Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan

Summary

Podcast Summary: Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh
Episode: Bible Expert on which Christianity is TRUE, the Book of Enoch, & if Christmas is Pagan
Release Date: May 13, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh, host Andrew Schulz welcomes Wesley Huff, a renowned Bible expert, to delve into profound and often controversial topics surrounding Christianity. The conversation navigates through textual criticism, historical contexts, non-canonical scriptures, and the intersections of Christianity with cultural practices.

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1. Determining the True Christianity: Textual Criticism and Biblical Manuscripts ([00:43]-[05:04])

Wesley Huff introduces his expertise in ancient scribal culture and textual criticism, emphasizing the challenges in identifying original biblical texts due to the absence of originals and the prevalence of copies over centuries.

• Notable Quote:
  Andrew Schulz ([04:00]): "So you're testing for efficacy of these ancient scribes."
  Wesley Huff ([04:01]): "Yeah, different things. So, like, there's a field called textual criticism, which looks at the text of particular documents."

Huff explains how the vast number of Bible copies surpasses other ancient documents, primarily because of the early Christian community's dedication to preserving and disseminating scriptures.

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2. Historical Context of Early Christianity ([05:04]-[10:00])

The discussion shifts to the historical backdrop of early Christianity, focusing on figures like Diocletian and Constantine. Diocletian's intense persecution of Christians inadvertently strengthened the faith community, while Constantine's eventual legalization of Christianity marked a pivotal shift.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([08:33]): "Christians thrive under persecution, which is an interesting like factor, but largely in spite of all of the stuff that's being spread about them."

Huff highlights how early Christians' philanthropic efforts, such as saving exposed children, garnered admiration even amidst widespread persecution and misconceptions about their practices.

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3. Examination of Biblical Events and Figures: John the Baptist, Resurrection, Giants ([13:24]-[26:34])

Wesley Huff delves into the roles of key biblical figures like John the Baptist and Jesus, exploring the nature of their ministries and the expectations of the Messiah in their historical context. The conversation also touches on the narrative of giants in the Bible, questioning their literal existence.

• Notable Quote:
  Andrew Schulz ([14:59]): "But he would have at least heard something, because we have this story where Mary finds out she's pregnant, and then she goes to her cousin Elizabeth. She feels John the Baptist's mother."

Huff explains John the Baptist's call for communal repentance through baptism, positioning Jesus as the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy, diverging from contemporary expectations of a military leader.

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4. The Book of Enoch and Non-Canonical Texts ([107:00]-[109:00])

The episode explores the Book of Enoch, a non-canonical text that expands upon biblical narratives, particularly concerning angels and the Nephilim. Huff clarifies that while the Book of Enoch holds historical significance, its origins and authenticity remain subjects of scholarly debate.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([108:17]): "The Book of Enoch we know isn't necessarily. It doesn't come from that time frame because that would be like pre-flood."

Huff categorizes the Book of Enoch as part of the Pseudepigrapha, writings falsely attributed to biblical figures to lend theological credence to their content.

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5. Translation and Interpretation of the Bible: Formal vs Dynamic Equivalence ([54:00]-[60:33])

Andrew Schulz and Wesley Huff discuss the nuances of Bible translation, contrasting formal equivalence (word-for-word) with dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought). They highlight challenges in translating idiomatic expressions and maintaining theological accuracy across languages and cultures.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([53:35]): "So dynamic is like the thought for thought idea. Right. So in the Gospel of Luke, in The Greek, there's this line where Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears."

Huff emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural and linguistic contexts to preserve the intended meaning of biblical passages, citing examples like the translation of "long of noses" as an idiomatic expression for God's steadfast love.

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6. Evolution of Christian Denominations: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism ([70:00]-[84:00])

The conversation transitions to the historical schisms within Christianity, detailing the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. Huff explains the theological and political factors that led to the formation of distinct denominations, emphasizing the divergence in doctrines like papal primacy.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([76:31]): "So, yeah, but I think you have a central core, which we would all adhere to approximately. But then you have differentiations and like theological disagreements."

Huff critiques the Roman Catholic Church's historical decisions, such as the sale of indulgences, as deviations from original Christian teachings, aligning more closely with Protestant reforms that advocate for sola scriptura (scripture alone).

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7. Pagan Influences on Christian Holidays ([92:00]-[94:20])

Andrew Schulz and Wesley Huff address claims that Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter have pagan origins. Huff counters by tracing the historical establishment of these holidays within Christian tradition, attributing elements like Christmas to specific Christian figures and practices rather than pagan rituals.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([93:14]): "Christmas goes really old. Yeah. So there's a guy named Julius Africanus in the second century... And then he counts nine months and gets to December 25th."
  Andrew Schulz ([93:39]): "The Book of Thomas, which we knew about prior to this because it had been condemned in the ancient church, but we didn't have evidence for it in terms of physical documentation until in the 1800s in a place called Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, they found some fragments of this unknown gospel."

Huff acknowledges the integration of certain cultural symbols, like Christmas trees and Santa Claus, evolved over time but maintains that the foundational aspects of these holidays are distinctly Christian.

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8. Morality and Religion: Faith vs Works ([155:00]-[168:15])

The hosts discuss the source of morality, contrasting religious-based ethics with evolutionary perspectives. Huff advocates for the Judeo-Christian moral framework, arguing that it provides an objective standard for goodness that evolution alone cannot fully account for.

• Notable Quote:
  Andrew Schulz ([155:02]): "But you're the person that doesn't understand the, that sees those things as a burden and sees them as a rule."

Huff counters by emphasizing that Christian morality is not merely rule-based but rooted in the inherent worth of individuals created in God's image, promoting a more profound sense of purpose and ethical living.

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9. Doctrine of Heaven and Hell for Non-Christians ([130:00]-[155:00])

A significant portion of the episode tackles the fate of non-Christians, discussing theological perspectives on heaven and hell. Huff explains the conditioned belief that salvation is attainable only through faith in Jesus, while also addressing common concerns about fair judgment for those unaware of Christian teachings.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([144:52]): "So, ultimately, I would say that if you have spent your life not living out a life, that is what Jesus has called you to do...you can't earn your way to heaven."

Huff introduces concepts from C.S. Lewis, suggesting that God's judgment is based on divine mercy and justice, rather than human understanding alone. He debates the exclusivity of salvation through Jesus, reflecting on the theological tension between inclusivity and doctrinal purity.

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10. The Trinity: Historical Formulation ([171:53]-[184:53])

The final segment explores the doctrine of the Trinity, explaining its development through early Christian theological debates. Huff outlines how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were understood as distinct persons within the single being of God, a concept that emerged through the Council of Nicaea and subsequent theological discourse.

• Notable Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([173:24]): "So this is the question the early church is wrestling through when they say, okay, Jesus is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds and the seat of God... in three persons."

Huff compares the Trinity to philosophical concepts of being and personhood, emphasizing the complex unity that differentiates Christian theology from other monotheistic interpretations.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with a reaffirmation of the importance of understanding historical, linguistic, and theological contexts to grasp the essence of Christianity. Wesley Huff advocates for a holistic approach to biblical interpretation, encouraging listeners to seek deeper insights into scripture beyond surface-level readings.

• Final Quote:
  Wesley Huff ([184:54]): "When you look at all these systems of the survival of the fittest that I talked about before. Christianity is the fittest stepping down and sacrificing himself for the survival of the weakest."

Andrew Schulz and his co-hosts express admiration for Huff's comprehensive knowledge, acknowledging the depth of the conversation and its implications for both believers and non-believers.

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Notable Sections Skipped:
The transcript included various advertisements, personal banter, and off-topic discussions about NBA playoffs, which have been excluded to maintain focus on the episode's core content.

Transcript

[Andrew Schulz]

What's up, people? Today we are joined by the most bodaciously brolic Bible expert you've ever seen. A true man of God. Wesley Huff, or as Billy Carson calls him, White Devil, is here to break down the big questions. Which version of Christianity is the truth? Did Jesus make it to India that explains how he walked on water because it's so polluted. Also, were there actual giants in the Bible? What's up with the Book of Enoch? Are Christmas and Easter just some old pagan holidays? And can non Christians still get into heaven? Indulge, Wesley, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm very excited for you to be here. We must state that I'm not taking any credit for your success. Neither is Mark, neither is Alex. Neither is Akash.

[Wesley Huff]

Never. Okay, I'll give it to you.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, don't do it. Because you earned your success. Okay. And Jesus, look at that fucking thing making me a Christian. And the other thing, put the test.

[Wesley Huff]

Back in New Testament.

[Andrew Schulz]

Let's go. It's ok. The, the, the Billy Carson debate, does it sprout from you reacting to Billy on our podcast?

[Wesley Huff]

Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Because I made response videos.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

To you guys.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

Because people kept sending it to me.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Now, did you watch the whole episode when we were like, we're not fact checking any of this. This is just for fun.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. And you're like, I'm gonna fact check.

[Wesley Huff]

People kept sending me these clips.

[Andrew Schulz]

I know. It's. The thing about Billy is like, I know he's full of, but he know he's full of. And that's why at least I didn't think he was a con artist. I was like, he really believes it. And this is kind of fun. So we're like, listen, we're going to have some fun today. But then when things get clipped out and put on the Internet, people believe.

[Wesley Huff]

It 100% when he's so confident.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

You know what's funny? I was just in Turkey and Billy's now in Turkey. I missed him by a week. We were in the exact same location. Wow. We could have. I had this thought.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

When we went. Because I went to Darren Kuyu, which is the underground city in Cappadocia, and I had the thought when we're like going in, I was like, what are the chances I run into Billy Carson down here? Because he said in an interview last year that he was going to go to Darren Ku in a year. And it was like almost the exact same time frame. I had that thought, didn't Happen.

[Andrew Schulz]

What would. What would have happened if you guys ended up in the same place? He's ducking.

[Wesley Huff]

I don't even know. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Have you guys spoken since. What's up with the lawsuit? Like, fill us in, dude.

[Wesley Huff]

No, the. The lawsuit didn't amount to much because there was no credibility to the lawsuit. You can't sue for not liking what you. You yourself said yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So it's okay. But, yeah, I mean, I haven't heard anything from him, nor do I necessarily need to. I don't want to be the guy that took down Billy Carson. I don't want that to be my legacy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I don't think that's her legacy.

[Wesley Huff]

My origin story.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, he's still doing.

[Wesley Huff]

He's still doing all right.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, Billy's going to be fine. For sure. People still want to believe in aliens. They want to believe in all this stuff. You believe in the Tablets of Toth. You got a necklace about it? Al is 100% locked in. Al's a flat Earther. There's a lot of things that we. What do you think about flat Earth? What's your.

[Wesley Huff]

I don't know. I mean, I've been in an airplane and up in the sky, and I think I've seen the curve, but I don't know.

[Andrew Schulz]

You don't know?

[Wesley Huff]

I'm not a scientist.

[Andrew Schulz]

Exactly.

[Wesley Huff]

Don't make me. What are you? Sciency things?

[Andrew Schulz]

What are you exactly?

[Wesley Huff]

I'm a historian.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, we know that. But then there's another thing.

[Wesley Huff]

What is it?

[Andrew Schulz]

I don't know. I was looking up your exact title, and I was like, there's no way I'm going to memorize it. But Your specialty, your PhD, is in biblical manuscripts.

[Wesley Huff]

Okay, so ancient scribal culture. So I study ancient scribes and how they produce and copy and disseminate manuscripts.

[Andrew Schulz]

So you're testing for efficacy of these ancient scribes.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, different things. So, like, there's a field called textual criticism, which looks at the text of particular documents.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Because in the ancient world, we don't have any originals. Everything is a copy, no matter what it is. And even if we found, quote, unquote, an original, I don't know how it would.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. What makes something original?

[Wesley Huff]

The author writes it.

[Andrew Schulz]

But, like. Oh, so the author could write 40 of them, and then we would deem that an original or.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, like, whatever. Like, say we find Plato's Republic and it was one that was written by him. We're like, how would we verify that it's actually. But everything we have are copies. And most of them are like, hundreds of years after because old things wear out. And so textual criticism looks at the text and the copies and looks at internal and external factors and traces the original back.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, question.

[Wesley Huff]

That's not what I do. But it's related.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, I just have a question about this.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. So it is possible that you could find an older version of the Bible or there could be a newer version of the Bible that is more accurate than an older version of Bible. Because the older version had a copying mistake.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And Right. And so how would you identify that?

[Wesley Huff]

Because there are so many copies. The thing with the Bible is that you have so many copies, far more copies than you have of any other ancient document.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. Why is that?

[Wesley Huff]

The Christians really wanted.

[Andrew Schulz]

Because we're the best copy. Copying of Jews, you get a copy.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, part of it was like, the Christians were the. I mean, Muslims call us the people of the book. Right. Christians and Jews, because we have a scripture and that's, like, central to the belief system we believe. Whereas that's not necessarily true for, like, other ancient religious practices. In fact, that's the argument. There's a end of 1st century, beginning of 2nd century, Jewish guy named Josephus.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

And so he writes a document called the Antiquities of the Jews. And in it, he talks about the differentiation between, like, the Greek religious practices, the Greco Roman religious practices, and the Jewish religious practices by saying, we don't have just an unlimited amount of religious texts like you guys have. We only have this. And part of the reason we know what the books of the Old Testament were in Jesus's day, part of the conversation is that Josephus outlines them. He gives a number and an argument for the list of books and what the books are.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. So from there we have this idea, because why would he lie or mislead about this time if his argument is to prove that this is the limited amount of books that we have?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. I mean, he has no reason to, like, make it up one way or the other. And then you have. So the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Like a lot.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And so we have evidence from. Okay, well, Jesus, Paul, Peter, they're quoting this stuff and they're saying, like, this is script. They're advocating for it and arguing, like, theological stuff on the basis of these texts. So we can also look at how they're treating Scripture.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And then there are other stuff, Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. What is the earliest version of the Bible? How do we. What is the Bible?

[Wesley Huff]

This question sounds familiar.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, what do you mean by version?

[Andrew Schulz]

I think that's where I'm going with the question, which is like, what were people consuming at the time?

[Wesley Huff]

So all of these books are like independent scrolls. So there's no such thing. We think of a Bible and we think of like the single volume.

[Andrew Schulz]

When do we get that? What time in history. So we don't get that until the year 300.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Anywhere between. So Constantine decriminalizes Christianity in 313.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

The Edict of Milan, the peace of the Church. So he makes it so that it's no longer illegal to be a Christian.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Because before him there was a guy named Diocletian who was the emperor.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And Diocletian in 308 says, you know, I'm going to wipe these people out. So he makes it illegal for Christians to gather and he beheads all the church leaders and he like, it's this systematized persecution. So there's persecution before that. Emperors were kind of loopy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So like Nero is famous for burning Christians in his garden as the lights.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

He's nuts.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. He got the lead poisoning, right?

[Wesley Huff]

Probably, Yeah. I think he was the one who made his horse his general and like made a marble, not like few screws loose. So there was persecution, but it wasn't like empire wide until Diana Diocletian comes.

[Andrew Schulz]

In, he's like, yo, we're getting rid of this shit.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So easy. And he's going to destroy the Christians. That's his kind of motivation. Constantine eventually takes control of the empire.

[Andrew Schulz]

Now in his effort to try to destroy them, does he just bolster the strength of the religion?

[Wesley Huff]

Which one?

[Andrew Schulz]

Diocletian.

[Wesley Huff]

Diocletian bolster, like you mean for Christians.

[Akash Singh]

Like banning a book makes it sell more?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Does it? See, is it, is it more popping? Is it more badass? Do more people want to go do it because of that? I'm just trying.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a bad way of putting it. I sort of. So Christians thrive under persecution, which is an interesting like factor, but largely in spite of all of the stuff that's being spread about them. So Christians do things like the Romans practice this ancient form of abortion where like, particularly if you have a girl, they. It's called exposure. So they take the children, they'd put them out in the garbage dumps or like in the. Outside the city gates and the Christians would go save them and would raise them. And so there was this like disproportionately large group of women in the Christian communities statistically, because smart. The Romans didn't want the women. Famous church right now. Right?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

It'S like a matt rife comedy shows there.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So. But yeah, and then they have like the Eucharist, the Lord's supper. Right?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Jesus talks about, this is my body, this is my blood. And so the, the Romans catch wind of. They do this ceremony where they're talking about drinking blood and eating flesh and they're grabbing all these babies.

[Andrew Schulz]

Sounds Hollywood. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. So in the midst of like stuff like that where they're like, they're eating the babies, they still grow. And in large part because they like, they're, they, they're philanthropic, they help people.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So we have some like Roman leaders who write and they, they decry the fact that Christians are not just taking care of their own, they're taking care of like, they're like, they're taking care of everybody else. This is embarrassing us. Oh.

[Andrew Schulz]

So.

[Wesley Huff]

But there are lots of factors that go into that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Take me even earlier then, like, what's happening immediately after the, you know, the big day?

[Wesley Huff]

The big day. Ground zero, Round zero. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What's happening? Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

What do you mean? Before that?

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, after what's happening after, like.

[Mark Yagnon]

The time of the early church, after the resurrection of Christ.

