Full unedited unaltered Wes Huff vs. Billy Carson debate

All right, what's up, everyone? I'm trying to move this stuff, and, uh, yeah, they'll do an awesome job editing this intro to make it way more fancy than this. But I'm here with my good man, Billy Carson, who I've known personally for some years now. Yeah, solid friend, great character, businessman. He's been on Elevating Beyond last time sharing your whole story behind the story and what you hugely specialize in as well. You just came back from Egypt; it's like The Emerald Tablets! You've been studying those since what, you were like six or something? I

think—no, not The Emerald Tablets. Yeah, The Emerald Tablets I've been studying for the last probably ten years. Okay, yeah, but since I was six, I was studying aerospace technology, which then led me into understanding more about advanced technologies and then finding the link between advanced technology and ancient civilizations. I've been on a, you know, literally a twenty-five-year—twenty-seven year now—goodness!—Trek around the world. I've been around the world now over eighteen times. Last year, I spent nine months in hotels. I remember, as you know, you’re my witness, leaving this big old mansion behind and not going home

at all, and traveling nonstop to these ancient sites to get the information hands-on. Okay, and that was weird; I just heard a little chunk. Wes? Wes, you there? It's frozen. Be too easy if it works perfect, right? Yeah, I know. What is he calling in on? What is that app? This is through Stream Deck. I have to ask Carl; through it actually works great. Usually, there's something going on with the WiFi. I think it’s pretty cool; I'm just trying to figure— I think it's on his end, his connection. Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out

like, what is the name of this, this thing you're using, this portal? It's, um, I want to actually press...it's e—oh, I think it's all through Ecamm. Ecamm, okay. Got to—yeah, so they have their own link in it. Nice! You can set this up for different guests. You can make...when Carl was here, through like Eric Thomas, we were just doing the show, waiting for him to call back. Yeah, um, yeah, he helped get some of these pre-things going, but you can get way more fancy. You got someone that—yeah, I'm just like, how do I do it?

Yeah, I think it's a pretty cool platform. Let me actually try to jump back in. Okay, cool, so we'll figure this out in some editing and stuff, or maybe we'll just leave this in. As, um, Wesley's getting ready to jump on, Wesley Huff is here with Billy. You can watch the previous show, and I've had the honor of being on his podcast. So likeminded in so many ways, and I've been talking about this for a while. I'm like, it’d be interesting to have you on and discuss—I don't love overly getting obsessed with the word religion,

so I would say more of where some of the beliefs differ. If I were to be connected to a religion, it would be closest to Christianity and the Bible, although the Old Testament...I have still...it’s the New Testament and Jesus's teachings that have changed me and transformed me belief-wise as a person. And, um, okay, it says he's in the Green Room. Okay, and let's see; we got Wes on. Hello, hello, Wes! We got you back on, so I'll introduce Wes too. But yeah, what I was just saying real quick, Billy, too is—a shared belief, I think,

too with you, with God, is I also believe—no, I don’t believe, I know God is within me too. It’s just—and I don’t believe that it’s like you have to do twenty circles in the sand, and like do a ritual to that; that was through like my connection with Jesus where I know throughout my life, that’s—that’s been my—when things are tough, it’s like the strength of God is literally within me, right? So, like, where we do agree on, where like a lot of the heresies and stuff through over-religious practices would be like, "No, you have to

come through the head of this church to be blah blah blah," you know? Um, and personally—and we're about to get W on, so we can have two really smart people in this talking about it—but I'm just breaking it down to my level of my understanding. That's been what really drew me in is kind of when Jesus came and flipped all that on its head and was like, "No, we're not—what was it like the Pharisees? What were the hyp..." He's like, "We're not having to go through all the rules," he’s like, "they're actually worse than this

thief right here!" and really looked at what was in people's hearts, you know? Right, and I think that's a beautiful thing. I know it has been for my life, but I'm about—so, Wes, now that we got you on...Wesley Huff, historian, linguist, biblical scholar, PhD, and athlete! I like how you threw that in the bio right there! Um, and Wesley, my man, I think it would be great to—I know you guys were both recently in Egypt. There’s tons that I’m interested in, how all these things show up in Egypt is baffling to me. But just going

right to what I had here, Billy, you talk about how Jesus was never crucified, which is interesting because my wife, who’s a Muslim, believes that as well. Well, their beliefs, from what I understand from her, are that they don't think that Jesus, as they believe, is a prophet. God would have him killed, but I don't think they have any historical evidence, as far as I know, as to what or how or why they believe that. I'm curious for you guys both, and if you want to, I guess go first, Billy, as to how you came

about the findings where it seems that Jesus was not crucified; that's not accurate. Sure! In my videos, and if you listen to the podcast, the statement is according to the Sinai Bible. According to the Sinai Bible, Jesus wasn't crucified in that Bible. That Bible predates the King James version of the Bible, and the text there actually has about 12,000 to 14,000 differences between the Sinai Bible and the King James version of the Bible, which came much later. One of the things that were interesting is that they discovered the book of Jesus's wife, which is at

the Harvard Seminary. According to some scholars, that's a little controversial, but they claim that this is an accurate record that Jesus may have even been married, which then, you know, adds more—if that's true— to the hypothesis that maybe he wasn't crucified. I just personally believe that Jesus was an amazing human being. I don't think that he was the Son of God in the sense that he's God, but that we're all gods, as he said, "Ye are gods," and that we're to do greater things than him. I just personally believe that the return of the Christ

is the return of the Christ Consciousness, when we can all achieve a certain level of knowledge, wisdom, passion, understanding, empathy, and love that he came to this planet with. When we get that in our mind and conscious and we can act on those incredible actions, and that understanding, the whole world is going to transform instantaneously. I think the second coming is the coming of the Christ Consciousness to the planet, not a human being flying back to Earth to save people. That's just my personal understanding of how I've perceived it over many years of going through

this information and all this text. West, I'm going to let you respond to that. Again, everyone listening to the show, you know I'm always like, "Challenge everything! Learn to critically think and continue to come to your conclusions," even with Jesus. I'm not personally even waiting on that he has to come back; I already know, like I said, that the strength of God and Consciousness is already accessible. I can tap into that right now, so you don't have to wait for him to come back for those that believe he does to actually have that next level

of what that's supposed to mean. But, Wes, go ahead with what Billy was talking about concerning the book in the Harvard Museum. I heard something about Jesus's wife. Yeah, well, first let me say I think it's really cool to not just be in the room, proverbially, with you, Billy, but to actually interact with you, because I wish I could be there in person. Unfortunately, Toronto, Canada, is a long way away from Florida; it's a bit of a jaunt. But I really appreciate the fact that you seem to have investigated, to a certain degree, some of

these facts. Do you mind if I ask a clarifying question? Sure! When you say the Sinai Bible, what are you referring to specifically? It's the biblical text that was written; you can actually look it up on Amazon. It's a Bible called the Sinai Bible. I have a version at home; it's called the Sinai Bible right from Mount Sinai. I'm assuming that's the mountain that they're referencing there, but they put together their own version of the biblical text prior to the King James version being put out. Sure, so when you refer to the Sinai Bible, would

you be referring to Codex Sinaiticus, like the Codex that comes— Okay. That's why I was trying to get some clarification. Because you can actually go and see Codex Sinaiticus at the British Library; you can go and see it. It's on display, and the British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript. I work with manuscripts in my linguistic work—I'm an expert on early Christian scribal culture, particularly in Greek and Coptic manuscripts. I actually have a facsimile, so I have a photocopy done by the British Library of Codex Sinaiticus that I work with in my office. I

have it here, and the only reason I ask for clarification is that I want to make sure that what I'm addressing is actually what you mean, and not addressing something else because Codex Sinaiticus, in particular, is just a Greek manuscript—it's a fourth-century Greek manuscript. It comes from approximately between 325 and 350 AD, and its text of the Gospels reads almost identical to the modern Greek text that we develop translations from. My curiosity is just simply in exploring: when you say that it denies the crucifixion or that the crucifixion isn't there, I mean, I can go

on right now to Codex Sinaiticus, and I can look up the end… If you know, say, um, Matthew 27 where it has Jesus being crucified, and that’s in Codex Sinaiticus, or you know, the John 19, um, or any of the other ones, so I think my confusion is that it doesn’t read any differently. So, actually, are you able to pull up a website? Would the, like, viewers or listeners or whatever be able to see the version that I'm looking at? While he’s pulling that up too, like I keep saying to all the people that aren’t

scientists traveling the world in linguistic—I don’t even know how to pronounce it the right way, like me—linguists. What I keep thinking of is cyan, like the ‘PO cyani’ Bible, so is that like a version? From my own knowledge, when I really studied all this, what I thought was interesting about the Bible was how many different eyewitnesses— I studied C.S. Lewis back in the day—how many different eyewitnesses and stuff there were, and they went on purpose to mention so many other names that they were able to, like, cross-reference throughout history and throughout those times. From my

understanding, those were different things that I always thought were kind of interesting; that I felt was a good concept of proof. Um, and then I want Billy to answer, and I’m also just curious, like, the Sinai Bible, is that where? Was that piece? I found the text where I was referencing; actually, I misquoted there. It’s the Gospel of Barnabas. Okay, yeah, well, so that’s good. Um, so, uh, let’s deal with that too because I’ve actually worked with… There are two manuscripts of the Gospel of Barnabas. Um, the Gospel of Barnabas is a really interesting document

because it is a known forgery, and so that’s why I think it’s important to get to these sources. So, at the very start of the Gospel of Barnabas, we only have two copies: one is in Italian and one is in Spanish. Um, we see right off the bat that the Gospel of Barnabas—not to be confused with either the Epistle of Barnabas or the Acts of Barnabas, which are two apocryphal documents from the second century—but the Gospel of Barnabas in particular, uh, we know it’s a forgery because it does things like, um, in chapter 92, it

says that Jesus spent 40 days on Mount Sinai, and then he came to the Jordan River and he walked to Jerusalem. But Mount Sinai is more than a week's journey away from Jerusalem, and neither Mount Sinai nor Jerusalem are close to the Jordan River. So never mind there not being a route from the Jordan River to, like, around Mount Sinai or going to Jerusalem. Um, but there are internal problems with the Gospel of Barnabas, which indicate that it shows no actual indication of evidence of coming from even having knowledge of first-century Jewish understanding. It actually

says Jesus is the Christ, but not the Messiah, which indicates that whoever the author is, he didn't know that those were the same words. And I think a bigger problem is that the Gospel of Barnabas actually paraphrases Dante's Inferno, which was written in 1314. So, there's a lot of internal evidence that disqualifies the Gospel of Barnabas; never mind the fact that we don’t have any evidence of it prior to the 14th century and none in any other language other than, um, middle-aged Italian and, oh, sorry, yeah, Italian and Spanish. But the internal content of the

Gospel of Barnabas disqualifies it from being ancient, and then the fact that it’s doing things like paraphrasing Dante, or it also refers to a rule of the time of Jubilee, which was changed in the Middle Ages from what it was in the biblical Year of Jubilee, and it goes with the Middle Ages concept, not the ancient concept. So I think what I’m getting at is, so I’m a historian, and I deal with sources. So when I’m looking at sources, I want to make sure that I have a methodology by which I approach any type of

source. So if there is something that denies the cursive fiction, I want to make sure that I’m analyzing it, and that the methodology by which I analyze it actually reveals that the content can be accurately tied to the event. So if we’re talking about, say, Codex Vaticanus, that’s the 4th century. Now, that is—I would agree with you, Billy—our oldest copy of the Bible in the sense of a cover-to-cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible. Right? The problem is that we have individual copies of all four gospels going back hundreds of years before Codex Sinaiticus.

