. The scribes did a first-ray job preserving the text accurately. The reference to the overwhelming identity between these two, and as an astonishing tribute to careful copying.

I'll put those quotes on the screen, but you can go back and watch my initial video and see them in context. What I also discussed is how tiny the majority of these textual variants are between the different copies of Isaiah, and I worked through the first two verses of the book, and I just gave some examples, you know, talking about the name Uzziah or a Vov being added,

but it doesn't, you still translate it in the days of and so forth, just trying to give some texture to the terms here, so people following along can understand how rarely the text. variants even show up in English translation. There are a couple tricky passages, but the overall point is absolutely true that the transmission of the text of Isaiah over this thousand-year period of time is remarkably stable. This is the video where I went into that, by the way. So that's kind of all in the back story here, but I just wanted to make one observation. From watching Bart Ehrman talk about this about how Christian apologetics is sometimes treated, especially on the internet.

Now, this is not directed at Bart Airman's clip. The portions of his video I watched were respectful, and I appreciated that. What I'm thinking of right now is some of the broader reactions, especially smaller videos and comments and just the way people draw conclusions. Sometimes you feel this jealousy to say, no, you know, you don't want people to go in the wrong direction. So I'm thinking especially of some of the reactions to Wes's appearance on Joe Rogan. And the concern that I have is sometimes people neglect to distinguish between imperfect wording

and the larger substantive apologetical issue. So people go from, well, it's not technically word for word, even though honestly it's not far from that. It's pretty amazing. But it's not word for word. That's overstating it. Therefore, Christian apologetics is being sneaky again, right? And often on the internet, sometimes elsewhere as well,

you have this framing like the apologetics is on one side and the scholarship is on the other. the scholarship is determined by the data, the apologetics is determined by the dogma, and the working assumption is often that because apologetics has a religious motivation, this makes genuine scholarship impossible. And while I do agree, apologetics sometimes acts in a way that serves that framing and deserves criticism, I want to protest against that in two ways. First, a religious commitment is not necessarily opposed to a sincere interest in

in truth. The metaphor I often use is suppose your friend is criticizing democracy and you want to argue that democracy is a good form of government because that's your sincere conviction and you start to give arguments and your friend labels you a democracy apologist. Okay, and they're trying to use this to dismiss you and you're like, you know, that label doesn't say anything about whether the arguments are good. A person can be deeply committed to a conclusion and still pursue the question honestly, and that's true for religious commitments as well. And this is how I feel about Christianity. After a lot of wrestling with my faith and continuing to try to court and receive objections, trying to be open to consider them, I genuinely still believe God exists and Jesus is that God

revealing himself to us. And that conviction doesn't eliminate my desire for truth so far as I can tell. It's the result of my efforts at truth. And so for me, apologetics is an effort. to defend what is true, and I think that's the same case for many Christian apologists as well. Second thing, though, is that apologetics is not the only form of advocacy that is operative in these discussions. And so previously I've talked about, I've used this label of counter-apologetics. By counter-apologetics, I don't mean scholarship that just happens to reach conclusions that Christians dislike. I mean advocacy aimed to undermine religious claims, and often that advocacy will be just as ideologically motivated as Christian apologetics, just in the opposite direction. So in the past,

I've talked about this. Again, I'm not actually thinking of Bart Airman's video right now, but you see this a lot. I've talked about this in some of my responses to Dan McClellan on monotheism in the Old Testament. So, for example, you get this framing. I'll put a, two stick figures on the screen. Apologetics versus scholarship. In the social media world, again, here's the jealousy to try to respond. I don't think that's what's really happening. I would want onlookers who are seeking the truth about these topics to envision more of a continuum, okay, with apologetics on the one side, counterapologetics on the other side, and scholarship in the middle. This isn't the only way you could frame it. But the point is,

both apologetics and counterapologetics can make good or bad use of scholarship, but neither enterprise is anti-scholarly in essence or necessarily. Now here's the video where I've talked about that more. That's treatment of monotheism in the Old Testament. So I'm not going to dwell on that point here, just wanting to kind of keep putting these things out there for hopefully people to wrestle with. Again, the appeal is not that there's nothing to criticize about Christian apologetics. There often is. The appeal is that all claims, whether they're apologetical, counterapologetical, use any other

label you want, all should be treated on a case-by-case basis and charitably received and evaluated on the basis of arguments rather than sort of move to the side because of a perceived agenda or motivation. But in this video, mainly I just kind of wanted to show that Bart Ehrman clip and state my appreciation for it. I know obviously Bart and Wes will be. We'll disagree on many, many important things, but here, Bart was willing to recognize the legitimate point that Wes was making. And that is the kind of intellectual fairness that I hope all of us, whether we're Christians or apologists or skeptics or scholars or whatever, can practice more consistently.