[Akash Singh]

Between resurrection and 313 or whatever.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. So Christianity is this like fringe movement of a bunch of. And early on, they're still associated in the pagan world with the Jews. They're like a group of Jews. They just follow this.

[Andrew Schulz]

So they're thought of as Jews at the time, but like an offset of Judaism.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, because it kind of are stranger because. So your religion in the ancient world is largely tied to your ethnicity.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

And so conversion wasn't unusual.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is interesting. Yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Conversion wasn't unusual in the ancient world. In fact, if you got married and you were like a pagan Roman, it was expected that you would convert to your husband's religion, Particularly if they had house gods, which was common.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

But the Christians and the Jews were unusual in that they just denied everybody else's gods existed.

[Andrew Schulz]

Fire.

[Wesley Huff]

So actually one of the earliest accusations for Christians is that they're atheists. They deny the gods. So they're accused of being atheists and they're accused of being anti social.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Like atheos. No gods.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

You guys believe in a thousand gods?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I believe in one, yeah. And the ancient world is not just polytheistic. It's what's called henotheistic.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

So you don't just believe there are many gods. You believe that there's, like, hierarchies of gods. And actually your gods could be minor gods by another name. So, like Zeus and Jupiter.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

Like, that's why the Greeks and the Romans have the similar, if not the same gods by different names.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

They have, like, different stories to them.

[Andrew Schulz]

So that's assumed by one another. You're like, okay, we both believe in these different gods. You have different names for them. That's fine. But we're both part of the same belief system.

[Mark Yagnon]

The emperor's a God.

[Andrew Schulz]

Everyone's a God. Everybody's a God. And where Jews and Christians are coming around, they're like, that ain't the case.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Not only are your gods not, like, powerful, your gods just don't. They straight up don't exist.

[Andrew Schulz]

You're making them up.

[Wesley Huff]

And so persecution for Christians becomes this. They become this easy scapegoat. Because if you're, like, in Athens and the city God is Athena and there's some sort of, like, famine, we can't blame Athena. Why do we have a famine? Well, Athena's mad. Why is Athena's mad? Well, because there are these guys running around saying she doesn't even exist. So there's this early church historian named Tertullian who. And he has this famous line where he says that if the Tiber river in Rome is too high or the Nile river in Egypt is too low, the cry will ring out the Christians, the lions, because they become like, this easy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Why? Why would our gods punish us?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

We have no reason.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So. So that. That happens pretty quickly. And Tertullian also said the blood of the martyrs is a seed of the church. So we get, like, martyrdom stories very early.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

And a lot of them are because that Christians become this easy scapegoat.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it. So there's tons of persecution early. I actually want to go back even before crucifixion. I want to go to John the Baptist. I'm really interested in this John the Baptist guy, and I don't feel like he gets enough shine, doesn't get the press he deserves.

[Akash Singh]

I don't think he's an underrated character in the Bible.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, so. So what? So he's offering forgiveness through baptism. Right. Is this happening in the world? Okay, well, maybe you clarify. So I don't misrepresent.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So he is starting this, like, this movement of group repentance.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Where he is saying. So baptism isn't necessarily an unusual thing. To do. In ancient Judaism, like ablution, cleaning is part of just ritualistic purity. The Jews. The ancient Jews were obsessed with ritualistic purity. And then you have groups like the Essenes out in the desert who. They're like, we were just going to do this all day long. Like, we're basically. We're going to. There's bads everywhere. In Qumran, which is their community.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And they're just constantly washing themselves for ritual purity.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

So it's not that John the Baptist is doing something unusual. It's that he is then saying that Israel communally needs to repent and that you need to be doing this there for this reason. And that then this Jesus guy shows up and he says he's the one that John and Jesus.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like homies or cousins. Yeah. So, like, they kind of grew up together. No.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, but. And John knows this, this entire time that Jesus is going to be the Messiah. Or one day he realizes it.

[Wesley Huff]

I don't know. I mean, that's not explicitly said one way or another. But Jesus shows up and asks John to baptize him. And John says, I'm not worthy to.

[Andrew Schulz]

Baptize you, so he knows you should.

[Wesley Huff]

Be baptizing me, not the other way around.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. But he would have at least heard something, because we have this story where Mary finds out she's pregnant, and then she goes to her cousin Elizabeth. She feels John the Baptist's mother.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Don't mess that up. And the progressive Bible.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, right.

[Wesley Huff]

And so there's. There's like a knowledge there that.

[Andrew Schulz]

That something special might happen.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, something special.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. So. So the thing that John is doing that is novel. You would. Is saying that they should repent.

[Wesley Huff]

Sort of like, what is he doing.

[Andrew Schulz]

That is dissimilar from everyone else at the time?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, he's like a wild man. He's wearing camel skins and he's eating locusts and honey, and he's like, living out in the desert.

[Andrew Schulz]

So he's not offering forgiveness.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, he's saying repent. He's saying. So he's not offering forgiveness, but he's saying you need to seek forgiveness from God. And you start by doing this, like, act of going through, like, a public declaration of your repentance. And the Jewish leaders kind of get mad at him because he's implying that they. They like their ethnicity isn't enough. So they come and they're like, well, we're children of Abraham. And his line is, you know, God can raise up children of Abraham from these Stones is what he says.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, just. Just being the child of Abraham is nothing special. You have to do the acts.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. He's also speaking out against the political system. So he.

[Andrew Schulz]

So he's the first person recognizing that there's something that he deems corrupt happening in society at the time.

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, there were other people doing something.

[Andrew Schulz]

I don't want to say first, but he is one of these people that is recognizing there is corruption. And the only way that we can thwart this corruption is through repentance. And hopefully there will be forgiveness. Yeah, more or less.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm just trying to understand, like, what's happening societally at the time that compels a guy like John the Baptist to even do that.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, there's cultural expectations in the day that the Messiah's gonna come.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right. Because the Jews are saying, yo, Messiah's gonna come.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

So that's. Okay. So that's already been set. So they're looking, they're like, who's gonna be the guy?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And there seems to be in the New Testament this like, buzz that it's gonna happen soon because when Jesus talks with the woman at the well.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Like he's. He's talking to her and she basically says, like, the Messiah's gonna come and he's gonna reveal all these things. There's this like, cultural expectation. Yeah, this guy's gonna come, things are bad with the Romans, and he's gonna rescue us from the Romans.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

But they kind of thought that that would be a military leader.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right, right.

[Wesley Huff]

So the expectation was that the Messiah was going to. He was gonna save us from the Romans. He wasn't gonna get murdered by the Romans.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, so Jesus comes around really quick.

[Mark Yagnon]

Have you heard the claim that Jesus just took up the teachings of John the Baptist and basically co opted it to then create his own cult, so to speak.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I mean, they're.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's never happened in religions before. No, no, I'm just saying one guy with interesting ideas and then a really smart businessman comes around and like forms religion around it. I'm just saying.

[Wesley Huff]

What are you.

[Mark Yagnon]

That I don't believe.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, maybe you could clarify that.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah. Keep the blasphemies to a minimum. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

We're counting them down.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. So explain Scientology. Yeah, Go, go, go.

[Wesley Huff]

So, I mean. Yeah. That, that there is an idea there. I think all the evidence we have of the historical John the Baptist kind of points otherwise. And there are actually followers of John the Baptist in the second century that kind of Outlived Jesus. And so you have these different factions. Some people are still following John the Baptist.

[Andrew Schulz]

So some people don't choose up with Jesus. No, they stay true to John.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, and even in the Gospels, there's this. So John the Baptist speaks out against, like, the. The local leader. The local leader has a party with his daughter. And his. He gets his daughter. Well, she dances. It's kind of weird scene. She dances in Herod's palace. And then he says, I'll give anything to you. Up to half of my, like, empire. And she says, I'm with the head of John the Baptist. So she kind of gets coerced to have him bring in the head of John the Baptist. While John is in prison for speaking out against them, he has doubts. And he sends some of his followers to Jesus to ask Jesus, are you the one we're waiting for? Should we wait for another? So even John the Baptist starts to struggle with his own faith when things aren't going his way. And then it's really interesting is Jesus's reply is, go tell John what you've seen. The dead are raised. The blind see the lame walk. And there's this interesting connection with those are statements in the Old Testament of what Yahweh is going to do when he. Like, when he reunites his kingdom in the restoration. And there's a Dead Sea scroll fragment called 4Q521, which is part of these, like, Essene community. And it talks about the fact that everybody will see God's Messiah and the dead will be raised and the lame will walk. And so it has these connections. So those are verses from the Old Testament.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. How much writing is there when he raises some dead?

[Wesley Huff]

What do you mean?

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, do we have, like, is everybody going, this is insane.

[Akash Singh]

Like, are you saying, like, how many souls are there in the bead?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I mean, every copy of, like, the Gospel of John with the story of Lazarus and Mark is the Gyrus's daughter.

[Andrew Schulz]

But do you have anything outside of that? Is there just like, a newspaper clipping, like, this guy's on it?

[Wesley Huff]

No, but, like, Twitter clip. Yeah, it's on X.

[Andrew Schulz]

We hear a lot about the walking on the water and the wine. The raising the dead one is.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. What's funny about the raising the dead one is that then the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders are, like, trying to figure out how to kill Jesus after that. And, like, did you see what just happened?

[Andrew Schulz]

We gotta get this back.

[Wesley Huff]

We gotta kill this guy. And then how are they gonna kill Lazarus again? It's like, well, that didn't work the first time.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, go on, go on.

[Wesley Huff]

But yeah, so I mean, all the copies that we have of John and Mark would include those stories. But the ancient world was largely illiterate. So that's something we also have to keep in mind is that our world is hyper literate, so we're constantly writing things down. And most people know how to write and read. It's not true in the ancient world.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So at the height of the Roman Empire, probably was only 10% literate. And there would be like pockets of communities that would be able to read and write.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

But usually like the first Bibles were audio bibles in the sense that you would have someone within your community that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Had memorized the entirety of Obama or.

[Wesley Huff]

They would just read out loud.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So Paul writes letters to these churches. There'd probably be a few people in the church who could read it, but they would just hear it. Yeah, most of the time.

[Akash Singh]

All right, guys, dates before I go to hell, see me in Salt Lake City, June 19 through June 21, Oklahoma City. These shows might have to get rescheduled, but as of now it is July 18th and July 19th. August. I'm in Kansas City, Missouri on the 1st and 2nd, Perrysburg, Ohio on the 8th and 9th. Liberty Township, Ohio. Why am I doing so much? Ohio on the 22nd, 23rd. And we got more dates coming. We got a bunch for the fall, so get your tickets. Akash Singh.com is a website. I love y' all. Thank you.

[Mark Yagnon]

What's up guys? Really quick. I'm on the road. That's right. I'm going to Indianapolis and then we're going to Buffalo, Raleigh, Poughkeepsie, Portland, Fort Worth, Austin, Stamford, Philadelphia, Levittown, Washington D.C. san Diego, Burlington, Montreal, Toronto, and a bunch of other dates. You can check them out on my website, Mark Yagnon Live. And we can have a great time. See me, come hang out.

[Akash Singh]

I'm not asking because he's asking.

[Mark Yagnon]

Yeah, I'm not asking for anything.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'll be honest.

[Wesley Huff]

I.

[Mark Yagnon]

A few people after the show were.

[Wesley Huff]

Like, what is this?

[Mark Yagnon]

A few people after the show were like, hey, I'm not gonna do what Akash told me to do, but I just wanted to say hey, and that's great. That's all I need. Okay, see me at the show.

[Akash Singh]

Well, no, I mean, he wants you to suck his dick. That's why he's sitting like this.

[Mark Yagnon]

See you there.

[Andrew Schulz]

Jesus is crucified.

[Wesley Huff]

Uh huh. I've heard of it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Runs it back. Okay. What.

[Wesley Huff]

What do you.

[Andrew Schulz]

What. What do you do?

[Wesley Huff]

It's an accurate description. It is.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is what happened.

[Wesley Huff]

Runeth it back.

[Andrew Schulz]

He runneth it back. Okay. Immediate fallout after running it back.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Who's seeing him?

[Wesley Huff]

So the. The disciples run scared. They hide because they basically figure, okay, the movement's dead. So Jesus isn't the only messianic movement that happens within this time period. There are guys before him and after him who try to create, like, revolutions. So after just a short period after Jesus, there's a guy named Simon Bargiora, and he's famous, and then there's Simon Bar Kokba. So the Bar Kokba revolt is the one that kind of launches things that eventually gets Jerusalem destroyed under Titus, who then marches into Jerusalem. He sacked Jerusalem. And they destroy the temple. That happens in 70 AD. Was Simon claiming to be the son of God also? No. So that's a new show. Most of these guys are just like military leaders. So Jesus's messianic claims are kind of unique in that he's doing things that people didn't really expect the Messiah to do or be in that they're still expecting a military leader. Because have you heard of Maccabees? Like, first, second, third Maccabees? The Maccabees is the story of Hanukkah. So the. The Greek emperor guy, he marches in and he takes over Israel. And then he does something real bad for the Jews in that he sacrifices a pig on the altar in the temple to Zeus. So all. All bunch of layers of not being kosher.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right?

[Wesley Huff]

And then the Simon, or not Simon, Judas, Judas Maccabeus. Judas the hammer, he goes in and he kicks them out and he rededicates the temple. That's the story of Hanukkah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

So he's like a. Like a military leader in that sense. So he's seen as not the messianic figure that they're waiting for, but a messianic figure in the sense that he's established, like, he's kicked out the bad guys and he's established the kind of unification of the Jewish nation at that point. So they're kind of looking for that again. And Judas Maccabeus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, which is also what Jesus does. So when Jesus does that, it's kind of a callback, like, okay. And the people are like, I think we know what's going to happen.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. When he rides back in on the donkey. First of all, incredibly, I'm going to use the Exact term badass. Right. Like super flex. But super flex. Do you come in on the donkey? I don't need some big shiny horse. I'm going to come in on, like, the little. I'm trying to be very respectful of my language now. We're talking about Jesus. Fake horse. Right? And then so immediately, is everybody, like, shook? Are people running? Are there people that rejoicing? Like, what is that immediate reaction upon return?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. When he. When he rides in the Triumphal entry.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Like when he goes in Jerusalem. Yeah. They're waving palm branches. That's why. Like, Palm Sunday, right?

[Andrew Schulz]

We.

[Wesley Huff]

Palm branches. Because they're waving palm branches. They're putting their coats down and they're saying, Hosanna.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. I listen to that song this morning.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

[Andrew Schulz]

Shadow Hill song.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So. But it's the same crowd that then at. When he's, like, on trial with Pilate.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Is then saying, crucify him. So they turn. They turn fast.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, right.

[Wesley Huff]

I want.

[Mark Yagnon]

I feel like the funniest thing of Jesus going to Jerusalem is that. That no one thought that a guy like the Messiah could come from Nazareth or Galilee and that there's a reference and they go, what good has ever come out of that? Like, they talk about it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. It's the boonies.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. It's like.

[Wesley Huff]

I don't know. What's the jersey? It's like the middle of nowhere. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Upper Michigan, somewhere small in that. Like, he's. He's a. He's a hick.

[Mark Yagnon]

And who says it? I forget exactly who. Who makes that comment.

[Wesley Huff]

I think it's when Jesus is ministering in Galilee and they're like, who. You know, what good can come from Nazareth? Like, it's just such an unusual place. Once again, like, subverting cultural expectations, right? He's. He's born in Bethlehem, which is where he should be, which is, like, from the house of David. But then he lives and grows up in Nazareth, which is like, Nowhereville.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And so. And then even when he goes back, they're like. Because he ministers in Nazareth at one point, and everybody. He's doing, like.

[Andrew Schulz]

Now I'm seeing the Star wars parallels. I never got it before, but they just ripped off the Jesus story completely.

[Wesley Huff]

Everybody rips off the Jesus story.

[Andrew Schulz]

Unbelievable. They gotta pay their little 10%.

[Wesley Huff]

Star Wars.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wait, how's the Matrix?

[Wesley Huff]

The Matrix?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Is it a chosen one?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, but outside of that, like, I'm talking about.

[Akash Singh]

That's a good point. Honestly. Y' all laughing. But outside of that, there's a Judas Right.

[Wesley Huff]

There's a Judas who betrays him.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's fair.

[Wesley Huff]

And then there's a John the Baptist. He shows you the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who like, like makes the path straight.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's right. Morpheus is John the Baptist.

[Wesley Huff]

And there's.

[Andrew Schulz]

He's like, I'm not the one. He's going to be the one.

[Wesley Huff]

There's a Mary Magdalene.

[Andrew Schulz]

But what happens with. All right, what happens with him? What happens with him and Mary?

[Wesley Huff]

That's true.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's true.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. That's Hollywood.

[Andrew Schulz]

Jesus. Yeah, yeah. You don't think that Jesus. Jesus was. I'm trying to be respectful, obviously, but you don't think Jesus was, you know, testing the profession?

[Wesley Huff]

Nah.