So, um, I have a facsimile behind me of P66. This is a late 2nd century copy of the Gospel of John. Um, I work with this particular manuscript—um, I can just show the screen right here. This is an almost complete copy of the Gospel of John, um, and it has the crucifixion. Any chance? Yeah, so Papyrus is just what it’s made out of. Um, so I got that from, uh, ChatGPT, by the way. Sorry, guys, just for a second—I have that. Oh yeah, so I’ll show you this. So, I make the documents you actually see

on my bookshelf behind me; they’re facsimile papyri that I’ve made. Um, so when I was in Egypt last summer, I went, and I got made for me some papyrus sheets. And so, I take these papyrus sheets, which are made from the Papyrus plant, and then when I go and I, uh, look at actual manuscripts—so I was at… The University of Philadelphia—um, last summer, I went and I saw a document called P1, which is a third-century fragment of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. So, what I did is I sat down with that original and

I produced a facsimile. First of all, I cut it out with an X-Acto Knife—um, not the original third-century one; on my papyrus, I cut out with an X-Acto Knife this guy. Then, I copied the text transcriptionally on the front and the back. So, papyrus is just simply what it's made out of, yeah? Um, and there are categorizing systems, and the standard one is called the Gregory-Aland categorizing system. Sometimes, when manuscripts are mentioned, they'll have a "GA" and then a number behind it. If it's made of papyrus, you simply abbreviate the word papyrus to "P," and

then you have the numbering system. So, P66, which I showed you earlier—that's this on the categorizing system. It's the 66th manuscript that was put into the system; it's from the Gospel of John. I also have, you know, P46 and P47 on my shelf, which include all four Gospels and Acts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries. So, the only hesitation I have with what you said, um, Billy, is that we have single copies of the Gospels that can be dated to the 2nd century that all do have the crucifixion. If we're relying on something like the

Gospel of Barnabas, which is not just—it’s not that there’s any ambiguity about it; it’s a known forgery. I mean, no one's referring to the Gospel of Barnabas as anything other than a known forgery. Yes, but I'm going to go with that. Let's talk about the Old Testament a little bit. Well, hold on, because do you mind if I address the Gospel of Jesus's Wife? Sure, go ahead. What was her name? Yeah, I'm trying to write notes like I know what I'm doing, but I'm just curious. So, the Gospel of Jesus's Wife doesn’t actually mention—so oftentimes

what happens is that the text of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife is kind of paralleled with the Gospel of Philip, which mentions that Jesus would kiss Mary Magdalene on the mouth. So, those are kind of used in—uh, in parallel to kind of support this argument that Jesus was married. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife is in the Harvard Library; however, the reason we know it's also not legitimate is because even though the manuscript, the papyrus that it's on, was carbon dated to the 4th century, the text was actually copied from a PDF version of the Gospel

of Thomas known as Grandin's Interlinear. There was a mistake in the Coptic text of Grandin's Interlinear that was copied into the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. So, we know that this is not a legitimate document, even though the papyrus is ancient. This happens a lot with forgeries. Um, I have a couple of friends who have actually worked on projects that have revealed forgeries within, uh, Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts and, uh, within, um, other ancient Christian papyri. The reason why we know the Gospel of Jesus's Wife is not legitimate—and that Karen King, who kind of vouched for

it, unfortunately lost a lot of credibility for herself—and she's admitted that it's a fake as well—was because we can tie it directly not to an ancient text but actually to an online version of the Gospel of Thomas in PDF form. The mistake on that PDF form was copied into the text that was borrowed in the phrasing of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. So, I just point that out as, once again, with our sourcing, I think we need to make sure that we're going towards not just early sources but actually credible sources. Unfortunately, neither the Gospel

of Barnabas nor the Gospel of Jesus's Wife are credible sources in terms of actually—and are agreed upon by not just the vast majority of scholarship, but I don't know anybody in the field of papyrology, paleography, or historiography who actually refers to these documents as being legitimate. That's fair enough. I can respect that. So, let's go into the Old Testament a little bit. Um, predominantly from my research, uh, I discovered that a lot of information from the Enuma Elish and the Seven Tablets of Creation is, uh, a lot of the—in Genesis, a lot of the creation

story that comes into Genesis—not all of it, but the—because obviously it's a smaller—Genesis is a much smaller version of a much bigger story. But, uh, it's literally, uh, almost word-for-word from the Enuma Elish and the Seven Tablets of Creation. The Epic of Atrahasis as well is also there in the Old Testament. Um, several other tablets—Tablets of Hammurabi and a few others—have made it into that text, Sumerian cylinder scrolls that, uh, talk about the creation story again. The creation story in the Epic of Atrahasis. So, we tend to see this, uh, this copying of ancient tablet

texts and scriptures—even some papyri—into, uh, the biblical text. Meaning that my point here is that I think a lot of people are saying that, uh, this information was written in real time. A lot of people believe that; if you ask the average person, they really believe that. But a lot of this information is just copied from older tablets. Texts from an earlier date, that’s what I found—that it's made it into the canonized Bible, but they never referenced that they got it from any other ancient texts that have to do with a totally different civilization and

totally different religious beliefs. Have you read the Enuma Elish? Yeah, I've done lectures on it. Do you mind summarizing the content of the creation account in the Enuma Elish for us? Sure. The Enuma Elish is a very ancient text discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal. The summary of it is that it really gives us a crazy, astronomical account of the creation of our solar system. It talks about planets and moons gaining specific orbits around the Sun. It talks about a huge planet named Tiamat, 46 times larger than Earth. Earth didn't exist at the time, according

to the author of this text, which is pretty interesting. Then, it talks about a nemesis of some sort. In the original version, it's called Nibiru, but in a more recent version, still thousands of years old, the name was changed to Marduk. Marduk is in a Jewish-American library in the biblical text, in the Torah, and so forth. He was a very popular figure in ancient religious texts. Marduk wanted to be the Destroyer, so Marduk is the one that, during its next orbit towards Tiamat, crashed into Tiamat, destroyed Tiamat. A huge chunk of it swung away, coalescing

the water, land, and organic material, which basically became our planet, Earth. The rest of it broke up into pieces; some of it turned into the asteroid belt. Excuse me, other parts of it were thrown towards the Sun, and some were thrown towards the inner cloud, towards the outer edge of the solar system. This planet, or this moonlet that orbited, proposed to be a brown dwarf based on the description of it, gained a very strange orbit around our Sun. We have the scientific evidence now, also, to match with NASA's data where we see that Saturn and,

I believe, Neptune switched places. Uranus is flipped on its side, and that's more evidence that something came through our solar system in ancient times and gravitationally tugged those planets, switching up their orbits and even pulling the axis of a planet on its own side, where the equator is now running north and south. So, a little bit of modern astrophysics kind of backs up what this ancient text is saying. But the Enuma Elish also begins to talk about the fact that these beings, it kind of cuts into the fact that these beings, you know, are on

Earth and at some point begin to engage mankind. In other words, they didn't create people from scratch, but they engaged the existing hominid and began to utilize us as workers for their workforce. In the Epic of Atrahasis, you see a much similar story. It’s slightly later in the time period but still thousands of years old. The Epic of Atrahasis tells a very similar story where the sons of God literally came down to Earth. They came from Mars, according to this text. If you read the translation of the planet Mars to English, they went to battle

in South Africa against Enki and Anu. They came to terms without going to battle; they argued that they needed women—human women, believe it or not—and they also wanted a workforce. They didn't want to continue doing the labor; they were cleaning out the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, digging canals, building cities on Earth and according to the text on Mars—not according to me. A decision was made by Enki and Anu and Enlil to allow this experiment to happen, where they would take the existing hominid here. They would slay one of the gods, meaning that they would, in

my opinion, not kill it, but somehow perform some type of genetic modification or manipulation—in my personal opinion, that’s my hypothesis. But in the end, it ends up being that human beings are now doing a lot of this labor and worshiping these beings as gods, as they, in my personal opinion, masquerade as gods. There are a lot of parallel stories you see in the Bible, even the Tower of Babel incident and many other bizarre stories that are in the Bible. You can find a lot of those true stories in the ancient texts, like the Epic of

Gilgamesh, where you can find the true story of Noah. They found the Noah tablet to give him instruction on how to build the ark. It wasn't a big boat; it was a round disc that he built with the sections cut up on the inside like a pie. That was discovered about four or five years ago, and I believe it’s at the British Museum now. So there are a lot of texts that have just been covered and copied over into the biblical text. In my personal opinion, a lot of people became a cargo cult, worshiping beings

that were masquerading as gods. I do believe in God, by the way. Let me make this clear: I believe in God; I believe there's a creator of the universe. The mathematics, the quantum physics, all prove that the fact that we're here. I believe this universe is imbued with a divine energy and a divine spark that lives inside all of us. I just don't believe that the God of the Bible is truly the creator of the universe. I don't think that God needs money. I don't think that God needs... Sure, do you mind if I just

jump in here for a second? Because I think we’ve kind of gone on from the original question. I appreciate that. I do have a few issues with your summary, although I think I have read the Akkadian version. My Akkadian is not great, but I sat down with an Assyriologist friend, and we went through it a couple of years ago. So, I think that there are components of what you said that I would say are in there. I'm not sure it’s the best summary nonetheless. Okay, going with what you said, you said that there were like

verbatim parallels with the biblical creation story. Even just going off what you said, which I think there are components of that I would agree with, you know, the Battle of the Gods, the concept of Enki and the younger god, and they fight Tiamat. Then Marduk, who swears he’ll defeat Tiamat, Quingu who kills Tiamat by shooting her with an arrow, and there’s this big battle. Then the gods that die end up being the earth and the sky and even us because we are the end result of that battle. I’m just curious, when you say that there

are not just parallels but there’s actual copying, looking at Genesis chapters 1 and 2 where the Christian story is summarized in the Bible, what are the actual kind of parallels there that you’re looking to? Because as someone who’s read both, I not only do I not find parallels; I actually, and this is the majority of ancient Near Eastern scholarship with me, think that Genesis chapter 1 is actually an apologetic against documents like the Enuma Elish. So what are the parallels there? “Separated the waters from the waters,” for example, that’s in the Enuma Elish, and that’s

also in the biblical text. Okay, that I would agree is a parallel. The only reason I highlight that is that if you’re going if you’re making this argument—because you brought it up—and I mean this with all due respect, there are superficial parallels. I would agree, you know, the separation of the waters, the concept of the earth being formless and void; that’s also in the Enuma Elish. However, I think all the other details—it’s the details that make the difference. If we’re looking at not the superficial crossovers but the actual themes and concepts of what it’s saying,

you don’t have a creation within seven days. You’re not going to take the Enuma Elish and put it into the biblical text. There are certain words that they utilize that let me know they copied it from that text. Like, for example, what words? “Separating the waters from the waters,” “the void,” “the earth being void”—that information is literally just copied over. So it tells you that somebody saw that and said, “Let me add it to this book right here. Let me add the scripture of this papyrus,” because it wasn't a book yet at that time. So

was this text discovered that makes it parallel to Genesis, and was this supposedly discovered prior to? I’m just curious. It wasn’t discovered prior to the Bible, but it dates back long before the Bible was ever written. Yeah, so let me just say this. The reason why I say it’s actually an apologetic against that is because the purpose of the Enuma Elish—which the Babylonians read every Babylonian New Year—was to point out the fact that, A, the deities—and there are countless deities in the Babylonian pantheon—actually come from the created order. So they’re not outside of time and

space; they actually come from the created order. When they die in this battle, when Tiamat is defeated, the defeated gods become the earth and the sky and the plants and even you and me. In that sense, the theme is that you don’t actually have any purpose or end result, and you’re not created in the image of God. In fact, in the ancient Babylonian system, only the kings were created in the image of God. What we see that is counter to that is that even sure, they’re superficial—you know, divided the waters—but we find that in almost

every society and culture. That’s not a parallel as much as just a generality, I would say. What we see within the biblical account is that God purposefully creates. There’s only one God. He purposefully creates, and then he creates and it’s good, and it continues to say it’s good seven times. Then at the end of chapter one, just for the thick people in the original audience, it says, “And then it was very good.” Then he creates humanity—not kings, but simply the humans that he creates in God’s image, and they have purpose and meaning, and that instills

them within this creation order. And that’s not what we find in the Enuma Elish. In fact, we find the opposite; in the Enuma Elish, the created order is not good; it’s a mistake, and that you are not created in the image of God. And there’s a reminder... That regular people are not created in the image of God. So linguistically, I mean, Hebrew does have Semitic ties with Akkadian; it doesn't with, um, Sumerian. Sumerian is a language isolate, um, a glutening language. But I would say just with all fact, the parallels linguistically are not there. There

might be superficial kinds of concepts that are there, but they're so superficial that we can find them in everything. In the sense of, I'm in this, I'm in my office studio; you're in your office studio. That doesn't mean that, you know, that we're the same people or we're even in the same place. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I don't agree with that. I just see, uh, if I have all these texts out, there's a lot of different information that you can see there. A lot of it's been copied word for word into the biblical

text. Um, but what's the word for word in your version of what you believe in? You keep saying that God is a "he"—why? And so where do you get that from? Um, well, throughout both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament, you have the, um, masculine singular pronoun used for God. And why does God have to be a man? Where's the evidence of this? Well, God isn't a man. See, within historical Christianity, we don't believe that God has a gender. However, the way that He has decided to reveal Himself is through the masculine

plural, and then ultimately by becoming a human in the person of Jesus Christ. So, we don't believe that God has a gender. In fact, the fact that God creates humanity in His image, and He creates them male and female, those are two aspects of the image of God. And so that's the complete view. Historical Christianity has never argued that God is gendered. Jesus is gendered in the sense that during the Incarnation, He becomes a human man, but He's still fully man and fully God. But God is spirit, and, right, as the scripture says, we worship

Him in spirit and in truth. But nobody's arguing that—what's that? Sorry, God; that always blows my mind. God is the same all the time, right? He's always good; it's always God. Is He all the same all the time, right? Yeah, but we do see that in scripture, God has revealed Himself through the, um, masculine pronoun, and there are aspects of God's character that we see within scripture that do actually communicate. You know, Jesus says that He longs to gather Israel like a mother hen collects her chicks. So we see aspects of, you know, the feminine

of God—not meaning that God is feminine, but that the image of God reflects both the masculine and the feminine. And that's why when, you know, the two become one flesh, there's a uniting of that that reflects the image of God as well within the covenant of marriage. Do you actually believe that the majority of Christians really believe that God is not masculine—that God has both aspects? I mean, it's irrelevant what the majority of Christians believe. How many would tell you, you know, that God’s not a man? They’ve never been taught this. Well, I was taught

it growing up. I was taught it in, um, when I was a child, when I went to seminary, when I went to Bible college. I was taught it in graduate school. Um, I would say here's, here's some things to that: I would say in one sense, it's irrelevant what the majority of Christians believe because what historical biblical Christianity articulates is what they should believe. You know, there are Christians who run around saying all sorts of things that are not in conformity to biblical historical Orthodox Christianity, and they shouldn't believe that because it's irrelevant. And so

if one Christian believes something that is not in line with biblical Christianity, I mean, that's on them. Um, so God is not gendered, but He does express through inspired scripture the masculine pronoun. That's pretty convenient, I mean, for an all-knowing, all-loving God to understand that human beings were going to take that and abuse it to put their boot on the neck of women for eons. It's pretty interesting. Also, I'm trying to understand— Yeah, I mean, so hold on. Let me speak to that because it is interesting. Guys, I— Yeah, sure. Um, if it was only

for the Old Testament, I would have a hard time following a lot of stuff. For me, like you said, putting the boots on women and stuff—it was when Jesus came that they were literally like, "Oh, if a woman—you can just accuse a female of having an affair, and then murder her." And that's like, okay, that was the—like, He just reminds me of anyone that cha—basically challenged everything. And people would say that it didn't contradict what's in the Old Testament, but however people were interpreting it—they were believing that they were following the Bible. Two women can't

do this; you stone them if they have an affair or if they're accused of having an affair. And Jesus—you know, as we know, the famous scene when they were about to stone her, He's like, "He who hasn't sinned cast the first stone." Basically, saying no one—no one's perfect! And was the first one that I know of that started, like, speaking to other tribes and other countries that people weren't supposed to—like, they were so racist and prejudiced. And He—this is where my heart opened up, is like... He stood for this love and this God that broke

down all these barriers and just flipped what all the scholars and everything was saying on its head. That's where I found that I believe that he was crucified because he went so far, like against the grain at the time. I get what you're saying too; there's stuff where it's like, "Oh, that's convenient," you know, where human beings can add in, "This is there and that's not." But something else that I always was curious about is, you know, if especially the New Testament was written by man and stuff and pre-planned, I think they would have done

a better job of not making a lot of the people so, um, like ignorant. The people that were literally with Jesus questioned him half the time: "Bro, I don't know if you can do this miracle," and Jesus is like, "Dude, you just saw me yesterday turn water into wine." If I was writing a story, I would want everyone to believe this; I would make the people not as questionable. They have so many characteristics where the humanity in it is what always drew me. Even one thing in the Old Testament, that David and Goliath—he kills Goliath,

a man after God's own heart—I'm like, if you're pre-writing this to be the perfect person after God's own heart, then he becomes king. You'd think to have the story end perfectly, but then he goes off to see he's watching this lady bathe nude, has an affair with her, has her husband killed. It's like he goes on to keep praying to God and coming back to God with a humanity, and God's like, "This is a man after my own heart." Finding all these human flaws, to me, showed so much of the beautiful struggle. I'm not going

off everything you guys are talking about, which is factual stuff. I'm just talking from my own experience of the ways where I drew and continue to draw my own conclusions. I'm much more about my relationship with God, personally with Jesus. It's the same over worshiping the religion because so many people can—I mean, we all know that wars are created, slaves are taken—there are so many horrible things that have been done in the name of religion. It's sad, and that's where Jesus comes back into the game for me. I'm talking to you guys about where he

was like the one gathering all these people: "What are you doing? We're supposed to be here helping each other. This is about loving each other." You're killing them because they eat meat on Tuesday and don't eat bacon on Sunday, and you're literally murdering each other. It's so messed up. So I get where people look at different organized religion and stuff and they're like, "This is horrid." On behalf of Christians, I'm fully apologetic for what was it, the Crusades. In the name of Catholicism, there are so many horrible things that human beings have done. I'm speaking

as someone that I would call myself a Christian, and I'm just letting everyone know that I'm an open, critical thinker and how I've continued to find my own beliefs. I've never sat here ignorantly and was like, "Nope, throughout history they've all been perfect." It's like through the Crusades; they went through and committed genocide, rape, pillaging—all some of the most awful stuff—wearing these huge crosses. But God wasn't with them. They said he was, but that's why I also believe in the devil. I don't believe he's this dude with a pitchfork and a red tail; I think

it comes more in energy, in thoughts, and comes in people. It's like, "Oh, talk to this guy who's rising in power. You know, you should start conquering that other country in the name of God." Anyway, that's the way I look at things. So, go ahead. I had to just throw in—yeah, I mean, there’s a really great resource written by a friend of mine, John Dixon. It's a book called *Bullies and Saints*, where he goes through a lot of the instances of—obviously, we're going to find abuses, and every human being is going to find a way

to exploit whatever is presented to them. So in one sense, I think we can say, you know, "Isn't it convenient that God used the masculine pronoun?" I keep saying plural; just a mistake—sorry, the masculine pronoun. We can say, "Oh, sure, that’s convenient." Maybe, but it is how he has revealed himself to us, and it’s not his fault if we abuse that. I mean, we could say—so I actually grew up in the Middle East. My parents worked in Amman, Jordan, and when I was living in the Middle East, there was a country called the Democratic Republic