[Andrew Schulz]

She was a pro. Right. Like allegedly. Isn't that what say. Or is that.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no. So that's a. So Mary Magdalene is not the prostitute. That.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

That was a Pope's fault. He. He connected those dots and that they were wrong. And then the, the church had to. The Roman Catholic Church had to backtrack on that.

[Andrew Schulz]

They did backtrack on that. Okay, good.

[Wesley Huff]

Always thought she was a prostitute. No, this is.

[Akash Singh]

I'm obviously not Christian, so this is a much broader, maybe ignorant question. Is there like a matrix kind of thing in Christianity? Like in Hinduism we call that Maya, which is like all this stuff that you see is illusion. The reality is the afterlife thing.

[Wesley Huff]

No, that's fine.

[Andrew Schulz]

I love confident Christians. Bro, get your goofy ass multi God religion out of here.

[Mark Yagnon]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What are you talking about?

[Wesley Huff]

No, well, because there's a, there's a differentiation between like Eastern mysticism has this idea of like, that this world is an illusion. Right. So you have things like Samsara, the cycle. That's Buddhism, right, Not Hinduism, but the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. And. And you're trying to escape this.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, that's Hinduism too.

[Wesley Huff]

And, and so that would be. That would be ancient Platonic philosophy that gets mixed in with like the Gnosticism that develops in the second century where the physical is bad and the spiritual is good. And so when you have the early Christians arguing against the Gnostics, they're doubling down. Not that Jesus is God. They don't have a problem with that. It's that Jesus is a human. Because they believe if you're human, you can't be God.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

You can't mix that. You're in a meat prison and your spirit's trying to get out of there. But Jews and Christians have the inherent belief of the resurrection. So we are embodied. You're not A spirit that has a body. You're a spirit and body. Those. Those two things kind of mix. And heaven is a layover. It's not the final goal. You're in the. The heaven is the place you go to wait for the final resurrection, when we will all be given new resurrected bodies. And that's why Jesus is called the first fruits, is because everybody believed in the resurrection. So when Jesus keeps saying, you know, I'm gonna die and I'm gonna rise again, they're like, yeah, all of us. Jesus, they don't understand that he's talking about something that's unique and that he's gonna do it now as, like, a preview of what everyone's gonna get in the afterlife. Like, you have heaven and then the resurrection, where heaven and earth meet and all things are restored.

[Andrew Schulz]

I had no clue that's what the real heaven was. I didn't know that. This current one is dud. I started on the Old Testament. It's dense. A lot of rules. So much. I don't want to be disrespected to.

[Wesley Huff]

The part with the, like, the. The sore with the white hair.

[Andrew Schulz]

I got to the part where it's like, the temple needs to be 6 inches from the legs, and I'm running on a treadmill, and I'm listening to the audio version, and they're constructing a temple out of, like, certain materials, and the fabric needs to hang three inches from the thing, and I'm like, I'm not a gc. I don't need to know, like, what's going on here. I'm not building the temple. Like, we're going to heaven, you know, So I didn't even get to the fun stories.

[Mark Yagnon]

You start with the Gospels.

[Andrew Schulz]

I need. I should have started with the Gospels. Why do you guys. I still want to get into. I still want to get into what's. Guys. Yeah, you're right.

[Wesley Huff]

I'm one of them.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, I wasn't baptized, so I don't get. But my parents were. How does that work?

[Wesley Huff]

We can. We can get that done for you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Really? Should I go to the baptized?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, but should I go to, like, is it.

[Wesley Huff]

You should go to the Jordan. Go to the Jordan up here before you start.

[Akash Singh]

You don't think they want 10 of your income? Dog.

[Andrew Schulz]

It went up.

[Mark Yagnon]

It's 15, though.

[Wesley Huff]

Old Testament. You don't got to give 10%. You released to give as much as you want. Well.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Mark Yagnon]

Actually on the topic of India and Hinduism.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, yeah. Did Jesus make it out to India?

[Mark Yagnon]

Yeah. What do you think of that?

[Wesley Huff]

I don't think so. So the claim. People think that comes. So there was a guy named. I'm going to forget his name. He was a Russian researcher in the 1800s, and he made this claim that he went out to Tibet and he found a document in a Tibetan monastery that talked about Jesus studying there in India. His name's eluding me. It'll. It'll pop in my brain. Yeah. Nicholas Novich.

[Andrew Schulz]

So.

[Wesley Huff]

So the problem is that he basically, with all these things, right? Emerald Talbot, all the evidence disappears, right? And then you have like, trust me, bro. And actually a statement came out from the monks at this particular monastery, and they're like, we have no idea what this guy's talking about. No Russian has ever showed up here. But he made this claim that Jesus went to India when he was in his childhood, missing years.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

So you have his birth story, right? And then you have a story in the Gospel of Luke where he's 12 years old and Mary, Joseph and Jesus go to Jerusalem, and then Mary and Joseph conveniently lose the son of God and they heck it out of there. And then he's not with them. They go back to the temple and he's teaching.

[Andrew Schulz]

Home Alone is the fucking Jesus story, too.

[Wesley Huff]

I know. It's all.

[Mark Yagnon]

It's all the Jesus story.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

Matrix is Hindu.

[Wesley Huff]

That's my point.

[Akash Singh]

But Home Alone.

[Wesley Huff]

Home Alone, you let us have that.

[Andrew Schulz]

One that's y' all lost in Jerusalem.

[Wesley Huff]

If he's the Messiah, why aren't they keeping track of everything happening throughout his entire life? Good question. So the Gospels are a form of ancient biography. And when you read there are stipulations for ancient biography. So there are guys like Lucien who writes a document called how to Write Good History in the Ancient World. Right. So he's a little bit before Jesus and he actually talks about. And some other ancient, like biographers, historians talk about, how do you write good history? And the editing process, they say, is just as important as what you include. So in the, like, 18th, 19th century, a lot of these German scholars looked at the Gospels and they said these couldn't. These can't be biographies. Because we know that biographies include stories of her childhood and particularly psychologize. So we have to remove these as thinking about them as biographies. What they failed to understand is that there was already a category in the ancient world for what biographies looked like and whether the Gospel authors were reading, like Lucian and Celsus and Aristophanes are not, which I don't think they necessarily were. It was in the zeitgeist that you include what's important and you make sure that you don't add fluff, particularly because these are very arduous and expensive to write. And so you include what's. If there's something noteworthy about. So the birth is noteworthy. The story where Jesus goes to the temple and all of these teachers in the temple are amazed by this 12 year old boy who's teaching them stuff that's in there. And then you like, fast forward to when he's 30 because. So from 12 to 30 is just fluff. Well, he's just kind of living. So Luke says he. He's something.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, my boy. That's some good living. Magical powers from 13 to 30, they're gonna be. You going to Thailand.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, so that's.

[Andrew Schulz]

Come on, come on, come on. With all due respect, I'm not mature enough to have this con. With all due respect, if you have magical powers from 13 and 30 and then at 30, like I'm on my longevity right now. I'm 40. Right. So I'm, you know, switching things up in my life. Obviously lifespan was a little bit less back in the day. So 30 comes around, you're like, now I'll change the world forever for the better. But there's got to be a time where, you know, you pop down to the Nile, see what's good over there.

[Mark Yagnon]

He's a carpenter, he's doing his job.

[Akash Singh]

He's laying wood.

[Andrew Schulz]

With all due respect. With all due respect.

[Akash Singh]

So I don't.

[Wesley Huff]

You get a pass. Pass. So it's a good question. So I mentioned before, when Jesus get a pass.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, because he gets hell anyway.

[Wesley Huff]

I didn't say that.

[Andrew Schulz]

You inferred it.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no.

[Andrew Schulz]

You can say a lot about trying.

[Wesley Huff]

To eliminate his existence anyways. Right, Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

He'll be back. He'll become back in the next life. As a Christian. No.

[Wesley Huff]

So there's this story where Jesus goes back to Nazareth.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

And they're like, who is this guy? Isn't he, don't we know his mom? Don't we know his dad? Isn't he the carpenter's son? So there it's the equivalent of saying like, we went to prom with this guy, what's he doing? Like, how, how do you end up like this? Like, they're surprised.

[Andrew Schulz]

But don't they also know that he was immaculately conceived?

[Wesley Huff]

They may or may not. Why would they know that?

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, that, that wasn't like, you know, people talk.

[Wesley Huff]

People talk.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

They're not broadcasting it.

[Akash Singh]

You don't think Joe didn't confide in nobody.

[Mark Yagnon]

No, you go to your boy and.

[Akash Singh]

Be like, hey, man, I don't know what's going on. This girl pregnant. I didn't do anything.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. There must have been a little they don't know conversation.

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, maybe some people knew, but they're surprised. Right. And so there's an indication from the historical records of the Gospels that people like Jesus during childhood, it couldn't have been all that crazy because they're surprised when he's showing up and he's doing miracles.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

There is a category of literature in like 100 years plus after Jesus.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

It called infancy narratives, where people are coming up with stories where. What would, you know, magical messiah Jesus have done. And so there's stories he's like, playing on the playground. He knocks it, guys. Then he raised. Oh, no, no, no. These are clearly embellished.

[Andrew Schulz]

And let's stick on the first hand accounts because these are the ones that are really exc. You can verify these kind of. We would.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're at minimum, there are only source material from the time frame that Jesus lived.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. Why was he in Egypt? Why did he pop over to Cairo?

[Wesley Huff]

He went to Cairo. He did go to Egypt.

[Andrew Schulz]

I went to the church that they were hiding out in.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the claim that they make.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's fake.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I'm not saying it's fake. Egyptians.

[Andrew Schulz]

Down the street to go see where Jesus was hidden. It's a.

[Wesley Huff]

You get good deal. I got good deal. I have another choice.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is unbelievable.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no. Okay. I'm not saying it's fake.

[Andrew Schulz]

You tell me Jews built the pyramids. Now they didn't. They started.

[Wesley Huff]

That was aliens. Yes, I watched that documentary. Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

It was great.

[Wesley Huff]

So it's not that that church is fake. It's just that the. The stories that come up around these particular things are much later, and they. Their reliability is iffy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. I went to the anointing stone when I was in Jerusalem. Is that real?

[Wesley Huff]

That has a lot.

[Andrew Schulz]

Don't break my heart.

[Wesley Huff]

This stuff in Jerusalem has a lot more credibility because we have records going Back to the 2nd century of people going there in pilgrimages. So a lot of the, like, locations for the Holy Sepulcher or like, like that kind of stuff. They go back to Constantine's mobile, who went to Jerusalem and established some of these things.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

But she did. So based on, like, a oral chain of custody, where she went to the places where the locals were saying, we've been going here for hundreds of years. And this is. This is. These are the connection points.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it. So that's some word of mouth right there.

[Wesley Huff]

It is, but it's like the chain of custody going back arguably to, like, there's a reliable sense. So are there questions about all these things? Sure.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Mark Yagnon]

I have a quick question on the. Like, some of the discrepancies that occur in the Bible. That's something that I struggle with sometimes.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure.

[Mark Yagnon]

As a Catholic, you know, we have a little. A little broader, you know, papal authority. But I'm curious, like, how should Christians deal with discrepancies in the Bible? Whether it's like the birth story or like, the death of Judas or things like that.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What do you mean by discrepancies? Can you explain?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, so there are differentiations in detail because we have four Gospels.

[Andrew Schulz]

Explain what the Gospels are to people out there like me. Me?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Good Catholics like you. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are these biographies of Jesus's life. So two of them claim to be written by eyewitnesses. Matthew is Levi, the tax collector, and John is the disciple. John, Luke and Mark are not. So Luke is a traveling companion to Paul who writes this twofold document, Luke and Acts. And then Mark is in the earliest church tradition, he's a traveling companion of Peter. So he gets his source information from Peter, which is really interesting in the fact that Peter does not look good in Mark. Like, that's where. Get behind me, Satan. He's the duh disciple. Like, he's continually not getting what Jesus is saying, and he, like, runs away, denies Jesus. So if. If the earliest source material is true, which I think we have no reason not to think it is, especially because they don't then call it the Gospel of Peter, which they could. If they're like, well, this is Peter's source information, they call it the Gospel of Mark. Who. Mark's a generally a nobody. That only gives credibility to the fact that Mark probably wrote it. And then it has this connection directly with Peter himself. So four Gospels. Two are claimed to be eyewitnesses who wrote them, and then two claim to be, like, associates.

[Akash Singh]

Secondhand.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Yeah. So when the church is looking at all this literature and they're saying, okay, we have an Old Testament, a Testamentum just means covenant idea. The game in the Greek, you just translate it into Latin and it's Testament. The Old Testament. God's covenants are always followed up by written texts. So that's why they collected. You have guys like Philo and Josephus. They talk about this stuff, what are the books? And then the Christians see Jesus, he establishes a new covenant. He's fulfilling what the prophet Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 31, 31, where he says, I'm going to make a new covenant with my people, I'm going to write my law in their hearts. Jesus claims to fulfill those things. And then the early Christians who are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, are saying, okay, here's the covenant, here's the promise, where are the written texts? And so they have these conversations of canonicity which just means like canon in Greek means a rule. So it's the standard. You know, you have like a Harry Potter canon and then you have stuff that's non Star wars canon or Lord of the Rings canon, whatever. So the canon of scripture. And they're saying, okay, what's in, what's out?

[Andrew Schulz]

What's in, what's out? And these are all the stories about Jesus and his teachings at the time. Firsthand account, secondhand account, third hand account, some are some rumors and they have to go through, parcel through to find what has the most efficacy.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So what the conversations they're having is what are the documents that are either from someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus. That's the standard.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it, got it. So yeah, it's either what is it, empirical evidence or like what is one derivative away from that?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And for the gospels in particular, like these four biographies of Jesus's life, they're the ones that the early Jesus community agrees upon the most because the disciples of Jesus had disciples. They're called the apostolic fathers.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So there were people who like Peter and John and Paul disciple themselves. And then those people talk about, okay, I heard John say this, I heard, you know, so, so and they give credibility. So there's this like direct chain of succession in line of custody to the apostolic community.

[Andrew Schulz]

But is each started interrupt here. So is each one of the apostles teaching their version of Jesus's life? And do those differ slightly? And is Christianity kind of like fracturing a little bit in those first few hundred years?

[Wesley Huff]

So yes and no. So this goes to your question in terms of the differentiation in detail. So the fact is we have four biographies and sometimes they tell the same stories, but they give different angles on the stories. So we have a similar thing with the emperor at the time, Tiberius. So the only other person who's sort of comparative to Jesus in terms of source information is the emperor. So you have Jesus and then you have the most powerful, the most well known, the richest person at the time. And he also has four biographies of himself, or at least four. Don't kick that, please.

[Andrew Schulz]

Thank you. Sorry.

[Wesley Huff]

Forgive me. So he. So Tiberius has Velius, Paterculus, Suetonius, Cassius, Dio, and Tacitus, who are all writing source information for him. So if we can do, like, a comparative analysis for someone with Jesus, the emperor is a good guy to do it because he likewise has four individuals who are writing about his life, you're.

[Andrew Schulz]

Saying as an example of their importance and impact.

[Wesley Huff]

Or like, how can we look at source information? Now, the Gospels are a little bit different because they're pretty comprehensive and they're only about Jesus, whereas these other guys are writing, say, about emperors more broadly. And so it's like snippets here and there. But what I was getting at is we have differences in those stories too. Or like Socrates.

[Andrew Schulz]

I get what you're saying.

[Wesley Huff]

Socrates has three biographers.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, it's three different sports writers writing about the game. They might have different angles, but at the end of the day, this is the score. And these are how much these people played. And they're gonna reference who the superstars were.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And the detail. So I would say a differentiation in detail doesn't necessarily amount to a contradiction. So I haven't found something that I think is an outright contradiction. That's not to say there aren't hard ones. So the death of Judas is a hard one, because one gospel says that he. He went and hung himself in the potter's field. The other says that he falls headlong and his entrails fall out. So he falls headlong and his, like, insides fall out.

[Andrew Schulz]

What does that mean, falls headlong? Like.

[Wesley Huff]

Like, it falls on his head and.

[Andrew Schulz]

His insides fall out.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What.

[Wesley Huff]

So that's what it says happens. So there are a few things going on here. I think it's entirely possible to harmonize that and say he hung himself and he rope snap and it fell and he. He, like, it's not. You can see how you could get these kind of things, even if some people think you're playing loose and fast with that kind of thing.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

You also have the fact that in Hebraic Semitic idea, your entrails, like your. Your intestines, are where your credibility comes from.

[Andrew Schulz]

Ah, got it.

[Wesley Huff]

So there's. There could be a play on words in that he could have physically, like, his cut open and his intestines fell out. But there also could have been this idea for the Jewish mindset of, like, this is the guy that betrayed Jesus, of course. His entrails fallout. Because that's where your, like, credibility is now, is there?

[Andrew Schulz]

Could you argue that there is credibility in the authenticity of the Gospel, of the Gospels? Because they're the Gospels.

[Wesley Huff]

Those are my favorite.

[Andrew Schulz]

Because me too. It's a ser. Because there are differing accounts. Like, if every account was identical, you don't need four accounts. The fact that they differ slightly and they don't make the changes to make them match up offers more authenticity to me.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I would say if, no, like.

[Andrew Schulz]

If you're gonna change it, change it. It's sort of like the headspace of, like, if you're, like, sort of cheating on a test or like, you have.

[Mark Yagnon]

To make one thing wrong to make it not look like you got it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I guess you can make it so, like, they're terming it that way. I mean, it almost in the way that you're correct. I've never thought about it that way. Yeah, because the criticism from the outside is, hey, they're just changing these things to make it look the best so that they can exert power and influence over the people that they rule.

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's the outside perspective from, like, an atheist, perhaps, and on, on the societal utility, or not even societal, of, like, how the power structure uses religion. Right. So. But I'm like, okay, well, that's not a really good one if you're putting quote unquote mistakes or differences. You're like, unless they thought it was important to maintain the authenticity of these stories, so they left them in there despite the differences.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, if they all said the same thing, you could accuse them of collaborating in collusion.

[Andrew Schulz]

That, yeah, maybe that was a really quick way of saying what I've babbled about.

[Wesley Huff]

That's why you brought me up. Yeah, it's good. It's good.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But to, to. So what are these circumstances that their discrepancies that are causing you to have a lack of faith? You fucking front.

[Mark Yagnon]

Wait, no, no, that's not what I said.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's not what I said. Hold on. What?

[Wesley Huff]

That. Let me come. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm just saying, dude, this guy's a non denom.

[Mark Yagnon]

This guy's a non denom.

[Andrew Schulz]

He's like one of those guys that was, like, celebrating when Jesus came in on the donkey and then when he's up there in the car.

[Wesley Huff]

Don't do that to Mark. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What is flopper.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no, no. I, I, So the Gospels are writing. So there's different authors with different intentions writing to different audiences. So some of them are clearly writing to Jewish audiences. And so they're capitalizing on certain things. For Matthew is making this connection between Jesus being the new David and the new Moses. So he's doing certain things in his gospel where he's capitalizing on aspects of Jesus's life where. So he gives a different genealogy than Luke does for Jesus's ancestry. So some people look at that and they're like, well, this is a problem. You got two genealogies of Jesus. And. But what we know about genealogies, particularly Jewish genealogies, is that sometimes they're not meant to be either exhaustive or gapless.

[Andrew Schulz]

What does that mean?

[Wesley Huff]

So we today, if I'm doing a family tree, I'm going to make sure that everybody's listed right. Grandfather, great grandfather, great, great grandfather. The ancient Hebrews are more concerned with the right people being named for the right reasons. So. And they also have this idea that's called gamatria, where every letter in the Hebrew Alphabet has a number associated with it, and your name ends up having a number. So David ends with the number 14. If you, like, count up the things. Matthew's gospel starts with a genealogy that has three lists of 14 ending with Jesus. And the point of that. And we know that it's not like he leaves people out because we can go back to, like, first and Second Kings, first and Second Chronicles, where we have longer lists of these people and Matthew is leaving people out, or he's like squishing whole generations into just one person person. So you could look at that and say, in our modern mindset, well, that's. That's playing loose and fast with the data. But an ancient Jew would say, okay, well, why is this happening? Ah, you have lists of 14. That's David. And so he is, to his audience, he's communicating. This is the new David, okay? And he's doing things that are fulfilling the expectation of who David should be like, as the king, as the anointed one. And you have things like, Moses goes up on a mountain and receives the law. Jesus goes up on a mountain and gives the law a new law, right? And so throughout the Gospel of Matthew, you have these constant insertions that are capitalizing on details for his audience to make sure that they know this guy Jesus is this person who is the person you're waiting for. He's fulfilling the Davidic reign. He's the prophet, like Moses that's predicted back in the Torah, and he's accomplishing these things.

[Andrew Schulz]

Is this what you. You mean when you say the Bible is written for you but not to you.

[Wesley Huff]

I like that. Yeah, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it has a different audience. Right. And so understanding the context helps you. That's why the, like, German rationalists in the 18th and 19th centuries didn't, like, they did the wrong thing. They said, this is how we would write, therefore, and they didn't look back because there's, like, linguistic and cultural levels to it. Yeah, Right. So you could just translate the text directly, but it's context that's going to tell you the difference between a butt dial and a booty call. Even though they might be the same words in Greek or Hebrew. Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

But you could read that and you could be completely misled.

[Andrew Schulz]

A butt dial and a booty call. Completely different things. Yeah. So there's versions of that in the ancient literature.

[Wesley Huff]

Oh, yeah, totally. And this is whatever some guy is.

[Andrew Schulz]

Just guessing at that point and just making an inference in terms of, like, today interpretation. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, you study the ancient culture, so fortunately we have, like, the ability to look at things and understand idioms.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And people talk about stuff, and that gives you a frame of reference.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, I'm sure they're using slang.

[Wesley Huff]

Oh, yeah, yeah. All the time.

[Mark Yagnon]

Apparently there's all these issues with, like, biblical translations as they're trying to translate it in, like, the 20th century to all these different cultures. And when they're putting in their native tongue, like, there's one specific that I remember I did this field trip to Wyclef, and it's a, A. It's a Bible translator in Florida. Have you heard of it?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

And. And one of the things in like this one specific tribal culture in Africa, the. There's this idea of Jesus knocking on the heart. But in that culture, thieves knock. And so they're like, okay, we can't make it knocking because then they're going to think Jesus is a thief.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

And so one what they did is like, they would cough or something like that. They would, like, clear their throat to indicate that there was someone on the other side of their hut. And so they had to translate it to Jesus. Cough at the door of the heart or something to that effect.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

And that when you're translating things, you have to be super specific to the culture that you're translating to.

[Wesley Huff]

So this is the difference between what's called a formal equivalence translation and a dynamic equivalent translation.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, this is a dynamic equivalent translation.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So dynamic is like the thought for thought idea. Right. So in the Gospel of Luke, in The Greek, there's this line where Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears. Right. That's exactly what Jesus says. Let these words sink into your ears. So if you have a dynamic equivalence, like the new international version of the Bible in English, they're going to say listen carefully to what I'm about to say because that's what that means. But that's not what Jesus said. Right. So whereas the new American Standard Bible, the NAS NASB is more of a formal equivalence. They're literally going to say let these words sink into your ears because that's the words that Jesus spoke. So it's the question of what's. Because people always ask me like what's. What's the best translation?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And I, I don't know the answer to that. Like the best Bible is the one you're going to read. So just figure out the one that you're going to read and then read it.

[Akash Singh]

New international version, baby, there you go.

[Wesley Huff]

So like let these wor. Sink into your ears or, and this gets tricky because you have turns of phrase. So one of the most quoted verses in the Bible of the Bible is a version of Exodus 34. 6 where Moses goes up on Mount Sinai and God says that he is a gracious God, compassionate, steadfast and abounding love. And, and the Hebrew says long of no's. You're like what, long of nose? Well there's. It's a Hebrew idiom meaning slow to action anger.

[Akash Singh]

Are they.

[Wesley Huff]

That's what that means. So.

[Andrew Schulz]

How do we know that that's what he meant? What else does it mean?

[Wesley Huff]

So Hebrew is a Semitic language. We have other pain. Get out of here. Okay, here's why I use that illustration. Even the most formal equivalent.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, well, okay, how would you say someone just got a long nose back in the day? How would they say that same? Well, how do you know it wasn't just a descriptor?

[Wesley Huff]

A descriptor?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Because why would you describe God as long of nose? So we have other examples within other Semitic languages and portrayals of it.

[Andrew Schulz]

I got a fucking idea too. Like why wouldn't you. But this is why Jesus had the golden hair. Yeah, but they probably were describing the way as hair. Hair looked.

[Akash Singh]

That was safe.

[Wesley Huff]

This is just God.

[Andrew Schulz]

In my religion. Jesus is God. I don't know about you. Oh, we are. Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

But, but I, I use that example to say like even the most formal equivalent isn't going to translate like that because it doesn't make any sense.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So.

[Andrew Schulz]

But long of nose you think that they were just using a common.

[Wesley Huff]

It's an idiom.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's an idiom.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

This guy's an idiom, dude.

[Wesley Huff]

I'm just.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's not like. Like an insane scenario, but. Joe, Hebrews is, like, a Chinese God was described as, like, small of eye. I don't think it would be, like. No, I don't think it would be an idiom. Right.

[Akash Singh]

Like an idiom for good at math.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, one could say that. Or you could be like, oh, this might have been a descriptor.

[Wesley Huff]

I just picked up on why you guys are laughing.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, he's on Jesus time. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And he's back three days and three night. He just resurrected your sense of humor.

[Andrew Schulz]

Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, maybe it was just a description.

[Mark Yagnon]

Like, but if everyone's got big noses, then it wouldn't be a description, you know? I mean, if everyone's got big noses.

[Akash Singh]

Not everyone.

[Andrew Schulz]

Not. But if you're a God, you want.

[Wesley Huff]

To have the big thing has a big nose.

[Mark Yagnon]

That's what I. Italians or something.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, that's what we're talking about.

[Andrew Schulz]

Jews.

[Wesley Huff]

Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if so, wouldn't the Jewish God also have that?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, so this is an idiom that we find in other Semitic languages, so. Like Acadian and Aramaic, and, like. So this is a language found languages.

[Andrew Schulz]

That are in the region.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Where the Jews live. You're not seeing the parallel here. You're a historian. You got to know about this. He understands the context. You got to understand the context. Know who he's speaking to, too. He's saying he's one of y' all.

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, maybe contextually, no, Listen, leave it up to the historians, okay?

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. Comedically, yes. Comedically, yes. Okay, wait, just.

[Wesley Huff]

Cuz Ari Shaffir looks like that today doesn't necessarily mean.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Ar Shaffer.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, yes. Much like that. Yeah. Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I got you.

[Mark Yagnon]

I guess you get dove in here. Dude, we're getting. We're getting on the line right now.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

We're getting close. Okay. All right. So you were saying?

[Wesley Huff]

So dynamic formal equivalence translation stuff, that's. That's. How do we start this? You brought it.

[Mark Yagnon]

You're talking about translation of.

[Andrew Schulz]

You just said there are a bunch of long noses running out. Get out of here looking for Jesus.

[Wesley Huff]

I'm gonna kick you out of your own pocket.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I thought it was disrespectful. I thought it was disrespectful. Like, the long noses are trying to crucify him. I'm like, you can't call.

[Wesley Huff]

I didn't say that.

[Andrew Schulz]

You said something like that. And we're like, we got to put a stop to this. Slow to anger and. Yeah. And then you were like, no, it's an idiom for the time.

[Wesley Huff]

Love and faithfulness.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, exactly. What language was that?

[Wesley Huff]

Huh?

[Andrew Schulz]

What was did you speak? What language is that?

[Wesley Huff]

Abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, bro.

[Andrew Schulz]

I said it quickly and we were.

[Akash Singh]

Very like, what window moment? Did you understand what he said?

[Andrew Schulz]

I thought he was speaking Hebrew. I had no clue. Yeah. But I, I, I just didn't bust the rhymes, you know? Okay, okay, okay.

[Wesley Huff]

I twisted on you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Let's, let's, let's, let's center ourselves.

[Wesley Huff]

So he was talking about, like, translation issues, and that happens all the time. Yeah. And like, you're translating the Bible into Peruvian. In a culture that, like, doesn't know what a donkey is, do you then say it's a llama or is that, like, taking too much liberty with the text? But this is stuff we run into all the time. So this is why I. The best commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament is going to be the Hebrew Old Testament and.

[Andrew Schulz]

Greek and the Greek New Testament.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. But there are things that we learn about these languages. Like the King James Bible translated between 1603 and 1611. There were terms that they just didn't know what they meant and they transliterated them. We now know what they are because we've, like, through study.

[Andrew Schulz]

Have they adjusted the King James Bible since?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, no, you don't. Well, new translations do. There's a new king James and KJV.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And they would. So first Chronicles 26:18. Yeah. In the King James Bible says, at par. At Parbar Westward for the causeway into it. Parbar. You're like, what does that mean? Right. But if you read the niv, this guy's favorite translation, that is lit.

[Andrew Schulz]

New Indian version.

[Wesley Huff]

L. That's right. It says, as for the court to the west, there were two at the court and four at the road itself.

[Akash Singh]

I didn't even know what that meant.

[Wesley Huff]

So parbar is not an Elizabethan English term. It's just a transliteration of a Hebrew word that they were like, we don't know what this is. So we're just going to call it.

[Andrew Schulz]

A par bar, like croissant.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, that's a. I think, I think.

[Akash Singh]

He'S right on this.

[Wesley Huff]

Okay. Okay, we'll go with it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. We didn't have a word for that type, like gay bread, so we just called it. Right. Like, we don't have an English word for that. Yeah. So we just go, okay, let's just call it their thing.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Mark Yagnon]

We should just leave it in Latin.

[Andrew Schulz]

Why do you guys look at me like I'm dumb? It's the exact same thing that the English did. Right. They didn't have a word for it. So they're like, all right, just leave it there. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Cultural appropriate creation.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes. Yeah, but in like, the best version of it. We want you to appropriate Christianity. That is what Christians would hope, that everybody appropriates it.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure. But then we figure out what the word is and it's fine.

[Andrew Schulz]

And then it's fine.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. Okay. I'm like. I'm jumbled up here. We still haven't figured out your discrepancies in the Bible.

[Mark Yagnon]

No, I think we. I think we kind of.

[Andrew Schulz]

That was the only one. What were the other things? You have a biblical scholar right now.

[Wesley Huff]

He's a historian.

[Andrew Schulz]

He benches 240.

[Wesley Huff]

You're lowballing me.

[Andrew Schulz]

Come on. What do you put up there?

[Mark Yagnon]

285 for five, easy.

[Andrew Schulz]

You could have carried that cross for days, bro.

[Wesley Huff]

You guys got a bench press here?

[Andrew Schulz]

No.

[Wesley Huff]

Okay.

[Andrew Schulz]

What? Why? Were you about to throw some?

[Wesley Huff]

We could test it.

[Akash Singh]

315.

[Andrew Schulz]

315.

[Wesley Huff]

I've done 404 for one. Whoa.

[Andrew Schulz]

What?

[Wesley Huff]

Nah.

[Akash Singh]

Body of Christ.

[Wesley Huff]

Jesus. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

All right, guys, take a break for a second. This episode has been brought to you by Squarespace. If you're looking to build a website, you need to look into Squarespace. They make it easy to create a beautiful website to help it engage your audience. Sell anything from products and content to time and do it on your own terms. They have Squarespace Payments. The easiest way to manage your payments in one place. With Squarespace, onboarding is fast and simple. Get started in just a few clicks and start receiving payments right away. Plus, give your customers more ways to pay with popular payment methods like Klarna, ACH Direct Debit, Apple Pay, afterpay, and Clearpay. Also, design intelligence from Squarespace uses cutting edge AI technology to unlock your strongest creative potential. Design intelligence empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across one's entire online presence. And last but not least, Squarespace can help you with SEO. Every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto generated sitemap, and more. So you show up more often to more people in global search engine results. So go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, Launch. Go to squarespace.com flagrant to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Now let's get back to the show. All right, guys, let's take a break for a second. Speaking of Lazarus, sometimes you gotta rise your dick from the dead, okay? With all due respect, Blue Chew has got your back, okay? Bring that shit up. Knock, knock. Who's home? Daddy. Okay, girl. Deserve you at your most rock at your most brick at your most titanium. Some have said that the strength of a Blue Chew cock can bring salvation. Point I'm trying to make is you can get your first month free when you go to bluechew.com use the promo code flagrant. All you gotta do is pay $5 shipping. Okay, we'll see you soon because we'll get back to the show. I don't even know why. I'll see you soon. We are see you right now. Bye.

[Wesley Huff]

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[Andrew Schulz]

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[Wesley Huff]

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[Akash Singh]

Shifty, he has a question.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, we need. Are you miked?

[Akash Singh]

Shifty knows the Bible.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, Shifty, we were talking about translations and mistranslations and I've heard a lot of people say that gay.

[Mark Yagnon]

Gay marriage and gay relations are just mistranslations of the verses, like Romans, the ones in the Old Testament.

[Andrew Schulz]

Do you think they're mistranslations?

[Mark Yagnon]

And the Bible is saying that they.

[Andrew Schulz]

Don'T ever just talk about gay marriage or gay relations in general, or do.

[Mark Yagnon]

You think that there are mistranslations?

[Wesley Huff]

Yes, the accusation is usually that the word homosexuality is. It gets incorporated into the Bible in like the modern era. So the words in Hebrew in the Old Testament, Leviticus, Paul, particularly in First Corinthians 7, plays off of what the Greek translation of the Old Testament has and uses this word arsenicoietes, which literally means, means to like to lie down. A man with a man. And so I think it's not a mistranslation because the concept is there. Like what it's talking about is not obscure. It might be controversial, but it's not obscure. In the Hebrew and Greek, the accusation is usually that it's not talking about like same sex sex. It's talking about something like men sleeping with boys or temple prostitution. I don't think you can really rationalize that. There's a guy named Robert Gagnon. That's your last name? Yeah, Robert Gagnon. So you say. Do you say Gagnon?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

These people don't understand.