of Iraq. Now, just because democracy exists and people are going to name things "Democratic," when they obviously aren’t, doesn’t mean we then judge democracy. Think of the Democratic Republic of North Korea, right? Nobody thinks that’s an actual representation of democracy. So people are always going to abuse terms and ideas. And concepts, the difference is, though I think historically, within Judeo-Christianity, you have this ethic that we were talking about before, that I think is fundamentally different than what we find in things like the Animal, the Atrais, and other things in that we are created in the

image of God. Actually, one of the earliest criticisms of Christianity was by individuals like Celsus, who was a Greco-Roman philosopher in the second century, where he accused Christianity of being foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, and he called it the religion of slaves, women, and children. Why? Not because God used the masculine pronoun for Himself, but because the concept that Christians believed in—that everybody, no matter what your gender, your race, your social standing—Paul says, “In Christ, there is no slave nor free, there is no Jew nor Gentile, there is no Scythian nor Barbarian, there is no male

nor female.” You know, these things united people. We can see there's a historian named Rodney Stark, and in his book, *The Rise of Christianity*, he actually says that you can track empirically the agency of women across the ancient world by the movement of Christianity. In other words, whenever an area became populated by Christians, we see a direct correlation with the privileges and treatment of women that expand in time, while the surrounding culture largely didn't view women as being fully human. So, I think we're always going to have abuses, but if there's one worldview that exists

that gives agency to people and says that everybody has worth by nature of being human, it's the Christian worldview, and that's where I think it's very different. We can argue about why we think God should or shouldn't have revealed Himself in His pronouns, but I think that's actually irrespective of the historical reality that we see within the impact of Christianity, particularly in the West, but around the world, and how it gives agency to the marginalized. West, can I ask you? So, when you—I'm always interested in this—like you were raised Christian. I always think about this,

like my wife, who’s Muslim, and our beliefs at the core are so similar, but there are some differences. I wonder, like, if I was born in Surly, on West Africa, where she was. I know in the Bible it says Christ revealed, but C.S. Lewis is someone that I really respect because I'm always—I'm an entrepreneur, I’m a think-outside-the-box always. We should be; no one should just be like sheep and follow what any of us are saying. Do your research on your own with everything, of course. But what led you—sorry, going back to C.S. Lewis real quick—he

was a famous scholar who was once an atheist, set out on a journey to basically disprove the Bible, and as he went to do that, he found it to be one of the most historically accurate written books, which really shocked him. He then became a Christian after that. He's done the Narnia series, *The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe*—or they were books; they weren't movies when he passed away. But he has an amazing—I love people like him because he doesn’t just back down; he was always questioning everything. He’s like, “Why? Why is this going on?

Why are these little kids dying, God?” But something that he continued to come up with, which reminded me so much of Jesus, is that love conquers all things, too. So many people overly get caught up on religion over the relationship, and he's like, “I've actually met some atheists that are closer to God without even knowing it, and I've met some Christians that are further away from God without even knowing it.” I believe that too, so much. I’m just really curious, as you went on your journey as a historian studying biblical texts and then being raised

in the church, did you take it upon—like, did you continue to discover and have to accept, like, say something you did find when you were in Egypt revealed differently than what you were taught? Did you kind of tell yourself, “I’m going on a quest, searching for truth,” without a set conclusion to prove Christianity, knowing that it could go either way? Am I making sense? Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a bit of an unusual household in that my mom grew up in India, and my parents—I was younger—I was born in Pakistan, and I spent

a portion of my childhood in Jordan. I grew up in majority Muslim countries and surrounded by majority Muslim environments. We had a copy of the Quran in the room; in fact, we had the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon, and for a little while other documents in our house. These were things that my parents, although they never verbally said, “This is true, therefore these are not,” forbidden—these are not verbum—you know, the truth, capital T, truth of the reality of the world we behold can stand up against scrutiny and investigation. I did do a great

deal of that as a kid. My dad is a historian as well; he has a doctorate, and I grew up on him, you know, reading *The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire*. So, at the exact same time, the reason... Why I actually went to university with the full intention of going into the police force. Um, but it was interactions with Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and atheists, and accusations against the credibility of the Bible, which actually piqued my interest. They would say things that I thought, you know, if that's true, of course, that undermines what

I believe. I believe that Jesus is God incarnate; if I can't trust the Gospels as reliable first-century eyewitness testimony, then I might as well throw all of this away, because I'm not going to believe a lie, even if it's a convenient lie. So, it was actually the exploration of eventually going into graduate college and now working on my PhD at the largest secular university in Canada that got me thinking, okay, how do we investigate these things? What are the methodologies by which we go about exploring the origins and credibility of something like the Bible? That

investigation, with all due respect to Billy and the content you put out, has actually confirmed what I believe. You know, I’m dealing with the actual manuscripts; I travel to academic institutions in other countries, and I look at these things, I read them. It’s a privilege to be able to learn languages like Greek, Coptic, Hebrew, and Aramaic and dig into these things. I think ultimately, I really appreciate what you said there, Mark, with your articulation of your personal relationship, and I think that’s so important. But I think it’s also important to remember that that relationship is

based on something that’s real and verifiable, and we can look into the evidence. You know, I have friends who are linguists, philologists, and historians, and when we look into these things and we talk with one another, we’re discussing, we’re constantly trying to falsify our theories because that’s what good history does. We’re looking for the falsification. You don’t go in, ideally, if you want to be a good historian, right, with trying to prove your original thesis; you go in and say, okay, what are the avenues that actually could disprove this, and then how do we engage

with those in an appropriate and articulate manner? So, what I believe I believe is true, but I believe it based on the evidence of the actual documentation. You know, I’ve read a lot of the literature that you’re talking about, Billy—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh—and I’ve read some of them in their original languages because I’ve tried to be a good historian and go back into the primary sources. Or, if I can’t, I engage with people like my friends who are several philologists and try to not just go off of a translation, but

the original. And I think I found largely the opposite of the conclusions that you have made, Billy. I know that you are very passionate about what you talk about, and I respect that. I just think that the confidence might not actually be backed up by the reality of the evidence. So, when we’re looking at something like the Sinai Bible, when we’re looking at something like the Gospel of Barnabas, when we’re looking at something like the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, these are things that actually have provenance that we can verify. Ultimately, I think the answers to

the questions of the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of those things point to not just a different conclusion, but actually the opposite conclusion—that Christianity is true. Well, now I'm glad you said that. Those three topics are a very small piece of my concept and idea of what really happened in the ancient past, so that’s a very small fraction. It’s less than one-tenth of a percent. You talk about eyewitness accounts convincing you that Christianity is real; there have been eyewitness accounts of every culture that I’ve visited around this entire planet, and their eyewitness accounts of what they

experienced are 100,000% opposite of what’s in the Bible. People have... What do you mean? Can you give me an example? The Doan tribe, for example, in Mali, Africa, experienced a culture that they claim came to this planet from Sirius B. They have the evidence that they knew these beings were from Sirius B because they have the instruments that show the orbit of a tertiary star system that we couldn’t discover until the 1970s with our modern technology. They understood not only the orbital pattern of Sirius A, B, and C, but even that B was a failed

star, which you can’t see from Earth with the naked eye. They knew that it was a white dwarf; they even knew that if you took a tablespoon of it, the entire tribe or a thousand men couldn’t lift the tablespoon. They understood mass and gravity as well. They were told the shape, sizes, and colors of all the planets in our solar system, which they recorded. There’s only one wisdom keeper, and that person can never be touched by another person. If they get touched by another person, they’d actually be killed. They eventually have a mentee that they

break down that verbally handed-down knowledge to, and that next person then takes over and becomes the wisdom keeper. They’ve been doing this for thousands and thousands of years, and modern science has found all their information to be 1,000% accurate. Then you have the Hy tribe of the Americas, indigenous tribes, the Hy tribe, the Lakota tribe, also having engagements with these quote-unquote Star Brothers, even having an account of... ...are true. Them being taken underground, which you don't see just only in America—I just came back from Turkey. You have the people from Turkey in Mesopotamia also being

taken underground into a place called Derinkuyu by these beings, by these people. A structure that's built 12 stories deep underground, that's made out of volcanic tuff, a very soft stone, and if you don't know what you're doing, it'll actually collapse. There's no evidence of any collapse, and it was thousands of years old. It was reused many times, so the mainstream story about what it was used for—to hide from Romans—is actually false. This place is ancient, and in order to build it, you actually have to have foreknowledge of how to construct this type of underground civilization

that can hold 20,000 to 30,000 people, with spaces for livestock, places for worship, and no sign of collapse. You have to have hundreds of ventilation shafts, and I've been down there. Those ventilation shafts cut through solid rock all the way down to the core, and there's even more. It links to other underground cities that are miles and miles away. As you get to the very base of this area, you can cut through and go to another location. But again, these people were taken underground. Also then you have the ancient Egyptians—similar story. A major catastrophe comes,

and these people come and take them underground. Then you have the information in the Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day—more accounts by our ancestors that do not match up with the biblical text. And so, all of a sudden, we're saying that all these cultures, the Aboriginal people; I can go into them as well. I've sat in the Outback, in the Outback, with these age-old Elders. Same thing—they were seated here by Pleiadians. This is their verbal handed-down history for thousands of years, and I can go around the world, and I can come up with all

this information from all these eyewitness accounts from people that should be respected, dignified, and shouldn't be scoffed at. And now we're saying that all this information they put forward, all their verbal handed-down history, all their written history, has to go to the side because this one text is 100% accurate? Sure. But my question is, most of that is oral history, correct? Oh, it's all oral history— even the Bible. Okay, so when we're engaging with oral history, what methodologies are you using to confirm that the orality is accurate? Oh man, well, first and foremost, some of

these texts—some of these cultures have written down information in caves. You've got cave paintings. The D'Urn tribe actually have not only written down— Sure, no, I don't disagree with that. The question is one of historic—sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there. The question is one of methodological analysis. So, you have to have a method by which you can find either that something is falsifiable or that there are avenues by which you can show internal and external accuracy of credibility. So, this is what we do with documents; this is what we do with the ancient

gospels. This is what I do. I've worked on Xenophon and Plutarch, and we look at the internal evidences and the external, multivalent corroboration to try to figure out, okay, yes, we have all these stories; great, I don't deny that. But as a historian, as someone who's trying to figure out what is accurate, how do you do that? Do you know if I use the term "verisimilitude"? Do you know what that term means? No, but I could tell you this. Tell me how the D'Urn tribe saw Sirius B, knew the orbit of Sirius B—a binary star

system—accurately, and can show you the orbit with a special tool that they made, which was given to them by these people. How do they know the shapes, the sizes, the colors, and the orbital patterns of all these planets in our solar system and other star alignments that they would use to have something called the Ziggurat and their own harvesting and planting, and so forth and so on? That's not enough evidence that there's something... Well, I'm not a—yeah, I'm not aware of that particular case, and even—I mean, I would grant that, you know, the ancient people

are far more technologically advanced than we give ourselves credit for. Just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're stupid. I am well aware, as someone who has done both investigation in the past and done archaeological analysis, that is a reality. My question is simply, okay, you have these stories, or you have these accounts. You're referring to them as eyewitness testimony. How are you going about verifying that? Well, if the people had eyewitness testimony about Jesus, they then just wrote down their eyewitness testimony on a piece of paper or parchment paper or papyrus. So, these people—right? So

that's where internal methodological analysis is actually written down, so I mean, it's the same exact thing. There's really no difference. Well, no. So you do internal investigations to figure out when something was dated. So something like—so when I used that term "verisimilitude" before, that's something we historians are looking for. It's a term that simply means the appearance or likelihood of truthfulness. So when you do historical analysis, it's an inference to the best explanation. You have proof, and you have data, and you're extrapolating that data on levels of probability. So some things can be confirmed as

highly probabilistically true, and other things are lower in their probability that they are true. Happened, but there are different methodologies—different ways that you explore historically how that happens. So for the Gospels, look at the Doon tribe. Scientists went there to visit the tribe, and they still have no answers because they used their modern science. It took the best scholars to visit these people, and they're still scratching their heads. Something happened there, sure, and I'm not even denying that necessarily. But the question is, okay, we need different levels of evidence and exploration—not just scientifically, but historically—to

derive something as eyewitness testimony. Now, we have mountains of that, and I'm more than willing to go into some of that with the Gospels as early eyewitness testimony that can be verified externally and internally. But nonetheless, the only reason I ask, Billy, is because I've listened to a fair amount of your content, and I'm unaware of the methods that you use to try to discern between what is an accurate source historiographically and what is an inaccurate source historiographically. Well, I use that—make sense? I use getting in an airplane and traveling to these places, doing my

own research, talking with the indigenous cultures, and researching as much of the text that is available that I can possibly find. Okay, so I don't dispute that, and I do believe you have done that. But even from what we've talked about, so you've researched the text, but when we talked about the crucifixion, everything you cited was either—and I mean this with all due respect—false in terms of the Sinai Bible because Codex Vaticanus is just a fourth-century Greek manuscript of the Gospels that we have today, or they were verified forgeries in terms of the Gospel of

Jesus's Wife. You may be right on that particular part of the topic, but like I said, that's less than a tenth of a percent of the information that I hold. Sure, but that was the original question. So, yeah, yeah, so that's what I'm saying. I'm saying, okay, well, I’m going off of what we've already talked about. So you've said you explore the text. I don't deny that, but the evidence—by going off of what you have put forward in terms of the actual documentary evidence—is not just less than convincing in my respect. And I mean this

with respect because I think you have done a lot of research and you've traveled to these places. I have too; like, this is what I do as my career. But I'm not really getting indication because in history, we go to the primary sources in their primary languages. And when we talked—when Mark asked, "Okay, why do you deny the crucifixion?"—the sources you used were not primary. Okay, we're still over and over again. There's so much more we can talk about here. We're wasting a lot of time. There’s so much more—that's this. There’s so much more stuff

to talk about. Do you think that all these different cultures and stuff describing these other beings could—they could have been? I’m not an expert in theology or what, but where it talks about war, I always want to personally ask you this too: where in the Bible talks about wars between the demons and the angels? There’s a lot of crazy stuff in the Bible too that you can prove has been written but it also takes some faith because you can't physically see where there were wars between demons and angels and stuff fighting in the heavens. So

there’s tons going on, obviously. Could any of those have been, from what you've discovered or how people have written it, do you think those could have been demons or angels? I don’t believe in demons or angels at all. You don't believe in them at all? No, I don't believe in demons and angels. When you read AEL coming down in the Book of Enoch, the first thing he does is teach people how to make knives and swords so they can cut a man's head off. Where's that in the Book of Enoch? In the Book of Enoch.

Where is that in the Book of Enoch? So, the only reason I ask is because there are two Enochs—First Enoch and Second Enoch—and only First Enoch is an actual historical amalgamation. Okay, and then you analyze the fact that these angels are having sex, they're getting drunk—these are just people. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Where are angels getting drunk? Angels party! They go, they hang out with people, they go to war with people, they put on their outfits and they go to war with people. Where are they getting drunk, though? They get married. Okay, whatever that means, but

they're having... They don’t get married! Okay, not married. In fact, the scripture says that angels can't get married. Merry Christmas! Not M—married. But the point that I'm making here is when you start to really analyze what these angels are doing and you start to analyze how many people are dying in the biblical text, you start to say, “Well, how many people did Satan actually kill?” And when you start doing the tally on the numbers, God's doing most of the killing in the Bible. It's not the devil that's doing all the killing. Then God says in

Isaiah, “I create the good and I create the evil.” Lord, so he's saying that he's doing the good and the evil—that's what he's saying. Yeah, my personal opinion on this whole thing, I just—let me get this out because we keep going over the same rhetoric over and over again—my personal opinion is that the biblical text, uh, is a good book. There's a—like I've said, I've got videos. My number one video on Twitter has me saying this: it's a good—it's good text because if you actually apply some of the information that's in the Bible, you can

get a good result, like you have done, Mark. Right? I—I struggle with it. No, I want you to finish your thought; go ahead. Yeah, so you can get a good result, but there's a lot of misinformation in the Bible. There's a lot of false information that's copied from other texts, and if you go by that text, all of a sudden you end up with 400 years of slavery. You end up with abuse; you end up with divide-and-conquer tactics that separate people. You end up with people thinking that they're the chosen ones and they're the chosen

people, and we've been promised this promised land so we can eradicate another race of people because this is our land. Because God promised it to us, you have people that want to go on the papal inquisitions and torture and kill and murder over 80 million people. You have the American Holocaust—111 million indigenous natives slain. You have all this going on because of this text, which is set up so contradictory throughout its path across time. You get into the New Testament: slavery is still being condoned. In the New Testament, it says, "Honor thy slave master as

you would honor God or Jesus," I believe so—in Ephesians. It doesn't say that the God of the Old Testament—like the—I’ll let you go real quick—but I’m just—and I know you have to go too—but I'm speaking as I challenge my own sub. It was always—I'm telling you, guys, this is where Jesus came in and changed everything for me. But like the Old Testament too, it is hard for me to read— even Noah, thinking God’s like mad at everyone; let’s flood the whole world and murder all these people that I created. That’s pretty bad stuff. But it

seems so contradictory, too, and I’m speaking, Wes, as a Christian, and I don’t have the—whatever they call that (papy). There isn’t—this is where people—and, but I continue to follow in my heart, but it’s so—Jesus did not seem like that at all. But they say God’s the same then as He was now, like time—He created time, so He didn’t come down, you know, as Jesus and change and evolve and then come back with new information and be like, you know what? I don’t think I’m going to flood and do these things. These are more, I guess,

like bigger moral questions that there's not necessarily—but I—that's where things like the Old Testament challenge me at times. And I know there are a lot of things that correlate, and I’ve seen some cool things that come together too, but it’s just like, man, to think like “I’m going to flood and murder all these people that I created and then leave a few alive” does seem like what Jesus did at all. So, I want to interrupt; a couple more points I want to make because he got a lot of talking in. It did say, “Slaves, obey

your earthly masters with respect and fear, as you would obey Christ.” That’s “Slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, as you with sincerity in your heart, just as you would obey Christ”—so it does say that in Ephesians 6:5. But there are so many aspects to this stuff, and what is the context of what Ephesians is saying? So, I think this is very important because we don’t take text in isolation. So, within scripture—and this is why all the abolition movements throughout history have only been Judeo-Christian movements. There's never been an abolition movement that wasn't

Christian. And, actually, there’s recent work by historian Tom Holland (not the Spider-Man actor, different Tom Holland), but his recent book, *Dominion*, highlights this fact very well. This is not a Christian, but in it, he shows that going right back into antiquity with the Cappadocian Fathers was the first abolition movement, and then into the British and the American abolition movements; these were fundamentally Christian movements led by Christians because of the idea that when Paul, who wrote that letter to the Ephesians, says, “In Christ, there is no slave nor free,” he’s breaking down those barriers. So in

Ephesians, when he says, “Slaves, obey our masters,” he’s operating under the socioeconomic context of what's going on and he's saying, “Hey, we have slaves and we have free people. Okay, if you're a believing slave, if you're a slave who believes in Jesus as the Messiah, don’t be—don’t be, like—be equitable in how you are living your life; reflect Christ accurately.” And that’s a movement that he is fundamentally working towards that eventually starts to completely take out the legs from— I’d be—I love, by the way, I love that we’re all—this is respectful. I don’t feel this is

all just GR talking in hell; I appreciate it, and I think this is going to give us—but this is where you and I sitting down in a room, I would be like, “Great that you came,” but like, “What methodologies did you use to conclude?” That him saying the slave be the master to the slave, you're able to interpret it, meaning that he's meaning that because I was also raised in the church, and I would have questions. When they’re like, “Oh, in the old days when they said women don’t wear jewelry, that’s a sin,” I don’t—you

would know the exact verse—and then they’re like, “Oh, but that was just written because at that time, that was what they did.” But then the next week they're telling me, “But if you believe in the Bible, you either believe in all of it or none of it.” I’m like, “Well, how come you’re just…”—and they’re like, “But it’s okay for women to do that now.” Those are the things where it’s like, “You’ve got to be honest here.” If you’re respectfully challenging Billy, and Billy’s going to go and do research and be like, “Okay, now I want

to see how to have,” because we’re all critical thinkers, those things seem to just get so blindly pushed over when they’re like, “But that doesn’t apply now,” and it’s like, “I don’t…” right? I do think there’s more common ground than people think. So many words stuff recall, but also, like, it’s weird to me to think that he would be like, “Women aren’t allowed to wear jewelry and this crap,” and then Jesus came and he’s like, “None of that matters.” Then for them to be like, “Oh, that only made sense then, but now it doesn’t apply,