[Akash Singh]

Wait, hold on. Is this guy about to justify homosexuality?

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no. So Robert Gagnon is a scholar. He did his dissertation. He taught at Princeton for a while on this. Like, like the linguistic and cultural context of homosexuality in the Bible. So his is kind of of like the volume. So he goes through.

[Andrew Schulz]

Why are you laughing at that? And talks about Mark comes from a long line of people. Long line of croissants. We just call them croissants.

[Wesley Huff]

We just call them croissants.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so he's a croissant historian. And then. And then what did he find out?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, these concepts are like, like if you went back to Moses and you had two dudes and said, we want to get married, Moses is like, for what?

[Andrew Schulz]

What he would say for what?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, well, that wouldn't be. He wouldn't. He'd be like, that's not what marriage is. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's not like. It's. Just because the word homosexuality exists now in English.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Doesn't mean that the concept isn't there back in the day, within the Bible. Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

So in the Bible it was frowned upon. Even like whatever, translation, whatever. Contextually. Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, so what happens? What happens? Are you guys done with the gay stuff or. So okay, so what do. What happens? So after Jesus comes back, what do his disciples go do? Do they go separate? They go around the world. Right. And they're going to spread the gospel.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, they hide because they think their movement's done. They think their leader is dead. That's kaputz. And so.

[Andrew Schulz]

But then he comes back.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So that's what changes their mind. So that's what they. When they go from 11 scared disciples cuz Judas killed himself.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

In the upper room.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

To then going out and being willing to actually lose their life for this proclamation is because Jesus shows up and he's like. And then teaches them for 40 days.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, so they do another 40 days.

[Wesley Huff]

They do another 40 days with Jesus.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right, That's.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So that's the. That's what Luke talks about that this is 40 day period. And then you have the mountain of ascension, he goes back and then they spread out. Well, first they go back to Jerusalem and start preaching that at ground zero where it happens, happened. Which if you were trying to make it up, you wouldn't go back to the place where everybody saw the guy killed and say like he's resurrected, the tomb's empty. Like that's. You go somewhere else and people check.

[Andrew Schulz]

The tomb and it's empty.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I mean the. They would have. Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

So that's a, that I've seen a bunch of pastors on TikTok use. It's. It's fire.

[Wesley Huff]

It's like the tomb is empty.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, it's. If you look in Muhammad's tomb, he's in there. If you look at Moses tomb, he's in there. You look at my God's tomb, it's emp. That's smart.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And. And then they start getting.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's good, it's good.

[Wesley Huff]

I've just heard it before. So it's all nervous. Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

They don't make any sense.

[Andrew Schulz]

Get me gassed up.

[Wesley Huff]

He's still dead in the tomb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesus ain't there.

[Andrew Schulz]

He ain't there.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And then Stephen is the first martyr and he gets killed. And so the disciples know that this is risky.

[Andrew Schulz]

They still want to go do it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So like when I was last week, I was in Turkey.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And I went to Ephesus, which is where the body of St. John is, and I went to Hieropolis, which is where the body of Philip the disciple is. So like they went out and they started preaching these things. And there's various stories of like, some were martyred. Those reports are sketchier than others. But we know at minimum that Peter and Paul. Paul were martyred in Rome in and around the time between 64 and 68.

[Andrew Schulz]

So every single one of them gets killed.

[Wesley Huff]

Not that we can reliably. At minimum, they are persecuted. Some were probably killed for their faith. A lot of them suffered physical harm because of it.

[Andrew Schulz]

And the idea is that they all have disciples as well. The religion continues to grow.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And you see a difference in the religion from certain areas. Right. When does, when do we have like the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church separate?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, that's in like the, That's a thousand years after.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. But it takes time for those beliefs to separate. And what is the true one?

[Wesley Huff]

What is the true one? Well, I mean, so I'm biased because I'm a Protestant.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. So nobody wakes up one day and is like purgatory. Sorry. We all believe that now. Right. Like there's a slow fade for these traditions that develop over time. And so it's not like it. So if you talk to Roman Catholics, they, you know, it's the 2000 year old church. Pope Leo the 14th is the successor computer. And that goes right back. Yeah. From Chicago.

[Andrew Schulz]

You like that though? You like that?

[Wesley Huff]

I mean I'm not going to say I, I influenced it while I was in Rome, but I'm not going to say I'm not.

[Akash Singh]

A Pakistani Pope.

[Wesley Huff]

Pakistan. I'm in. I'm. I like the Italian guy named Pizza Bola. That was the. Just because his name is Pizza Bola.

[Mark Yagnon]

That was a front runner. Pizza Bola is the funniest, most Italian. It's like a made up Italian.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah. If you were to like invent an Italian.

[Akash Singh]

Italian virus.

[Wesley Huff]

Nice. Don't you want Trump saying Pizza Bola though?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, I do. Pizza Bola. Okay, so tell me.

[Wesley Huff]

So, so, so the, the east and the west split.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Over. I mean there's language divisions, Latin and Greek and all sorts of things. And then they ultimately disagree on the formulation. There's a bunch of things that happen. But on the formulation of the Nicene Creed, where does the spear proceed from the Father? So there's a bunch of things that go on. But they eventually excommunicate each other, interestingly enough, under a Pope Leo.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow.

[Wesley Huff]

So.

[Andrew Schulz]

So here we go. Run it back.

[Wesley Huff]

And then Pope Leo.

[Andrew Schulz]

But how different are the religions at the time? And is there a bit, is there enough communication between the different factions to maintain one like singularity of belief? Like there is a printed book at the time. There is one story.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yet the Roman Catholics have a Pope and the Orthodox do not.

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

And so is. I mean I imagine there's infighting here. I imagine there's like, like, I don't want to say like blasphemy thrown around, but I, I imagine like, well, they excommunicate each other. They excommun. And what year does that happen?

[Wesley Huff]

One. I don't know. Give it a go. Which 1,000.

[Andrew Schulz]

So we're pretty deep into the exc.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, we're, we're a thousand years after God. But the, and that by the time you get to like 15, 17, 10, 54. So by the Great Schism, by the time you get to 15, 17 in Martin Luther post his 95 theses on the castle door in Wittenberg, Germany, that and launches the Protestant Reformation, like that's Then the next. And he didn't want to start a different denomination. Like that wasn't his purpose. He wanted to reform the church. Yeah, but the church wasn't willing to get along with that. And so then that created the division.

[Andrew Schulz]

So just so I can understand this, Orthodox have been holding it true this entire time. Time. Then the Catholics kind of change it up a little bit.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, no, it's trickier than that.

[Andrew Schulz]

And then the thing that the Catholics create gets changed up again. And then. Well, it gets changed up again and gets changed up again and gets changed up again. But them Orthodox have been holding it true this whole time. I mean, kind of crazy how that.

[Wesley Huff]

You got to talk to the cops. I'm just saying. See, they got, they got Jesus's house in the cottage wrote.

[Andrew Schulz]

So yeah, I was there for.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, so that's the Coptic. So they're. They're another group.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So you got, you got a bunch of different factions. Right. But yeah, but I think you have a central core, which we would all adhere to approximately. But then you have differentiations and like theological disagreements. The Protestant Reformation was to reform all of that and go back to the primitive church.

[Andrew Schulz]

The primitive church is.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, like what scripture teaches, which would.

[Andrew Schulz]

Be closest to English.

[Wesley Huff]

I don't think it's necessarily closest to any of them. Like, I don't claim that feels kind of Orthodox.

[Andrew Schulz]

Jesus feels like you don't want to admit it.

[Wesley Huff]

I know I'm not orthodox.

[Mark Yagnon]

No, this guy is like a die hard Orthodox Christian.

[Andrew Schulz]

I just went to Turkey and I had a tour guide and he was breaking the whole thing down to me. I was like, oh, I've been lied to my whole life. And Orthodox are really the real ones.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What is that church in Istanbul? Yeah, Hagia Sophia.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, the Hagia Sophia.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. Have you visited? Yeah, just there and thoughts.

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, it's a beautiful church. It's a mosque now. So.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. How'd we let that one go? That was the first one. Right?

[Wesley Huff]

This is the Muslims.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, they got it.

[Wesley Huff]

They got it. We had it for. They got a lot.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, they got a lot.

[Wesley Huff]

All those regions were Christian. Christian and Jewish.

[Andrew Schulz]

We stopped them right there, though.

[Wesley Huff]

7Th century.

[Andrew Schulz]

They didn't get into Europe, you know.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Charles.

[Akash Singh]

Italian.

[Wesley Huff]

You stop. That's why you get croissants from. You know that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, that's right.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Yeah. They ate the Turks for breakfast. Breakfast. That was the line. Oh, because that's as a crescent. Yeah, that's largely why we have coffee, is because the, the Muslims were taking Over Spain. And they went up and they grabbed all these beans from like Kenya because they were making coffee for a long time. And then when they retreated, they left the stories that they left these beans in Spain and Portugal. And then when Charles, the hammer of France, he pushes them back, they leave all these beans and they get some of the Muslim captives. They're like, what is this stuff? And they're like, oh, this is this drink. We. And there was a lot of pressure on the Pope to ban coffee as the drink of the devil. And so the story is that the Pope at the time drank it and he said, this is the drink of the devil. We need to baptize for Jesus. But there was this, like, this feud because it was. It was pitted as the anti wine. So wine was like the drink of the Eucharist and coffee is the drink of the infidels. And so. But that's large. And then the Capuchin monks in Italy, they took it and they didn't like the taste. They mix it with honey and they mix it with milk and Cappuccino's. Yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

Wow, that's awesome. Hell yeah. Thank you, Muslims.

[Andrew Schulz]

You could be Billy Carsoning us right now and I would totally believe every single thing. We're not fact checking anything, Joey. Okay.

[Mark Yagnon]

Oh, that's awesome.

[Andrew Schulz]

So you haven't really told me the difference between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, it would.

[Mark Yagnon]

The Eucharist is.

[Wesley Huff]

The Catholic Church has a papal primacy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. So they have the Bishop of Rome.

[Andrew Schulz]

How does that come about? Why do they decide that there is a pope? And why does the Orthodox Church decide that there isn't one?

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, this is one of the disagreements between the east and the West. Because the seed of Peter becomes very important in the West. And the East Church says, well, we have all basically every other apostle, so we're not too concerned with the Bishop and Rome. But there is a point in time where, like, papal infallibility starts to develop. And then when the Pope chooses the emperor. So Charlemagne is crowned the Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. I think it's the year 800. Give it a goog. And that's when I. I would argue I love you. That's when it starts.

[Andrew Schulz]

Great.

[Wesley Huff]

Fact check me. I know. I can't remember the day.

[Andrew Schulz]

Every once in a while the Canadian bursts out of you.

[Wesley Huff]

That's Canadian. Give it a go. Give it a go. Was it 800?

[Andrew Schulz]

You got it.

[Wesley Huff]

So, yeah, Pope Leo, another Pope Leo iii. He crowns Charlemagne the Emperor. Before that, the emperor kind of had influence who the Pope was. And this is where you get this, like, subversion. And that's where I personally would say the Roman Catholic, big R, big C church starts. That's controversial. Roman Catholics don't like that. I say that, but that's when you start to get this idea of a papal primacy and the magisterium as this concrete body. The east is not on board with that at all. No. Well, they don't. They just don't care. They don't think that the Bishop of Rome has any more or less authority than any of the other bishops. So they have the patriarchs and they have that kind of setup.

[Andrew Schulz]

Which do you think is most similar to the earliest forms of Christianity? Because was there a Pope in the earliest forms of Christianity?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, there was a. So bishops, yeah. Are like the ones singular.

[Andrew Schulz]

Bishop was there. He was just the guy. Or is that kind of like an event mention of, like.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, the bishops are corrupt, man, like leaders within the church. So Paul outlines this like, hierarchy of. Yeah, he won't give it to us.

[Andrew Schulz]

He won't go.

[Akash Singh]

He doesn't get it yet.

[Mark Yagnon]

Of course not.

[Andrew Schulz]

Guys hanging out in Turkey, you know, at the source. You keep going to the source. You're not going back to Rome, my boy.

[Wesley Huff]

I know because, you know, across the Tyburn, I. I took apart my boat and I made a pulpit and I started preaching the other side.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's what I thought about.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, so at the council of Nicaea, 325 AD, if you had to make the argument.

[Andrew Schulz]

If you had to make the argument for the Orthodox Church being the closest church toward. Could you do it if you had to? If you had to do it to save humanity, what would you say?

[Wesley Huff]

Sure, it's possible.

[Andrew Schulz]

What would you do to save humanity if you just had to save humanity?

[Wesley Huff]

Save humanity?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I would look at the Bible, say, sola scriptura, Scripture is the sole infallible rule and faithful practice for the Church. That was English.

[Andrew Schulz]

That was English.

[Wesley Huff]

Catch that one?

[Andrew Schulz]

I got that one barely, but I got it barely. Yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, that's a big, biggest differentiation when the Protestants come around is they say, Martin Luther's reading the Bible, he's reading the New Testament in Greek and he's saying, I'm reading this stuff and I'm looking at the Church, I'm seeing a big difference. And so.

[Andrew Schulz]

So the Church isn't acting in the way that the book is written.

[Wesley Huff]

There have been a lot of traditions that have developed that are, at minimum, non biblical and at Most anti biblical indulgences.

[Andrew Schulz]

What's an example of that?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, Pope Leo, another Pope Leo starts this process of indulgence. So there's this theological idea called the treasury of merit that you can draw from. That's like the holiness of the saints and Mary and the copious outgiving of the blood of Christ that you can draw on. And so the Pope Leo in the 16th century says, hey, we need to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica. And so he commissions guys to go out and collect money by selling indulgences. So you can. You either can get out of Purgatory faster, or if you have family members who are stuck in Purgatory, you give the church church money. They'll get so many years off Purgatory. This is still a thing, by the way.

[Andrew Schulz]

Did that ever happen in the Orthodox Church? You know, if they ever did anything like that? They never did anything like that. Wow. It's fascinating. Yeah. I feel like you should look in more to that church because it feels like.

[Wesley Huff]

We'Re going to be really happy you're talking like this.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So that's clearly like. And that's what the. Martin Luther's 95 TC.

[Andrew Schulz]

We're gonna get you over here, man. We're gonna get you over to the one true.

[Wesley Huff]

The one true religion.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah. No, makes sense. With Martin Luther doing. And do you think that there was. There were Catholics that at the time respected that idea and they thought that the Church had or against the Reformation, that they appreciated the Reformation despite not wanting to become Protestants, but they wanted Reformation for their own version of Christianity.

[Wesley Huff]

Yes. And even some of the people that, like, fought Luther on it were sympathetic to some. The first debate of the Reformation was between a guy named Desiderius Erasmus. He was Dutch. And the first debate was a written debate between him and Luther on the freedom of the will versus the bondage of the will. And Erasmus could have been like a closet reformer in some things, but there were lots of people. I mean, there was a whole period of time with popes and anti popes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Well, I mean, you even hear it now, like, with the selection of the Pope, a lot of times Catholics will be like, this Pope isn't progressive enough, or this Pope isn't conservative enough. So. And the hope, I would imagine, is that, like, maybe a more conservative Pope would reform the church in a way that met what they thought was most important about, you know, their values.

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

And I don't know, maybe that there. Maybe there's something really valuable to that, that you. That the Church can kind of sway according to like what society needs at the time. But maybe there's also something very concerning about that too, that if you don't have the regeneration that the religion can be manipulated and used in the way that you were saying.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, well, so you have another reformer guy a little bit later on after Luther named John Calvin. Ah, yes, he's in France or he's in. Well, he's French, but he, he's in Switzerland. And so he's in Geneva. And the, the bishop of Geneva at the time actually writes to Salido, Cardinal Salido writes to the people in Switzerland, in Geneva and says, like, you gotta come back to the true church. Like you're in danger of damnation. Come back. And the elderly Calvin comes out of retirement. He actually writes this letter to Cardinal Cido and he says, you got it wrong. We are the original church. We don't need to go home. You need to come home because you have. We've scraped all the moss off of the facade of Christianity and, and all that tradition that's dividing you from what scripture actually is telling you what the core of the, the faith adheres to. And so you've, you, you've lost the script.

[Mark Yagnon]

Hmm. What do you think about Martin Luther's removal of the Apocrypha from that original canon?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, great question. So he didn't.

[Andrew Schulz]

But what does that mean, the Apocrypha?

[Wesley Huff]

So Roman Catholics and Protestants have different number of books in their Bibles. So this is part of why I was in Italy, because we went to Trento in Italy where the Council of Trent happened, where the Council of Trent was, the counterrell reformation. So 1546 to 1563, I think it was. They respond to the Reformation because they're like, okay, like Protestantism has become this big thing. We need to deal with this. So let's try to bring the Protestants and, and the, the Catholics together and figure this out.

[Andrew Schulz]

So, so that we can reunite the.