but believe everything”—this is what’s referred to… you know what, like, this is why I’m always like, “Yeah.” So, there’s a field, there’s a discipline called hermeneutics, and that’s the methodology of interpretation. There are multiple levels that you interpret something. So whether we’re dealing with, say, the book of Ephesians or we’re dealing with Tacitus’ Annals, we look at something, and we contextually read it within the framework of how it’s being written. So there’s a historical approach where we look at the context: “Okay, Paul is writing to a church in Ephesus. What’s going on in Ephesus, and

how is what he’s saying in that city, in what is modern-day Turkey, how does that pertain to that particular time and framework? Where is Paul coming from?” Where is “now,” though, is my question. Because, yeah, so here’s how I answer that question. I love to death, Wes, but you’re starting to give… I’m sorry I had to interrupt you, and I believe in God; like, I believe in, yeah, our—and Billy believes in God too. I get why things are challenged, and things need to be challenged, but it’s saying that was for women then. But being raised

in the church, they say, “But then they’ll pick something, and they’re like, ‘But that doesn’t apply to them now because, in that context, he was talking to this certain town where they were having problems with the…’” I’m like, “Well, that’s not written anywhere.” And they’re like, “Well, if you go to blah, blah, blah.” And then they say, “Well, God is all-knowing, so he perfectly chose what was in and out of the Bible.” I believe whoever created the universe, which is God in my own opinion, is way smarter than any of us. Why would he leave

something like that crap in there—that women shouldn’t wear jewelry and all that—and then have the New Testament that that crap doesn’t really matter? That’s where it’s like, I have to believe that it’s not a per—I do think there are parts where things got written, and I don’t, but I don’t think they’re the major things personally. Like G, whether or not Jesus was crucified, which I think is a major thing, because if he wasn’t—I’ve studied that a lot—that would challenge my, that would challenge the core of my whole belief system over whether or not it said

if women can wear jewelry or something. But I do think that, and I don’t know there’s an exact answer, but I do think, you know, that’s perplexing to me. The God of all wisdom would choose to leave some of that in there—it’s like, why? So here’s the thing: the Bible was written for us, but it wasn’t written to us. There is an original audience, whether that’s the ancient Israelite in the ancient Near Eastern culture or whether it’s the Greco-Roman believer in Jesus within the city of Ephesus. So as historians—and I mean, most of the books

on this end of my shelf are what I refer to as commentaries—God be smart enough to know, “I’m not just going to write to this demographic of this civilization,” now knowing I’m a God who created the whole world and people are still going to be studying this thousands of years later. That’s what I was going to say, but I didn’t want to come off… yes. So I’m sorry. By the way, I’m the worst interrupter ever, and it’s more of my ADD type thing of like, I get a thought and I’ve got to get it out,

or else I freaking forget it. So I’m sorry about interrupting. Thanks for throwing me under the bus for that. Yeah, so how I would answer that is I would say this: you do have examples of where Paul is writing, and he’s writing to a particular group. So we look at, okay, what does it mean for a woman to wear and adorn themselves with gold in a first-century Greco-Roman context? Has to do with the fact that prostitutes would wear those things, so we need to ask the question: what is the intention of the text? So I’ve

got to ask the meaning. How do you interpret that? That’s—I’ve been there, done that. And I respect the crap out of you for how deep you go into studying the ancient texts and stuff, which is so important for the real root of it all. But they’ve told me that same thing, and I’m like, I don’t—why doesn’t it just say that he was speaking to the women and stuff that were prostitutes of that time? Like, where does that—he’s not speaking to prostitutes; he’s talking about purity, and he’s talking in the context of when he says, you

know, don’t adorn yourself with jewelry. The original audience—and we can explore this—by the dumb that sounds, what’s saying the original audience, then later on saying, but now it’s okay for this audience because these women and stuff. Because I get why people—like, if we’re gonna—we gotta be open-minded. We’re punching holes in other stuff to punch holes in our own. And even if it’s a green, like, don’t you think that’s odd? I get what you’re saying. Like, if prostitutes right now all wear a red band around their neck, and that signals what? A lot of prostitutes have

tattoos, and a lot of women who aren’t prostitutes have tattoos, right? I don’t think it’s this black and white that only the prostitute. And also, you’re only talking about in one little town. So my bigger question would be to God: well, in Roman antiquity, why did you put that in the Bible? That just confuses everyone, though, because all these other civilizations are going to be reading. We keep saying here, God didn’t put that in the Bible; men put this stuff in the Bible. I think that with some of the old—I’m telling you, Billy, it’s— for

me, I think he’ll get back, guy. Um, it’s— If it wasn’t for—sorry, you—we got you back on, West. Yeah, um, I understand what you’re saying, Mark, but what I’m saying is I think we’re missing a big point here. The point that I’m trying to make here is that the Bible is written by people—men—men who are extremely flawed, and the evidence of that is what they did, what they took the information that’s in that biblical text, and what they did with it globally to other human beings. And how they even wrote about it in the Bible,

how they enslaved and tortured people in the biblical text. Uh, so in that case, even in the book of Deuteronomy, which is one of the most brutal books out there where everything is given, okay to rape women, kill women, kill children—if one person talks against your Lord, go to that town and kill the whole town, burn the town down. So brutal. Turns people into—Saul. The killing in the Bible is not being done by Satan; that’s why I’m saying I don’t care. I don’t believe in demons and all this other kind of stuff. Moses goes to

the top, he talks to God, he gets his tablet—the first commandments are, “Thou shalt not kill.” He comes down, as soon as he sees the people making a golden calf, he kills most of them. It’s just like, come on! And I’ve learned with some of these stories how it correlated with killing your first son related to then what happened with Jesus. But I’m still, like, in my head, they’re like, that’s so beautiful. He was willing to sacrifice his son, as God would. And I’m like, I don't believe—that’s so mean. I don’t believe it’s so beautiful.

Like, Jesus changed my whole story. No, when I’m in heaven, I don’t believe God is irrational because he would be smarter than every one of us to be able to literally create everything. I would be like, “God, I don’t like—why would you tell that dude to kill his son?” I don’t see any benefit in killing your own kid, and then right at the last second, he’s like, “No, it’s cool; I was just testing your faith in me.” It’s like, that seems psychologically—um, to me, when God’s like, “Kill your own son,” but then at the last

minute says, “Don’t do it. Oh man, you proved your faith to me.” I would be like, “God, isn’t there like a—I don’t feel like you need to do that to a person.” I don’t think that’s such a beautiful story, and I’m talking as a Christian. There are a lot of things with the Old Testament I struggle with, but it doesn’t change my overall overarching beliefs. And I think there are things that are written in maybe misinterpreted that aren’t as important as the bigger things, like the crucifixion and stuff of Jesus. Like, I’m hoping to God

that your methodology of proving that is right compared to Billy’s in that specific scenario. But in some of these other things, like, I almost rather them be disproved—that God killed his—uh, that God—and I’ve heard a lot of these different answers and stuff, and I know God gave us free will, and I understand all that too. But it’s just like the God of the Old Testament and Jesus, it’s hard to believe that they’re the same person. Yeah, can I? Sorry, I cut out quite a bit there, and so I think I missed a large portion. I

apologize for that, and I just want to say a lot of stuff that I want to say. Yeah, so let me just say this. The most quoted verse in the Bible is a version of Exodus 34:6, which fundamentally describes who God is: that He is compassionate and loving, full of grace and mercy, and abounding in steadfast love. In fact, if you read the Book of Jonah, the beef that Jonah has with God—the reason why he doesn't want to go to Nineveh—is because he believes that God is so loving that if he tells the Ninevites to

repent and they repent, God is going to forgive them. So, fundamentally, we have the picture of God consistently throughout the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, as being a God who is rich in love and mercy and abounding in steadfast kindness. We want a God who is just, and just to speak very briefly to the slavery issue, I mean, Exodus—or sorry, Leviticus 25—condemns by death the man-stealing, so stealing someone and selling them into slavery. The fact that the Ten Commandments are prefaced with, “You are a nation who was slaves; I am the God

of Israel who brought you out of Egypt,” indicates a fundamental difference. There’s lots of literature on this. I would encourage people to read my friend Paul Copan’s book, *Is God a Moral Monster?* He’s written some excellent stuff. He’s also written on *Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?* He’s a leading expert in the field of comparative analysis of Near Eastern war literature. There are very coherent explanations for these things, and slavery within ancient Israel was very, very different from what slavery around the ancient East was like. On top of that, once again, when abolition

movements happened—what’s that? Sorry, Billy. I said slavery continued on throughout the Bible with no problems, but it was always undergirded by the fact that this was not the ideal; this was something that should not be done. Even slavery within ancient Israel was fundamentally different from slavery around the ancient Near East; this is not a contested fact. You can look at the scholarship of individuals like Wright, who has written extensively on this. He’s an ancient ethicist, and there’s a vast difference between the law codes in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers, and something like the Code of Hammurabi,

which puts people on a tier system and gives different punishments depending on where they are within society. That’s not true in ancient Israel. If you were a king and you stole somebody and sold them into slavery, they would punish you by death. But you can’t steal somebody else’s slave; that’s not a good thing to do. The point that I’m making here—I’ve got to say something before I get out of here—is the Bible is full of contradictions. The biggest problem that we have is we’re dealing with a civilization on this planet that is psychologically impaired. Human

beings are psychologically impaired. This entire planet we’re living on is an insane asylum; Earth is an absolute insane asylum. Mental illness has spread throughout the planet like a complete virus, and when you take a text like the biblical text, knowing that human beings globally are mentally ill, this entire planet is a mental insane asylum. I’m talking about everyone—all 8 billion, whatever number of people we have now, are all mentally ill. What I mean is there are different levels of mental illness. We all have trauma that we’re not dealing with; we all have internal issues, situations,

and shadow work that needs to be done. Some people are at higher levels of mental illness than others. Most of us are functioning functional mental illness people, but when you take a look at the biblical text and you start going through this information, the way it’s laid out, it becomes a proponent of more divide-and-conquer tactics. It becomes a proponent of racism, slavery, and all these things that are dark and ill, including murder and killing in the name of God, which has been done millions of times. So, my thing about the biblical text is: Is it

actually authored by the Creator of the universe, or is it authored by the dark forces, maybe Satan himself? The reason why I say that is because an all-knowing, all-loving God—omnipotent and omniscient—that is creating not only this universe, but most likely multiple universes, because a Creator never stops creating, especially with infinite power—is now, at some point, going to author a text that allows human beings to misinterpret it and take it in His name, and begin to slay people, torture people, and enslave people worldwide? To claim that you’re the chosen ones to set up a state of

chosen people, and then to even claim that you have chosen land and to torture and kill even more people, women and children, in modern times, still going on to this very day? To me, that doesn’t seem like a very intelligent being, especially a being that knows the beginning and the end. So, if you know the beginning and... The end. You have a certain level of foreknowledge; you have advanced knowledge that goes beyond. You know what's the ending before the end even occurs, so you set up everything for success. Why? Because a genius solves problems before

they happen. I'm going to drop the mic on that. With some of that too, I think I came back on. Yeah, there’s old stuff that’s hard to comprehend, but the thing that changed my life again was Jesus, and the core of it was love conquers all things. So yeah, yeah, yeah, go on, we do a follow. I really appreciate it, Billy. Thanks so much for interacting. So yeah, I would... it doesn’t cut out. A follow-up, just out of my own curiosity, is these things again. Like Jesus has changed everything in my studies. I mean, I

was young, I was in trouble, I was in jail at age 17. It changed my whole life, and everything Billy was just talking about. Yes, of course, we all know people are broken. It’s Jesus that has helped me through, and all of us are never perfect through my brokenness. And there’s so much more love than so many people know, and it’s unfortunate that some of the stuff has caused... you know, people can pull something, and there is anger and there are truths to what he was just at least talking about there when you were cutting

off about the wars and everything too. And it’s sad because that’s not what Jesus is doing there for us and for people that truly don’t have, you know, the Jesus I know in their life. I don’t preach down on them like I’m better than you. To me, it saddens me to be honest. West, talking heart to heart because I’m like, man, at the end of the day, I’ve had so many times, bro. I’ve had times—I’m telling you, my wife’s Muslim—but it was a church that saved our marriage. We were separated; we’ve been married 18 years.

Like three years into our marriage, we were separated, living separately, had our two kids; she was so lost. She literally found herself driving to a church as a Muslim. It just so happened at 11:00 a.m. There are too many coincidences in my own life that I can prove that. She found, well, everyone listening to this, she found a person that happened to randomly be at church at 11:00 in the afternoon, and he just so happened to be the marriage counselor. She’s just like, “I’m a Muslim. I don’t even know what got me coming here, and

my marriage is not... it’s...” My wife just randomly found herself at the church, basically opening up, when the marriage counselor happened to be there at 11:00 a.m. on, like, a Tuesday. She’s like, “I’m a Muslim; I don’t know why I’m here. My marriage is falling apart.” These are proofs where, like, I can dot these out throughout my own life, my own experience, and it just so happened. As a Muslim, then my wife and I started attending counseling at our church through Christian therapists, and I started seeing all these other marriages that were so broken. The

craziest things happened, and then they reconnected and had this foundation that was unbreakable. The only thing they all had in common was they had God and Jesus in the center of their marriages. And by the way, now my wife and I have been married for 18 years, and she has struggled internally with the Christianity—how that saved our marriage—and being raised a Muslim and stuff, and that’s a whole other conversation. But my point is, like, God is orchestrating, and there are so many different examples I have in my own life of actual proof of it. This

is totally different than what you and Billy were talking about, you know, going into the actual historical proofs and the methodologies. This is more of my own testimony that I have to share on a whole show one day to where sometimes people get into, “Was Jesus this color skin or that?” And I’m like, at the end of the day, I could care. That means nothing to me. All I know is when I was down and out and in jail, nothing. He’s like, “Mark, I still love you. Even in jail, I still love you.” He’s like,

“But I have such a better life for you if you stop doing stupid stuff.” In my head, I heard the way I talk, like, “Shi, then stupid Shi will stop happening to you.” He’s like, “But either way, I love you.” And I could feel that in my gut, and that love and stuff is so real. I listen, and I’ve continually changed, and I’m a constant work in progress. I mean, we are all broken, and I get that. And I’m just opening up to everyone that struggles and the anger and stuff. I can see from their

point of view, you know, when you read some of those stories, they can come off, and only think that it’s evil and not understand the beauty and the real love. It can sound corny, but speaking from my full life experience, I’ve had so many times in tears, and it’s like no other human beings are there. But at the end of the day, like, God’s always there, man. If I didn’t have that, I literally... Wes would have gone insane by now; that's just me personally. Yeah, you know, yeah, no, I appreciate that, and I apologize for

all the tech issues we're having here. I'm flipping in and out, but yeah, I mean, I would echo what I said about how the God of the Bible is described. When God reveals Himself and He says, “You know, I am Yahweh, the compassionate, the gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” I think we see that carried right over through the testimony of Scripture. When you look at Jesus saying things like, “But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray

for those who mistreat you. Love your enemies as yourself,” you know, don't expect anything back. He says, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” I mean, I truly believe Christianity is verifiably true, and I would really encourage listeners, you know, dig into these things. Not to be too self-serving, but I have a lot of historical information on my website, WesleyHuff.com. Oh, for all your information too! Yeah, we’ve been doing a series with the organization I work for, Apologetics Canada,

called "Can I Trust the Bible?" We have two episodes out talking about the canon and the text of Scripture. I'm going to be going in 2025 to hopefully a number of other countries and exploring even some of the Old Testament stories—going to the locations where they happened overseas and talking about, you know, how do we deal with some of these more tricky texts and the historical reliability of them? So, I'm not afraid of the nitty-gritty here; I want us to understand those things. God has changed my life, Mark, just like He's changed yours. I really

appreciate that, and I appreciate Billy being willing to come on and interact. I think Billy's a great guy. I just think fundamentally he really is. Wes, to tell you, and I told him, I love him so much; I didn't want him to feel bombarded, and he respects that. I told him I was going to have you, I wouldn’t just catch him off guard, but he's another example of C.S. Lewis. When he says everything, I know when you become famous on social media, people can think he’s the guy where it’s like, “I have something going on

with my family, whatever I need something.” He will fly across the world and be there for me in a heartbeat for any of my needs. I’ve seen him help so many people—not just on social media, I mean at home. I’ve watched social media; I’ve watched people just butcher, try to butcher his character. When I’ve seen him behind the scenes act like C.S. Lewis was saying, like, in God’s eyes, I’ve watched him get a homeless guy literally a car, and all these people writing in hate—that it was fake. I’m like, dude, he’s my neighbor! I watched

him not only do that but buy three other people cars that weren’t even public out of love, wanting his character to align with Christ more than he even knows. That’s where I believe the devil tries to really defame people—in the details. I understand where his anger and everything is coming from, but now what you’re pointing out here, Wes, too, is the factual methodologies of these things—the way you measure them and how you’ve been, you know, trained. Not just you, but it sounds like historians. It’s not like you’re just using some random thing. Not all those

same tools are being used in the way that he’s legitimizing some of these major claims. Some of the other stuff with the technology and all that, I believe that could be very—I think that’s really fascinating. But, like the stuff from the book saying Jesus wasn’t actually crucified, that’s a huge deal. So, it’s like that didn’t seem to be passing all those marks of how you would measure whether or not, you know—not just you, but like the scholars and stuff—if something is truly valid or not. I’m not saying that means everything he says to everyone listening

isn’t valid. I think a lot of stuff—I know when he’s out of the country. I see him in these sites, like, you know what I mean? So, he’s not just like some person trying to make some fake media. I’m just letting everyone know because we believe differently; we respect each other at the core. He’s like a brother to me, you know? I hope none of my critiques of Billy, whether today or anything I posted online, reflect any kind of castigation on his character. That’s not my goal. My goal is— and I do this with Christian

videos too. Sometimes people say a little bit crazy things with the biblical languages or whatever, and sometimes I do go on social media, and I’m like, “Hey, we need to correct this because we need to make sure that what we’re saying is true, and there’s a historical smell test.” I’m afraid a lot of what Billy says just does not pass the historical smell test, and that has nothing to do with him as a person. It’s not a... Personal attack: I think I would just implore and encourage Billy. You know, the sources that you're using, the

ways that you're analyzing evidence, they need to be verifiable. And I think when we look at the Bible and we look at what it says, that you have these early eyewitness testimonies of this person, Jesus Christ; I think those are verifiable. We can say what we have now is what the original authors wrote, and those original authors, they are eyewitnesses of those events. Jesus says audacious things; he claims to be God himself, and then he predicts his own death and resurrection—and he does it! People who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than

people who don't rise from the dead, and so I think that means something. You know, you mentioned C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis said that Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. So, I think we need to take that seriously; we need to make sure that we're analyzing whether it's true or whether it's false. And if it's false, throw it away! Like I said before, there’s no use in following a lie, even if it's a convenient lie. But if it's true, that

should fundamentally change the way that you live your life. And I think it is verifiably true. As we’re ending up, I obviously live my life believing it to be true, but there are some things I still struggle with. And by the way, so did everyone else in the Bible; as I was saying, they leave them in. They never were just one day perfectly, "I'll never mess up again; I'll never doubt God again." That’s what continues, like I was telling you, Wes, to make me believe—it’s the humanity that’s in the Bible throughout. If it was written

by a person, I feel like they would make these people perfectly—in such a way that once they found God, they never questioned him again. Even after all this, they would be like, "I'm doubting this God." To some people, they look at that as contradictory; to me, it was the opposite that gives me hope because it’s more relatable. And God’s like, "I'm always here." I feel like that’s us as humans. One thing I want to tell you, because you like scholarly stuff, is that I think you’ll find this interesting: I got my BS in Psychology at

Colorado State, and in one of my courses, we studied Jesus. It wasn't a Christian college by any means—any religion—but we did a case study of Jesus Christ and ran all the standardized psychological tests. It’s basically if Jesus Christ—which everyone agrees was a person that existed in that time—claims to be the Son of God; he would either be something on how we measured psychological disorders, whether it’s full-blown narcissism or, you know, schizophrenia—all kinds of things. We ran the test the same way we would with everyone else, studying his writings and life as a whole. Because he

just said one thing, we couldn't only take that into account; we had to look at everything to see the patterns of what he said and how his actions matched up with his words. You know, the different psychological tests. Because you could say one thing, but you could start to see, behind the scenes, oh yeah, they have some symptoms of schizophrenia that would correlate over time. He couldn’t not be; he would either have to be the Son of God or crazy. That’s not the politically correct term they would have had, but even our professor—who, by the

way, didn't claim to have a belief in religion—said it can’t be both. Well, at the end of the test, Jesus came out to have no psychological disorders at all, meaning he was a sound person and what he said would have been true. That class, actually without them even knowing it, took my faith to another level. I already had strong faith, but I thought, wow, that took it to another level right there. We just did a case study on him, ran him through the test, and he’s not crazy, but he says he’s the Son of God.