[Wesley Huff]

The believers, sort of. Although they invite the Protestants and they say you can show up, but you can. They can't vote, so they don't really. So the process. Hear this and they're like, well, we're not showing things. And a few show up later on. But part of the conversation is that there was no one Roman Catholic Bible. So you go back to say, St. Jerome in the fourth century. He translates the Greek Old Testament and Greek New Testament into Latin. That's the Vulgate. It's the Vulgato. Right. It just means like common. So people weren't speaking Greek anymore. They're speaking Latin. And so Constantine says we need a Bible that people can actually read. So he commissions Jerome to translate the Bible into the language that everybody can read at the time, though Jerome doesn't believe that the Apocrypha. So this other group of books in the Old Testament on the New Testament are Scripture. So Jerome argues against Augustine, who does believe they were Scripture. But there's always this open conversation. Conversation. The only council that makes any delineation on what Scripture is is the Council of Trent. So at Trent, that is when the. So the Catholics would call it the Deuterocanonical books. And I'm a little disappointed that you didn't. You use my term though, which I'm okay with. Sure. Because apocrypha typically means I get to term for things that are out.

[Mark Yagnon]

Right. I went to Presbyterian School.

[Wesley Huff]

That's what the. So the, so the, The Catholics have 73 books in their Bible. I have 66 in my Bible. The 39 books of the Old Testament that I have in my Old Testament are the same books that the guy that I mentioned before Josephus mentions as the books that the Jews considered Scripture. Now he gives a different number, but it's the same number of books. They're just in a different order. So the Jews order them differently. It's the same today. If you buy a Tanakh, the Torah, Neviim, the kettle. What are the books of the Jewish publication? They will have the same books as a Protestant Old Testament. They'll just have them in a different order. They group the prophets together differently. They don't have first and Second Kings, they have Kings, don't have first and Second Chronicles.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, so it's all the same information.

[Wesley Huff]

It's just the same books, just different. That's fine. Order. So Luther says, okay, there's all this debate. I'm just going to stick with the core. I'm going to cut out the chaff and I'm just going to. This is the Bible. However, Luther still includes them in a separate section which he labels the Apocrypha. And actually the first King James Bible in 1611 also did that. So did the Geneva Bible. So did the Bishop's Bible. There's a longstanding history of Bibles that include them because they're written in the intertestamental period between the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, and the first book of the New Testament. But to say that like Roman Catholics put them in or that Protestants took them out, I think is a little bit messy because there's historical precedent. Precedence for both lists. But I would say that the strongest evidence, the earliest evidence, is for the 66 that US Protestants stuck with because we said, what is scripture to the Jews? And so Paul says, the oracles of God are entrusted to the Jews. And so guys like Jerome went back to the Jews and he said, okay, how many books do you have? And they said, these. And he said, have you ever considered these other ones Scripture? They said, no. And he's like, okay, well, that does it for me.

[Andrew Schulz]

Is it, historically speaking, is it easier to maintain the authenticity of a religion if it is not in power in an area?

[Wesley Huff]

Is it? I don't understand the question.

[Andrew Schulz]

In other words, like, once the religion is tied with the power structure of the area, there might be bad actors that will abuse the religion.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

To exert more power to raise finances, etc, when if the religion is a minority group in the area, there's no real way to exert power.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure.

[Andrew Schulz]

Outside of like maintaining its authenticity. Authenticity. And you have to do the most pure form if you want to get to heaven over here. You can bastardize it a little bit. That's maybe a strong word. But like, you can morph. Yeah, I'm not going to do that ever again. Sorry.

[Wesley Huff]

Don't say no more sorry or whatever.

[Andrew Schulz]

But you can, you can morph it and, and the morphing of it can kind of deteriorate the authenticity of the religion. So, like, what does history say about that?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I mean, you do have like, power corrupts. Right. People are always going to use adventure. I mean, that's the biblical narrative, original sin. Like the, the Israelites want a king. They're like, hey, God, we want a king. And God's like, no, that's going to king. Things always end badly. Yeah, you don't want that. And they demand it and he gives them a king. And Saul is not a great guy. And then David sleeps with everybody and kills people's husbands. So, you know, it's the, the narrative of the story. I think that definitely happens. I think. So the common accusation is that like Constantine converts and then he pollutes things. Right. Yeah, that. I think the problem with that is that Constantine, if he wants to exert power by converting to Christianity, it's kind of a dumb thing to do because he's converting to a minority religion that worships a crucified Jew.

[Andrew Schulz]

Why did he convert the empire to Christianity?

[Wesley Huff]

So he converted himself to Christianity. It's only after him, under Emperor Theodosius that Christianity becomes the religion of Rome.

[Andrew Schulz]

I thought he converted on his deathbed.

[Wesley Huff]

No, but I know what you're talking about. So he baptized on his deathbed.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's it.

[Akash Singh]

Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

He converts after the events of 312 with the Battle of Milvia Bridge. So there's this battle between Maxentius, who's the leader of the west, and Constantine, who's the leader of the east, and they fight for the unification of. And so the empire. The story is, whether you want to consider it reliable or not, is that Constantine and his army have a vision of the Cairo. What looks like a P and an X. It's the first two letters in Greek for the word Christ. And. And hear a voice that says in this sign, conquer. And so he puts that on all his shields. And even though they're going against the Praetorian Guard, which is like the elite fighting force of Maxentius, they win. And so after that point, he starts to like, okay, what's going on here with this? I used the sign of the Christian God, and it works, and I won. And so what's. And then we do have testimony of other early Christians who. Who seem to give credibility to the fact that he does, in fact, legitimately convert. And part of that is that if he wanted to exert power, he could just do what Diocletian did and say, I'm God.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm gonna kill everybody.

[Wesley Huff]

What I say goes. And he doesn't do that. So it's actually.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's interesting the way that this is taught, the way that it's taught. It was to me as, like, a kid, was that there was so much momentum for the growth of Christianity within the empire that they had no choice but to conclude. Convert.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, it's not.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's. Why even teach that?

[Wesley Huff]

Like, I mean, why does anybody teach anything?

[Andrew Schulz]

I guess I get. I guess. But I. I think it does a disservice to, like, the. The choice at the time. Like, it's a pretty brave choice in that regard for Constantine. Like.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And it certainly would not have been popular.

[Andrew Schulz]

I thought he was succumbing to the will of the people. No, I thought it was a train. There was. There was a runaway train. There's nothing he could do about it. He's like, the only way that we can keep the empire together is we start. Start following that. And then there's all this conversation. Conversation of them, like, including pagan rituals into this new version of Christianity, which I'd love you to speak on, so that the pagans would more easily adopt it. Yeah, but you're Telling me that this is just like completely false.

[Wesley Huff]

So there are like, there are, there, there are kernels of that. That's true in the sense that like Christians would do things like build churches over the sites of old temples. In that they said like you're coming here anyways to worship now, worship the true God in the same location that you're regularly aware of going to anyways. But the like the assimilation of pagan practices, that's a myth.

[Andrew Schulz]

How do we get the eggs in Easter?

[Wesley Huff]

That's a middle aged thing. Because eggs were associated with both new life and spring in Europe. It's a European thing.

[Andrew Schulz]

Christmas, how do we get Santa?

[Wesley Huff]

Santa is like a combination of St Nicholas, who is a 4th century bishop, and Sinterklaus in Germany. I think it's a New York thing. I think eventually the Dutch in New York.

[Akash Singh]

That's fire.

[Wesley Huff]

They. You're gonna take credit for that one.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, he should.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

Him and him.

[Wesley Huff]

And so he like all comes together together.

[Andrew Schulz]

So this doesn't exist prior, what, the celebration of Christmas?

[Wesley Huff]

Oh no. Christmas goes really old. Yeah. So there's a guy named Julius Africanus in the second century who's preoccupied with figuring out how old everything is. And you know how he gives us the date for the creation of the world and then he like adds up. So part of what he's doing is he's a Christian and he's like, when was Jesus born? So he looks at a bunch of different things and he, he, he reckons that he's figured out when Jesus was like when the, the, when Mary got pregnant. And then he counts nine months and gets to December 25th. And so that's is 24th or 25th? Why did I blind 25th? I was right the first.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, you know why?

[Wesley Huff]

Just ran with it. Why?

[Andrew Schulz]

When do the, when do the true Christians celebrate it?

[Wesley Huff]

January 6th.

[Andrew Schulz]

Damn it.

[Wesley Huff]

So the Orthodox do it on December. January 6th. But it's the same date. We just use different calendars. That's why you guys stuck with the old calendar. We went to the new calendar. It's the exact same date. We just, our calendars changed. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

What about Halloween?

[Wesley Huff]

Halloween is all Hallows Eve and the like pagan stuff appears to have been entirely invented by commercialization.

[Andrew Schulz]

So you're saying there's no pagan influence on Christianity?

[Wesley Huff]

I'm not saying that. I'm just saying like the accusations of Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan. Like that's nonsense.

[Andrew Schulz]

What about the accusations that like even the Jesus story was taken from other myths in other religions, I think like the Egyptian God Ra or something like that. Like, what do you say about this? Is it just like a common occurrence? Like, how do you feel? Is it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Really?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, it's Jesus mythicism and no historian. Like, even the people who doubt that Jesus exists don't use that argument because usually historians are aware of the primary sources. And if you look at the stories of, like, Horus Ra, Mithras, Addis, if you look at the details and then try to find the paralodes, they just not there. It was made up by largely and popularized by the. Oh, you know, the movies, I guess. Like a YouTube thing. Yeah, it's made up from th. So if you look at the actual stories of, like, Horus Ra, the accusations of virgin births and 12 disciples, and you won't find them in those things.

[Andrew Schulz]

You won't really. And isn't there connectivity to some Indian.

[Akash Singh]

I think the story of baby Krishna. I think there's some connectivity in that.

[Wesley Huff]

He.

[Akash Singh]

I think he was tried. The king tried to kill him. Like, couldn't do it.

[Wesley Huff]

So it's not that there aren't parallels that you can make. It's that, like, if you look at the actual core of the details. So there's a fallacy called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, where it's this idea the Texan is shooting the side of a barn, and he then finds the closest cluster of shots and he paints a target around it, making himself look like a great shot. Right. So if you want to find parallels, you can find them, and then you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Make the accusation afterwards.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

So, yeah, that makes sense.

[Wesley Huff]

Let me see if I can give you an example. Example. So John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were both. The presidencies were exactly 100 years apart. And Abraham Lincoln had a. He had an assistant by the name of Kennedy, and Kennedy had an assistant by the name of Lincoln. Both were assassinated by a man who went by three names. Right. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Kennedy was assassinated in a. Lincoln.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And Lincoln was assassinated in the Ford Theater.

[Mark Yagnon]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So, like, if you want to go down the rabbit trail of trying to find all these things, you could argue that John F. Kennedy never existed. He was just a copy of Lincoln.

[Andrew Schulz]

And that's interesting.

[Mark Yagnon]

The great one is that before Lincoln died, he was in Monroe, Maryland, and before JFK died, he was in Marilyn Monroe.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[Andrew Schulz]

I didn't say it. Mark did.

[Wesley Huff]

But it's these kind of things. Right. So that's Beautiful.

[Akash Singh]

I saw this on, like a VHS when I was like, 8 years old.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's good.

[Wesley Huff]

That's a crazy.

[Akash Singh]

Details. It's a story of baby Krishna, but this. I mean, the details are a little iffy, but I remember growing up in such a Christian country that I was like, oh, they took this from the Bible.

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

Because.

[Akash Singh]

But I didn't know Hinduism was older and the story of Krishna was older. So that would. That just came to me. That wasn't like, I'm trying to find the thing. And that always just stuck with me because I remember thinking like, oh, they stole us from Christianity. Which is very funny.

[Wesley Huff]

So. So there's also, like, issues of correlation and culture causation. So if you do find parallels and you want to assert that Christ Christians invented it, you have to find the causative links rather than just the correlations.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Because the correlations could actually exist, but things correlate all the time. And the idea of an incarnation within Christianity is very different than the idea that you would find in something like Hinduism or even like miraculous births in the ancient world.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, question. Did Judas carry out the will of God by killing Jesus?

[Wesley Huff]

Yes, because he was prophesied to do so.

[Andrew Schulz]

And was he aware of this? Did he do it? Begrudgingly.

[Wesley Huff]

I mean, I don't know. That's not something that the Bible necessarily. There is an interesting theory that Judas was fed up with Jesus not being the Messiah he wanted him to be, and by betraying him, he was going to kickstart the. Of the rest revolution. Oh.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, impatient.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, but it's. It's hypothetical, right? You can't say one way or the other.

[Akash Singh]

Something you would do, to be honest.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, let's go.

[Wesley Huff]

These New York Orthodox.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, dude, New York Orthodox. That's like fire type of Christianity. I like that. I don't want to see. Yes, yes, go.

[Wesley Huff]

I got something for you guys. When I was on Rogan, I made him a facsimile papyri.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

Okay.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

And he's a very important facsimile papyri. I remember watching it p.52, and it says, pilot, what is truth? Yes, I made you one. Oh, but okay, order of importance. I also made Mark 1, so. Because Mark likes the apocryphal gospels. This is. That's the Gospel of Thomas.

[Mark Yagnon]

Oh, wow.

[Wesley Huff]

That's the first page of the Gospel of Thomas.

[Andrew Schulz]

Mark. That's your guy, aren't you, Mark? Thomas.

[Mark Yagnon]

Thomas.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah. And that's made of genuine Egyptian papyri.

[Akash Singh]

Oh, wow, that's sick.

[Wesley Huff]

Yours thank you so much.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So order of lesser importance to great importance, because yours is far more important. Oh, wow. So this is a Dead Sea score scroll fragment. What?

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Okay. I made it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

And it's very important. 4Q51.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

From Samuel. And I got the text there for you. Make sure you. Make sure you read it. What it says in Hebrew.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is assalam alaikum.

[Mark Yagnon]

Salam.

[Andrew Schulz]

It says, then David sent messengers to Ish Bashif.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Saul's son saying, give me my wife. Mik McCall. Michael McCall.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. Whom I betrothed to myself for the price of a hundred Philistine foreskins.

[Wesley Huff]

Very, very important passage for you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Can you tell me what I just read? I was concentrating so much on.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I tried to find the words.

[Andrew Schulz]

Out without sounding that. I didn't actually take in anything.

[Wesley Huff]

I thought. I thought, who's McAll? I thought, that's his wife. David's wife.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, okay. Masculine name.

[Wesley Huff]

Saul's daughter.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got.

[Wesley Huff]

But I needed to find her.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it, got it, got it, got it.

[Wesley Huff]

But I needed to find you a passage that said, foreskins, Give me my wife.

[Andrew Schulz]

Give me my wife. McCall. Michelle. Whom I betrothed to myself. I betrothed her to me for the price of 100 philistine foreskins. So he had to go out and collect 100 philistine foreskins. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

To kill him. Take the foreskins.

[Andrew Schulz]

We don't know if they killed. He killed them. Did he.

[Wesley Huff]

Did he kill them?

[Andrew Schulz]

100% killed them.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

Man, you can't just find some Jewish people, see if they got some sticks.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, floating around, you know, start digging, Dig them up.

[Wesley Huff]

That's not how this works.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

You know about diaries, right?

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow. This is all. This is Old Testament, though. This is Old Testament.

[Wesley Huff]

Old Testament, Yeah. Samuel. So it's King David.

[Andrew Schulz]

King David. Wild boy. Right? With Philistine. Are those the Palestinians? Is the same people.

[Wesley Huff]

No. No.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, still fucking them all. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so who are the Philistines?

[Wesley Huff]

The Philistines are the bad guys. They are living in Canaan and they're so, like, Goliath is a Philistine God. Yeah, The Canaanites.

[Andrew Schulz]

The Canaanites. Wow.

[Mark Yagnon]

Why did he want the foreskins? What did that symbolize?

[Andrew Schulz]

How did he get him off himself? Did he get him off himself?

[Wesley Huff]

Of course he did. He's got sword, but the old.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, a sword. Got it. Oh, not the.

[Wesley Huff]

Bite him chubby.

[Andrew Schulz]

I mean, that sword gets dull. Guys, we got to put a little bit of a pause on this brilliant Bible breakdown because. Because people need their picks.

[Akash Singh]

That was great. Brilliant Bible breaker.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like that alliteration.

[Akash Singh]

That was fire.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's what I do. You know what I mean? Inspired by someone out there, you know, shout out him. Even though it might be illegal. Is it illegal in Christianity?

[Akash Singh]

Gamble?

[Andrew Schulz]

We gotta figure that out.

[Mark Yagnon]

It's frowned upon. It's probably some denominations say no, but then a lot of em are like, yeah, it's fine.

[Andrew Schulz]

What is the. What do the orthodox Christians say?

[Akash Singh]

You don't know?

[Andrew Schulz]

I don't. Because I don't engage in any of the. Of that.

[Wesley Huff]

Let's see.

[Andrew Schulz]

N. Shout out, y' all. Shout out, y' all.

[Akash Singh]

You know who you worship? The Knicks. You know what a Mecca is? Madison Square Garden.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yo, keep talking that, yo. Yeah. Wow. That's fire, though.

[Wesley Huff]

Hey, come on.

[Andrew Schulz]

I do go to Mecca. Low key.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

As much as I possibly can.

[Akash Singh]

The hardwood is your church.