Yeah, well, that’s the Lewisian trilemma, where C.S. Lewis said that if you take Jesus seriously, he’s either a liar, a lunatic, or he’s Lord. So, it’s very interesting that you phrase it that way. Even going back to what you were saying, touching on the methodology question, historians, when we do analysis, one of the methodologies is what's referred to as the criterion of embarrassment. What you talked about with the authenticity of the heroes of the Bible being fundamentally flawed is one of those criteria. You know, if people in history don’t usually write things that make themselves

look bad or reflect poorly on their leaders and kings—I mean, you look at this when you look at the inscriptions from the ancient Near East: the Babylonian inscriptions, the Sumerian descriptions, the Egyptian descriptions—they always make the king or the Pharaoh look good. Right? Because even when they lose battles, they spin it in this political narrative. I mean, just like we do today with politics! But when you read the Bible... The what really sets it apart, both as a religious text and as a historical text, is the honesty it conveys concerning its heroes. A primary theme

of Biblical scripture is that the greatest individuals spoken about in it, through its pages, are broken and flawed. You know, even just thinking quickly, yeah, sure, Abraham was the father of a nation, and he was a liar. Jacob was a patriarch of Israel, and he stole his brother's birthright. Right? Moses led the Jews out of captivity, but he was a murderer. Daniel was the greatest king; you mentioned he was a man after God's own heart, and at the same time he was a serial adulterer. Noah was the only righteous person on the earth in Genesis,

you see, but he was a drunk. Peter was part of Jesus's inner circle, and when things got tough, what happened? He chose to deny he even knew Jesus. Paul wrote more books in the New Testament than any other author. Yeah, they're beautiful too—where he denied him three times—but then what did Jesus say back to him three times? Was it, "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" And so then these are things that I find really fascinating, Wes. He denied him three times but got the chance to redeem himself. God wasn't doing that for God,

yeah? I think God was doing that for Peter because he knew how broken he was going to be over that. But at the core of it, I just want everyone listening to this, from all different beliefs, to know that I don't believe our God is an irrational God. I know people can get religion and stuff so misconstrued by so many things, but at the core of it, God really looks at, I believe, what's in our hearts and who we truly are. And, yeah, when we make mistakes, do we continue to try to be better than

the version of ourselves that we were before? Are you trying to live a life of purpose? That looks different for different people in different circumstances. I think He’s a very rational God, much smarter than us and much more loving. There are things that I definitely still have questions about, but it's not enough to break down. It would be more like 8% of stuff out of the Bible versus the other 92% that I know is so true. You know, in things like the necklaces and that, which aren't hugely relevant, but they're still perplexing to me at

times. But I understand how you're able to explain it, and I'm sorry for cutting you off. I just—I knew I have heard it, and I know you know it all, and I'm not even dis— I completely believe what you're saying, and I believe that to be true. But you get how it can be perplexing as well at times, you know? Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, no one's arguing that all scripture is easy to understand. I mean, I think scripture is clear on what it's clear about. You know, that we live in a world

that is broken, that is flawed, and we are not in right relationship as the creature with our Creator. You know, you have this narrative of creation, fall, and then redemption and restoration. I think that is clear, and that's not to brush over texts that are more complicated. I mean, the reason I have, you know, I have a home library with over 200 books, with you know, almost 2,000 years of historical writings, is that people are wrestling with these things. I think that's okay. You know, God is big enough to handle our doubts, and He's big

enough to handle our wrestling, and I think that's a good thing. I think the fact that God made us with a mind and then calls us to love Him with all of our heart, soul, and mind means that God wants us to explore. Let me just finish off on this: you look in the—there's a book of the Bible called the Psalms, right in the middle of the Bible, and Psalm 23 is a very famous psalm. You know, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures." The psalm

immediately before it, Psalm 22, starts off like this: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from me?" And you know what really moves me about the God of the Bible? It is that the same God who sees the person who says, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," and the person who says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," sees those as equally valid forms of worship. The God of the Bible is not afraid of questioning, of doubting, and He says, "Hey, come to me;

I'm big enough to handle these things, and I’ve given you a mind to explore them." I fundamentally believe that Christianity is true, and so we need to wrestle with these things, we need to explore them, we need to go to the original sources, and we need to make sure that we're doing our due diligence and not just having a blind faith. The faith does not call us to blind faith; it calls us to a faith that seeks understanding. And so that's hopefully what I hope the listener is hearing in what I'm saying. I love Billy.

I love you, Mark. I don't want to... "Cast any negative aspersions on anybody, but I fundamentally believe that all Billy is incorrect, and I think that there should be a level of accountability to correct that. I appreciate him coming on and being willing to do this. Absolutely, Wes, and I appreciate—look, this came up for everyone listening and watching when this airs so quickly that I've been wanting to have this talk with Billy for a while. But then it came up so quickly because I'm back and forth from my company, he's out of town, and then

we're like, wait, we're actually able to do this tomorrow. And I'm like, man! Then I'm looking at our calendars, and I'm like, I don't think we're both going to be available. So I'm like, we just have to make it happen. I was praying, and I'm like, I could talk to him all day about my beliefs and his beliefs, but half those books and stuff I would be looking up on ChatGPT—like, what is it? I don’t know them, so I'm like, I’ll have nothing to say to that. I don’t think anyone's really, from what I've seen,

debated that. And I'm like, I need— I was praying, I reached out, and I'm like, I just got to make this so it's solid information for everyone listening and watching. I'm like, I don’t have the wisdom. Then someone who I highly, highly trust—like I told you, Wesley—has watched your stuff, highly recommended you, and it comes from such a highly trusted source that, from not even seeing any of your— which I never do on this show, people know— from Elevating and Beyond, I watch people's stuff, I’ll pre-screen them. From knowing him as a source, I'm like,

all right, I believe that. I told you this, Wesley, too, but I think it's important for you to know to keep pushing you to do what you're doing. He struggled a lot and he works with a lot of spiritual gurus and celebrities, and he's all over in media. He really gave up on religion for a lot of the reasons that we were talking about, and I get it. People get mad because these are run by people, and there are some awful things that happen from people to people, but that’s not God. So I understand where

the anger can come from. You know, I don't stand here on a pedestal and act like I understand what everyone is going through or why they get angry, but what's beautiful is God continually doesn’t give up on you. Whatever the different ways are, he started watching your stuff at the right time when he was challenging everything. Because people like you, Wes, come in almost as a modern-day—I know these are huge shoes to say, but like C.S. Lewis—type researching mindset, where you're also challenging other Christians in churches, too. You're like, no, what you’re saying right there—you’re

like, I'm not saying all this. You're challenging everything in a really wise way and coming from a place of love, too. We need more of this because people are either able to break it apart because they say, well, the documentation isn't there; it's not proven in history, or they break it apart in all these other areas and they’re like, well, these people are irrational, and they think they're better than other people. You come across as someone that truly cares and truly is after God's heart—humble, but also very intelligent and smart—and you're putting in your research

on that side of things, too. You're willing to be wrong and right, and that led my good friend to rediscover God. He's actually starting to—he's well-known, but he's preparing to start sharing his whole testimony, which a lot of people are going to be surprised about. He said that’s been largely because of you; I just got to let you know that, my man, because that’s why we’re here, right? It’s to fight the good fight. It’s really to help people understand and connect that are watching this and listening to this. You know, Wes and I aren’t on

here—Wes isn’t on here trying to be a hater and hate on Billy at all. I think you’re really just trying to check—I don't think you're just looking factually for what you’re finding things to be. And we need more of this! I don’t think we see enough of it. People just pull these sensationalized clips out of everything they will from the show, too. They could edit this any way they want. We won’t; we'll air the whole episode and we’ll do clips to lead them back to the full. I don’t—we don’t edit unless there’s like a gap,

but we don’t change stuff. You know, we make reels and all that good stuff. But people see too much of that, and it throws them off. There are so many people that have been led away by these people who I know tons of, and you know they see them on social media as one persona, or these huge preachers, or something. Behind the scenes they’re a totally different person. When you meet someone who is who they are both on and off the camera, you know, of course you’re prepared; you’re in front of the camera, and we're

all human. But overall, your character and core values line up. People aren’t used to seeing that these days, and we need more of it. So I just want to tell you to keep doing what you’re doing, and I..." Also, I appreciate you with pretty much no notice jumping on here for this show, and we'll definitely pre-arrange something for the longer-term future to really do something in person, hopefully all of us. Because when you all sit together in person, you have time pre-show to talk and get to know each other, and you can really feel the

energy and stuff too. I think that's a special thing that needs to be done more. It's just not done enough in this day and age, so I respect you for coming on, and I respect Billy for sitting there. You know, he didn't just say, "I'm not doing this, I'm leaving." He had to leave; he had a meeting at 1. So when he rushed off—by the way, he stayed on 20 minutes past it just to let everyone know he wasn't like, "I'm leaving this," but it was like, "Dude, Mark," his wife was texting him, and people

were showing up at the house. Yeah, I appreciate that, and I appreciate you reaching out to me and the encouragement you shared. Let nobody think I’m anything other than in the same boat as yourself, Mark, and everyone else—or sorry, Billy, and everyone else. You know, we're all, apart from the saving work of Christ, on the same page. It’s only by—not anything I've done—but what Jesus did that leads me to where I am. So it’s just a position of humility that I get to do what I do, even to begin with. It’s not because I'm anyone

special; I’m certainly not. But God has led me along to equip me for where I am today, working with the people I do at Apologetics Canada, and being able to do the academic inquiry that I have the privilege to dig into. To be honest, you guys— you and Billy have a lot more in common than you think. If you guys could unify one day, that’s what the devil doesn’t want either. That’s a powerful force. You guys both remind me of Indiana Jones in your own different ways. You’re going and seeking knowledge. He goes everywhere, and

he really believes in seeking knowledge. That's a beautiful thing. So, I appreciate all this again. Everyone, it’s Wesley Huff on Instagram—we'll have it all in the show notes at Wesley Hoff. Your webpage again, and Billy Carson, of course, Forbidden Knowledge has the TV network, the show; he's all over the place. I mean, if you watch any of the podcasts over the past six months, he’s been on pretty much everyone you can think of—Joe Rogan, everywhere. He’s doing amazing things too. But this was an important conversation to have. So, anywhere else they can find you, Wesley,

before we pop off? Yeah, WesleyHuff.com would be the one-stop shop for any of my other socials or the podcasts that I sometimes jump on or the videos that I do. That can all be found there. Awesome! Thank you so much, my good man, and thank you so much, Billy. And everyone, never settle, never give up, and keep elevating!