[Andrew Schulz]

Headline two shows at the Mecca. You know what I mean? Prodigal son returned. Yo, real talk. It actually happened. You can't say I didn't do that.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, you did. You know who else dominating at their home? The Knicks.

[Andrew Schulz]

They got rinsed.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, but they're still up 2:1.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, but they got rinsed. His fault, right? Whose fault? Jamil. Why? Jamil? What happened in the group chat? He had no faith. He had no faith in the Knicks, man. Yeah, yeah. That's how you know. Listen, Knicks were an arrogant group. Knicks fans were arrogant group. But the fact that after going up 2 0, most of us were like, I think we got in six. Let you know everything if you're up two zero. Happen.

[Akash Singh]

Dude, the Pacers got their ass beat up two O. And then game four, they won. They were by 50 at one point.

[Andrew Schulz]

It was insane. I didn't even understand the score.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, it was.

[Andrew Schulz]

Was like 100 to like 56.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, something ridiculous like that. So game three loss. If you're up two zero at home.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. Game four is the one that Nick's got it. I believe 100%. Nick's got it. We got in five. Absolutely. We definitely getting that W tonight. Recording this on a Tuesday. I mean, Monday.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

We were recording this on a Monday. Yo, why don't we get back to the Bible, man? Dude, what are we doing over here?

[Wesley Huff]

Trying to spread Jesus, bro.

[Andrew Schulz]

I do.

[Mark Yagnon]

If you want the Knicks to win.

[Andrew Schulz]

We came back from 220 points deficits.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

That's insane. Okay, listen, we. We. This playoffs. The question that we have right now is, can Jimmy Butler win a game on his own. For the Warriors. If he can win a game on his own, then they can get to game five at 2. 2.

[Akash Singh]

He should be able to.

[Andrew Schulz]

He kept a minute yesterday. Kept him in it yesterday, I mean, or two days ago, I think.

[Akash Singh]

I guess the wolves are better. But last year, we saw. Or I guess two years ago, we saw Jimmy Butler destroy everybody. He took apart the Celtics. He took apart the Bucks. He took apart everybody by himself. Yeah, I just. With the Heat, I don't know. He seems like he should be able to get a game off the Wolves.

[Andrew Schulz]

The warriors are a little. Yeah, it's really interesting. The warriors are a little. Like, Draymond just doesn't have it any more offensively. And then defensively, you don't even really have it. Like, Randall was cooking Draymond's ass. So.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, I heard that.

[Andrew Schulz]

So if you're not. If you're scoring two points a game and you can't defend, I think he.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, I don't know. I think they can do it. I think if Steph was healthy.

[Andrew Schulz]

If Steph was healthy, I think they win it. But right now, they need something else. They need somebody else who's going to create the shot. Like, Buddy can splash, but you got to run them around. Pick. Steph can go, give me the ball. I'll bring it up and I'll score. Jimmy can go, I'll bring the ball up and I'll score. And then no one else really can do that.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

On the team.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

You know, effectively.

[Akash Singh]

I mean, Ant is so fun to watch whenever I see anything of his. So I would not mind if they won. You know what series are the most interesting to me, though? Celtics, Knicks, obviously. Celtics, Knicks, and how well the Knicks are playing. And also the Nuggets and the Thunder. The Thunder are so good, but somehow it's too. All this series, and there's only one game that wasn't close.

[Andrew Schulz]

Fucking. What's. His face is incredible.

[Akash Singh]

Namiokic is. Yeah, he's the best player for years.

[Andrew Schulz]

Just unbelievable.

[Akash Singh]

But if that series goes seven, the Thunder are the better team, but they haven't ever played in a game. Seven, the Nuggets. This is small stakes, relatively.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

So even though it's going to be in Oklahoma City and all that, I think if it goes seven, the Nuggets will win.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. I just wouldn't bet against Jokic.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, he's the best.

[Andrew Schulz]

Just figure it out. It's crazy. It's like you don't even want to run the. The. You don't even want to run the offense through anybody else. Like I would literally have him bring the ball up.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, I'm not mad at it.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's just crazy.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Anyway, listen, a lot of great playoff games coming, a lot of great series. You know, Stake is the leader in global betting and US social casinos. Been on top sports and political events. Use the promo code flagrant for your welcome bonus.

[Wesley Huff]

Now let's get back to the show.

[Mark Yagnon]

What can you tell us about the Gospel?

[Andrew Schulz]

So this is awesome.

[Wesley Huff]

Thank you. You can. I went to the Coptic museum in Cairo two years ago and I saw the Nic Hammadi library. So this is Nadi Codex 2, which is. Was discovered in 1945 and includes bunch of gnostic writings, including the Gospel of Philip. But the famous one is the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Thomas, which we knew about prior to this because it had been condemned in the ancient church, but we didn't have evidence for it in terms of physical documentation until in the 1800s in a place called Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, they found some fragments of this unknown gospel.

[Mark Yagnon]

This is the sayings.

[Wesley Huff]

Gospel, yes. 114 sayings.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

This is an important one because the last saying of the Gospel, Thomas has Peter saying, let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life. Good start. And then Jesus says, don't worry, I will make her resemble a male like you males. And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

[Akash Singh]

Look at that.

[Andrew Schulz]

You said biting the foreskin is a modern thing. So there was one time when they.

[Wesley Huff]

Were using a knife. Oh, I don't know enough about that. You said it was a modern thing. Radical Judaism.

[Andrew Schulz]

Hold on, go back to this right here.

[Mark Yagnon]

Gospel of Thomas is fascinating, but is it legit?

[Andrew Schulz]

What do they say it was he.

[Akash Singh]

No, it's.

[Wesley Huff]

It's second century, like, so you have these.

[Andrew Schulz]

So he's just saying some wild stuff in the name of God.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So it's 114 sayings of Jesus talking to his disciples. And it's. It's pretty early, it's our earliest.

[Andrew Schulz]

But written by a guy who's never met Jesus or any of his disciples.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, pretty conclusively. The Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas the disciple. But these other groups appropriate the names of the disciples to give credibility to their theology. So that's where I get Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas. It's these other groups in the subsequent centuries and they read back their theology onto the lips of Jesus in order to like validate.

[Andrew Schulz]

Go, go. So okay, and then is that what the, the, what is it? The Book of Enoch or something like that?

[Wesley Huff]

So that's, that's pre Jesus.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, that's before Old Testament would have been.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, it's, it's pseudo graphical. So it's like, it's pseudo strange graph, a writing. So it's like, like a pseudonym is. You want to write a book, you don't want people to know.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's Andrew Schultz, Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, that's your pseudonym.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, you're Mark Twain, I'm Mark Twain. Nice.

[Wesley Huff]

Noah was a New York orthodox who did that. And so the Pseudepigrapha are a group of writings that are associated with names that we know wasn't written. So Enoch is Noah's great great grandfather.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So the Book of Enoch we know isn't necessarily. It doesn't come from that time frame because that would be like pre flood.

[Andrew Schulz]

It was written way after it was.

[Wesley Huff]

Written in and around the three, 300 years after the Old Testament beginning of New Testament. So like in that period of time they wrote a bunch of stuff and part of it was Enoch.

[Mark Yagnon]

What do you make of Enoch as obviously a non canonical text, but something that the people of the region might have been consuming?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, Enoch's very interesting. There's actually three Enochs. First, Second and Third Enoch. And the only one that really has any kind of credibility is First Enoch. But even then what we call First Enoch is a collection of different. So we have fragments in Aramaic and Greek in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but then we have later ones in Coptic. And so what ends up being like published as if you buy a copy of First Enoch, it's like all of these, this stuff put together, some of it is like 200 years before Jesus, but some of it could very well have been written in the time frame of Jesus in the first century AD. But it's very clearly like a collection of Jewish musings about what happened during the flood. It's like very theologically in depth fanfiction.

[Andrew Schulz]

I was just about to ask that, like is it, is it possible that it's like heroes? Harry Potter?

[Wesley Huff]

I think it's. I, I think it's them trying to figure. And this is common with like the pseudo graphical work is that there's another one called the Ex ex goge of Moses. So they're looking at these Old Testament stories and they're trying to figure out, okay, like how do we explain some of these things? You have this weird Story in Genesis, chapter six, where the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. And that's where you get the Nephilim and that kind of stuff. And so the Jews are like, how do we figure this stuff out? What are demons? What are angels? How interact with his world? There's not actually that much in the Old Testament about that stuff. So let's explore something like the Gospel or. Not the gospel, sorry, the Book of Enoch, to try to expand upon and extrapolate this stuff. Enoch is.

[Andrew Schulz]

So you don't believe in the Nephilim?

[Wesley Huff]

Well, yeah, they're in the Bible. It just depends what you mean by Nephilim.

[Andrew Schulz]

Well, what do you mean by it?

[Wesley Huff]

I don't know what you mean by it. I mean, I'll tell you whether I believe it.

[Andrew Schulz]

I. I would love to believe that there is. There's giants.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, well, the pro nephilim is a tricky term because we don't really know where it originates. So nel means to fall, Right. In Hebrew. And so that's where you get the idea of these are fallen angels.

[Andrew Schulz]

Fallen angels, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

But the Greek translation of the Old Testament translated as gigas, which is giant, gigantic giants.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So. And then they pop up later in Canaan when. When what's his face?

[Mark Yagnon]

Goliath.

[Wesley Huff]

Goliath. Well, so not just Goliath, but when. When they go into the promised land and they, like you have the story of there's these 10 spies that go to scope out the land that God has promised them, and then they come back and. No, it's 12 men and 10 of them are like, we can't go in there. There are giants there. And the term there is Nephilim. Like, they. They're giants. I don't know if it's like, they. They could just be spooked. They don't want to go in there. And so they come up with this excuse that there are giants in there, but because the idea of the flood is that they were destroyed. Right. So everybody dies, including the Nephilim. But then you have guys like, you know, C.S. lewis, like Lewis and Tolkien, had these ideas that these stories of, like, Zeus and the Greek gods, those. Those were like echoes of cultural remembrances of these heroes of old men of renown, which is what they're called in Genesis, chapter six. It's kind of cool idea. So I don't know what they are.

[Andrew Schulz]

Do you believe in giants?

[Wesley Huff]

I believe that there were giants, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow.

[Mark Yagnon]

When you say giant, how big?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Akash Singh]

Like, Andrew's A giant.

[Wesley Huff]

Game of Thrones. You're a giant to me. Everybody's a giant to me.

[Andrew Schulz]

400?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. I couldn't grow tall, so I had to grow wide.

[Andrew Schulz]

Fair enough. Like Game of Thrones giants. Dudes who are just a little bit taller. I mean, you go down to Sudan, you see guys that are seven feet, they look like giants.

[Wesley Huff]

The Hebrew Old Testament says that Goliath was nine feet tall, but the Greek translation of the Old Testament says that he was like. I think it was six foot five. So it's like.

[Andrew Schulz]

It could just be a word for really tall people.

[Wesley Huff]

It's really tall people.

[Andrew Schulz]

And I would imagine in a time.

[Wesley Huff]

It was kind of small back then.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. You don't have food readily available, and if there is a tribe that has tons of food, they grow big, then they look like. Like giants. Is that being reductive to the religious text?

[Wesley Huff]

I don't know. No, not necessarily. It's tricky because it's not like these stories tell you what you need to know, not what you want to know. And so often we have to speculate, which is where you get the Book of Enoch. And that's like, let's expand upon this stuff.

[Andrew Schulz]

Is there ever a time where. Or like, maybe the question I want to ask is, like, how do you feel about the people who don't take these stories literally? They take them metaphorically, but they arrive at a similar conclusion that somebody who takes them literally does.

[Wesley Huff]

I think it depends on what you're looking at and whether it's meant to be taken literally or not.

[Andrew Schulz]

Can you give me a good example of both?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So there's different genre within scripture, because remember, 66 books written over a period of 1600 years on three different continents, but close to 40 different authors in three different languages. Right. That was English, too. And so. So it's a wide variety. So don't read historical literature like you read apocalyptic literature. Don't read poetic literature like you read biography. Like, you got to figure out what you're looking at. And some things are descriptive. They're telling you things that happened. Some things are prescriptive. They're telling you what to do. And some things are emotive. So you read like the Psalms, and it says, blessed are those who smash the children of our enemies on the wrong rocks. And you're like, that's pretty intense. Like, it's not telling you to do that. It's just this, like, heartache in wartime where you're seeking justice. And so those type of things, like, are expressed and depending on what the genre is, we have to be careful in trying to figure out what it's trying to say to us. And some things are history and poetic. So in Canada, we have Remembrance Day, November 11th.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Is it. You have the equivalent, right? Like, remember World War II months earlier?

[Mark Yagnon]

Like Veterans Day?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, like Veterans Day. And so we read this poem by this Canadian soldier who was. It's. It's called I'm going to forget it, and all the Canadian people watching are going to get mad at me. In Flanders fields. Right. So in Flanders fields, the poppies grow between the crosses, row by row. And it's this, like, very passionate story about the graves. They're burying their compatriots in the. Between the crosses in Flanders fields, there are these poppies that are growing.

[Andrew Schulz]

So everybody wears the poppy.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is that history or is that poetry? Well, the answer is yes. Like, it's both. Right. Like, it's not. It's not just because it's poetic. It's talking about, like, these dead people saw sunsets glow days ago kind of thing.

[Andrew Schulz]

So there are. There are parts of the Bible that are meant to be interpreted as metaphor, and they're. I'm. So. I'm being, like, protective of you whenever I ask these questions, because I know, like, if you agree to something, somebody on the Internet is going to crucify.

[Wesley Huff]

They do that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, God. Do they do that on the Internet? Yeah, But.

[Wesley Huff]

But has anybody ever done that?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

No. Never.

[Andrew Schulz]

No. Yeah. Okay. So maybe that's not the wording. What would you find? There are parts of the Bible that are. Would you say prescriptive?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, prescriptive. They tell you what to do. So Leviticus, like telling the Jews what to do.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

But then you read something like. Like Joshua, and they're, like, going in Canaan and they're killing people. And you're like, that's descriptive. That that's what. Telling you what happened.

[Andrew Schulz]

It doesn't mean you should do likewise.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. You hung himself. That's not telling you to go hang yourself. It's telling you that Judas hung himself.

[Andrew Schulz]

So, yeah, it's.

[Wesley Huff]

It's. You have. That's what. Like, I knew a guy who. He put little, like, sticky notes in his Bible every time someone was like. Or killed or murdered. He's like, the Bible's so violent. No, it's just telling you things that happened.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

So it's not telling you to do.

[Andrew Schulz]

Life is violent. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So it just depends. And then there are some passages that are trickier than others. Like Genesis chapter one is a tricky one.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Because it's not entirely clear. Is it telling you, like, the mechanisms of how God created everything in the way that God created them? Is there more of an expansive explanation to that? When you look at the culture, could there be almost like a defense of the fact that you have other creation stories, like the Babylonian Enum Elish, which has this big battle between the gods, and it's chaos, and the. The gods who die become the world, and you and me. And the end theme is kind of like everything's a mistake. You don't really have any purpose. You know, you're just the product of this big battle. And then. And now you're worshiping things like the stars and the sun and the earth and. And Genesis chapter one says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So the things you guys worship, that's pretty stupid, because our God created them. And end. It's good, right? Keep saying it's good after each refrain. And created the land, and it was good. And created the fish and was good. Because that's countercultural to something like the enuma leash. And then he creates humanity in his image, and they're very good. And so is that the way God created everything? Sure. Yeah, potentially. But is it also kind of taking a jab at something like these other origin stories and it's subverting them and saying the stuff you believe is nonsense? Because this is actually how everything started. Yeah, I think so, too. So there's like, multiple things going on in. And once again, difference between a booty call and a butt dial. Like, contextual reading. Context matters.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Mark Yagnon]

In that regard, something I've seen sprout up on the Internet. A debate that I never really considered as a kid that I find fascinating.

[Wesley Huff]

There are debates on the Internet.

[Mark Yagnon]

Oh, God.

[Wesley Huff]

My. My goodness.

[Mark Yagnon]

Is the murder of the Canaanites. And this is something that gets brought up a lot, that basically you have this command by God to go into this land and murder all the people, men, women, children. And ostensibly, some of them are innocent, but yet all of them need to be killed. And people have kind of taken a bunch of different sides. Is like, oh, is God justifying genocide?

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Mark Yagnon]

What do you make of that text?

[Wesley Huff]

So I don't think it's genocide in the way that we would understand genocide specifically because the Canaanites continued to pop up. So if they did actually wipe everybody out, they did a poor job at it. There's a few things going on in the text. God promises Abraham, Canaan, and Says, I'm going to give it to your descendants, but I'm going to wait 400 years because the sins of the Amorites have not come to their full fruition. So God gives them 400 years to repent. And by the time you get to, like, Joshua, they're not repented, repenting. If anything, they've gotten worse. Right. They're doing things like child sacrifice to these agricultural gods. And so then you have something unique in the Old Testament where before the monarchy, before, like, Saul and David, the kings, it's a theocracy. God is the ruler of the people, and he uses Israel to enact his judgment. So he enacts judgment on these terrible people in order to. So, like, in the same vein, lot of people who accuse, who say to me, like, look, there's genocide in the Old Testament, also say things to me like, well, why doesn't God do anything about the evil in the world? I would actually argue this is an example of God doing something about the evil in the world and that he's using his nation, Israel, to accomplish the wiping out of this people.

[Andrew Schulz]

So he sees that as justice for what they've done wrong.

[Wesley Huff]

These are bad people, people.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

And. And so I think there is. There's an aspect of God is saying, go and wipe them out. I'm done with their evil. At the same time, there's a friend of the. The organization I work with, a guy named Paul Copan. He's in Florida, I think he teaches at Florida State University. He wrote a book called Is God a Moral Monster? And then he wrote another book called Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament. He. And he goes through some interesting parallels in other ancient Near Eastern. So like Canaanite, Hittite, Egyptian War texts, where it uses similar language in terms of like, wipe them out, leave none left, kill the women, the children, the goats, that kind of stuff. And Copan argues that there's an aspect of cultural wartime hyperbole that exists in the same way that I would say, like, the Toronto Maple Leafs murdered the Montreal Canadiens, right there. There's an aspect of. If you didn't understand what I was talking about, that that was. I'm talking about hockey, I'm talking about a team. When I say murdered, I don't mean like that. They were like that. We use these kind of phenomenological hyperbole in our language today. Like, you killed at your last set.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

Like, this kind of stuff makes sense.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And so in. In these kind of ancient Near Eastern texts, you have these levels of Hyperbole, which could mean kill everybody, but doesn't always mean that. And we can compare them with like Egyptian steelies or like wartime inscriptions from.

[Andrew Schulz]

Does other hyper. Hyperbole exist in the religious text when it doesn't have to do with these type of severe situations. Like are they hyperbolic about how fruit tastes?

[Wesley Huff]

It's a good question. I don't know if I know because.

[Andrew Schulz]

If that hyperbole exists in these other areas that aren't as high stakes, then it would make a lot of sense that it would exist when the stakes are high. But if it only exists when talking about genocide, it seems like people trying to scur accountability, right?

[Wesley Huff]

No, we do get that in the sense of like when you read the book of Genesis, Jonah in Hebrew, you get these like there's almost like a comedic play to it where when he does eventually get to Nineveh, which he doesn't want to go to because God says go to Nineveh, preach repentance. He doesn't want to go, so he tries to hike it in the other direction. When he eventually gets there, it says that everybody repents, even the cows. And it's like, it's hyperbolic where it's saying like even the cows are so. Yeah, like that's how. How much they're repentant of what they've done. Okay, so you got stuff like that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Can I ask a question sort of based on that?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

I don't know anything about the Bible. I'm very non religious. I know nothing. But it is interesting to hear that there's something funny in the Bible. You're surrounded by a bunch of comedians. Oh yeah?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like in Shakespeare how there's sort of mistranslated or jokes that don't make it to modern times while reading Shakespeare because you're not in the time period in which it took place. Are there funny parts of the Bible that are translated well or mistranslated that people don't know about?

[Wesley Huff]

That's a really great question. I don't know if I have a good answer to that in a room full of comedians. I wish I had examples.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I didn't mean it like year round. But are there parts of the Bible that are like light hearted funny or like.

[Mark Yagnon]

I mean the bears killing the kids is always funny.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. Elijah go up, bald head and he sends the she bears after them to kill them. That's, I mean, kind of funny.

[Andrew Schulz]

The foreskin thing is pretty good.

[Wesley Huff]

Foreskin thing is pretty good. Yeah. You have like record of that when Jesus is Talking to the woman at the well, and she's a Samaritan. So Samaritans are like mongrel Jews. They've married with other tribes. And so they, they, the Jews in like Israel don't like them very much. They also, there was a time where one of the Greek leaders was coming to, was coming to wipe out the Jews. And the Samaritans who like live up north, caught wind of this. And so they send him a letter and they say, hey, I know we look like Jews, I know we sound like Jews, I know we worship like Jews, but just FYI, we're not Jews, so don't kill us when you go kill them. And also we have a temple that's like their temple, but we're actually going to dedicate it to you. We're going to start worshiping you. And so this is like a point of contention in Jesus's day where the Samaritans, this is why the good Samaritan is kind of like a play on things, right? Who is my neighbor? And Jesus says, like, it's those people you don't like. That's who you need to love and be nice to. But when Jesus is talking to the woman at the well and she's like, well, you guys worship in Jerusalem or we worship at Mount Gerizim. Jesus is kind of like, hey, what's the name of your temple again? Who do you guys worship? He's kind of like poking her, right? Because it's callback to this story, which is not a biblical one. And we know it because of individuals like Josephus where they actually dedicated their temple to the Greek leader and to Jupiter. And, and so he's like, when she says, we worship here, you worship there. He's like, but who do you worship? So he's kind of like poking her. And there's some sarcasm that if you didn't know what was going on in the background context, you wouldn't actually pick it up. And it's actually a weird kind of comment that he makes to her otherwise.

[Mark Yagnon]

Oh, that's funny. What about him cursing the fig tree?

[Wesley Huff]

That's allegorical to the leaders of Jerusalem that they look like they should. It has leaves. And so even though it's not the time for figs, it's like a, it's, it's, it's like masquerading that it should grow figs. And he's like, I'm going to curse the fig tree and it's not going to grow any figs. He does that while he's going to Jerusalem and he's sort of. The play is that the leaders in Jerusalem have all of this appearance of religiosity, but in the end, they have no fruit. So they're like. Like dead and there. It doesn't matter how good they look on the outside, right? You don't judge by what you water with, right? You. The. The judging is by the fruit, but everybody's looking at what you water with. All the good, good things you do. But that's. That's not the going to church and the reading your Bible. That's not the fruit. That's. That's the. That's the. That's a nutrients. That's a fertilizer. The water.

[Mark Yagnon]

Water input.

[Wesley Huff]

And Jesus is saying, no, no, that's. Those are. It's not that. That's wrong, but you got to grow the fruit. And so if you're doing all the right things but you're not growing the fruit, something's. You're. You might as well be a dead tree.

[Andrew Schulz]

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[Akash Singh]

I like that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. There's no right to bear arms if you don't have the energy to get up out of bed, take your assault rifle, point it at somebody you disagree with. Not that.

[Wesley Huff]

No.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay. Defend your home. You disagree with the person trying to rob your home.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

There you go.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. You standing your ground is a disagreement.

[Akash Singh]

Freedom to defend your home.

[Andrew Schulz]

Freedom to defend your. Your home. Yeah. Against the migrants. Against the migrants moving into your state. Yeah. Your home is your state in a lot of ways. There's a gray area. There is a gray area. There is. There is a gray area. The point that I'm trying to make is blackriffle coffee.com. you go there right now, you use the promo code flagrant, you're gonna get 30 off today. And America, your energy.

[Wesley Huff]

If you're non Christian, can you get.

[Andrew Schulz]

Get into heaven? Oh, important question.

[Wesley Huff]

By non Christian, I mean if you just don't.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, him.

[Wesley Huff]

I'm agnostic, so I would say God is not going to force anyone into heaven in that heaven. Once again, remember, heaven is not the final destination. Soften the new earth, soften hell.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So essentially, no one comes to the Father but through me. Jesus says, right. But C.S. lewis, once again, he says that hell is locked from these inside. So I would say that if you have spent your life not living out a life, that is what Jesus has called you to do, to be, then Jesus is not going to force you into his presence. You're going to go. So Lewis also says heaven is God's or hell is God saying thou will be done. So what you want in your life by rejecting Christ is what you're going to get in the afterlife.

[Akash Singh]

Nobody wants hell. Well, you just accept and maybe, and I guess Hindus accept Jesus as I read, like a yogi. Sure, essentially. But maybe not the only form of God. And theoretically I think it aligns with Christianity in some ways. If that, if God is everywhere, we could all be God. Jesus is a human that she, he achieved his inner God.

[Wesley Huff]

So that would be the Hindu way of working it out.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Akash Singh]

But then we accept Jesus.

[Wesley Huff]

But even Hinduism is exclusivistic in certain regards. So like no one is entirely inclusivistic. Right. The exclusivists have to exclude the inclusivists and the inclusivists have to exclude.

[Akash Singh]

How would we, and I'm not you. Look, I don't know enough. So how are we exclusivists?

[Wesley Huff]

Right, right. So depending on what version of Hinduism you're talking about, because there's polytheistic Hinduism, there's monotheistic Hinduism and there's atheistic or non theistic Hinduism.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, you could.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

So they can't all be true. So truth by its very nature is exclusive.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

If I say two plus two is four, well I'll give Andrew the benefit of the doubt. Andrew says two plus two is four. I say two plus two is six. One of us is wrong. Now we could both be wrong, but the truth is that two plus two is four. He's right. And so in that, that sense that's an exclusive truth statement. So if you look at all the world religions, I would ultimately say they're all exclusivistic at some regard.

[Akash Singh]

I say Jesus is exclusivistic in the most important regard.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, yeah, So I would say Christianity is inclusivistic in that all are called to come. But it is exclusivistic in that Jesus loves, loves you and calls you to come as you are, but he loves you too much to leave you where you are. And so you, you the. It's, it's, it's unconditional, but it's not unconditioned because all you have to do is give up your life and follow Jesus.

[Akash Singh]

I think conditioned is conditional. Yeah, it is. They're putting a condition on it, like the. Was a very poetic thing you said, but it doesn't actually mean anything.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, it does in the sense that when I say it's unconditional, it's that Jesus says all are welcome to come, but there is a condition.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, there is.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. It's. It's not. It's not nothing.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And in that sense, God is either right, the universe in like an Eastern mystic kind of idea, or God is a personal being. They can't bother be true. So we. I think all world religions have these, like, superficial agreements, but they disagree on the fundamentals. Right. Who God is, who we are, why we're here, what sin is, what the afterlife is like, how we solve the problem of human flourishing. Like, all these things are important topics. But Advil and arsenic both come in pill form. But it's not the similarities that make you choose one over the other. When you have a headache, it gets the differences. So as someone who has studied world religions, I would say that there is no such thing as a religion that accepts everything. Because even if I say Jesus is God incarnate and there's only one God, he's not just a guru, and his teachings actually don't give you reason to just chop them up to a guru, then that's. That's excluding the worldview system of something like Hindu Hinduism or. Or Buddhism, which would also include that.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah. I guess the difference would be we would say that's fine. Like in Hinduism, that's okay. You believe what you believe. God bless. There are many ways to the mountaintop. If that way gets you to the mountaintop, amazing. We're thrilled for you.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And I would say there's only one way to the mountaintop.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Akash Singh]

And that is. That is a fairly big difference.

[Wesley Huff]

Yes. Yeah. So it's not pluralistic, I guess, to me.

[Akash Singh]

And I'm also a little. I don't want to say sensitive, but like, you grow up getting told you're going to hell, if you're sure. So it's like, I would look at it as a kid more so now I'm less bothered by it, but I'd be like, man, you guys will forgive murderers. Jesus will forgive you murderous child molesters if he believes in them or if they believe in him. But if you're a good person who doesn't fully believe in him.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So to that, I would say there's no such thing as a good person.

[Andrew Schulz]

Because we're all sinners.

[Akash Singh]

So all good people saying he's a bad person.

[Wesley Huff]

All good people go to heaven. That's clear biblically. Right. But Jesus says no one is good but God. So we have a dilemma, right? All good people go to heaven. No one is good but God. What does that mean? No one's going to heaven. So the. The issue is, is like, so this is similar to the question of what do you do with the person who lives on, like, a random island in the middle of, you know, Papua New guinea and has never heard the God, the innocent, you know, tribes person. And the biblical answer is that there's no such thing as an innocent person in that I don't deserve hell. Me, Wes Huff. I deserve hell 100% of the time. That's like, the wages of sin is death. And that's the language that Paul uses in that I'm like, actively working at a job to earn a wage, and that's sin and death. Right. But the second part of that line is, the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus. So the answer to the question is that I think we are both worse than we realize and have the potential to do much more good than we realize. However, I am not going to heaven because anything of anything I've done. Right. I can't do that. That's very clear. Scripturally, you cannot earn your way to heaven. It's not about doing things. It's not about what I'm doing. It's about what Jesus did.

[Andrew Schulz]

So it's up to us to get some Christianity out to that island in Papua New Guinea.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And is that why these people are compelled to, you know, take?

[Wesley Huff]

And that's why missions existed. That's. That was the motivation. So we're talking about, like, the New Testament is copied like crazy in the early period, these independent writings. The. One of the reason for that is because they were like, we need to get this out everywhere else.

[Andrew Schulz]

These people aren't going to get to heaven.

[Akash Singh]

So I didn't really. Pretty quickly, I didn't resent the people trying to convert me. I understood their motivation, but I did resent, you know, Jesus. Like, I said, like, your Christ, I don't like your Christians. I almost felt the opposite. And that Gandhi. Gandhi said that. Gandhi said that.

[Wesley Huff]

So.

[Akash Singh]

And I almost felt the opposite. Like, I. I understand. I have empathy for the people who are trying to convert me. They're trying to save me. What is this faith that is written in such a way that a guy who's never heard of me because y' all didn't make it out to me is condemned to hell.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure. But we both Deny each other's central truth claims like you would deny the central truth claim that I just articulated and I would deny yours.

[Akash Singh]

No, I'm saying that let's say Papua New guinea, never heard of you. They're not denying. They don't know how is that person going to hell for simply you not doing your job and going out to convert him.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, ultimately I would say God doesn't owe anybody anything. So the assumption is that God owes us our salvation. And I would say that it is more if God chose just to save Abraham, he would have been more graceful then he. We possibly deserve to do that. But he didn't just save Abraham. He saves a countless number in the sense that when John has his vision in the book of Revelation, it's an innumerable number. He can't even count it. That's how big it is. And so I think the message of Christianity, the good news, what we call the gospel, is that you are headed towards destruction and you're at actually attempting to cause the destruction. Right. It's not that, you know, Jesus has thrown a life preserver and you need to catch it. Now you're trying to fight Jesus, you don't want the life preserver. But apart from the saving work of the spirit, reaching into the, the prophets use the language of you have a heart of stone, God is going to give you a heart of flesh. But it's God's work that does that. And so we don't deserve that, that freedom, that graciousness.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's a heavy weight, man.

[Wesley Huff]

It is. But I mean the, the good news is that so when I study world religions, I, I come up with this conclusion that all world religion or all worldview perspectives are some form of survival of the fittest. In that it's a do this, feel this, or think this. Right? It's do this pragmatism, it's feel this emotionalism or it's think this intellectualism. Right? You need to be the best at the, the knowledge. You need to, you know, be the most spiritual. You need to do the most things. And it's one or a combination of those things, Right? Christianity is the opposite of that in that it says you can't feel, think or do good enough. Right? So it's not about that. It's not do and you'll be accepted. Feel and you'll be accepted. Think and you'll be accepted. It's God has stepped out of eternity and into humanity in the second person of the Trinity in Jesus, and now you're accepted. Now you can think now you can feel now you can do, but it's not on your shoulders.

[Andrew Schulz]

I get that it's supposed to alleviate it, but in order for it to alleviate it, you first have to accept that you're a piece of shit. And what if you don't feel like you're a piece of shit? So now I have to stop feeling good about it myself, and I have to convince myself that I am a.

[Akash Singh]

Piece of shit just as much as a murderer, child molester.

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Andrew Schulz]

Just, just so somebody else can get me back to. Not somebody else, God can get me back to feeling good about myself. And I think that that really works for people who feel like they're a piece of shit all the time. But if you don't feel like a piece of shit to convince yourself that you are, and the only way out of your piece of shitness is to believe in this one person who will then, through that belief, convince you to do the good and kind acts that you were already doing prior. Yeah, I can see how that's like a heavy weight for, for people to take on.

[Wesley Huff]

I, I would say there's this dichotomy.

[Andrew Schulz]

And keep in mind I'm framing this as someone who was not raised religiously and does feel like a good person. And I think there's been this part of me, I think there's probably this part of me that's, that's quite, quite naive, definitely, based on your description, which is that, you know what? Because I do believe in something, I'm like, yeah, God knows my heart. And you know, I, I, I try to live what is Pascal's wager, whatever, like. And I try to live as if there is a God. And I try to do the things that are good in the world. And those are probably prescribed to me through religion in some way, shape or form. But it would be tough for me to accept this. And I don't think that I'm perfect in any way. I do actually accept the fact that there is, like, sin in me and there are these, and I'm fighting those natural instincts, but the only way I can be good is if I'm just like that guy, like.

[Wesley Huff]

So it's not that that's the only way you can be good, and it's not simply that you're a piece of shit. I think if it was that, then, then I think we would have a problem.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

I think what the Bible says, particularly in that creation story, right, is that you are created with purpose and meaning and intention, and it is good. You actually bear the image of God. And there's something about that that is special. So in one sense, you're more of a piece of shit than you can imagine. But also you're more loved and more capable of amazing things than you can imagine. And that's the dichotomy of Christianity, is that God does not need to create. Right. So God lives in a set of living, loving relationships in the Trinity. He has existed eternally in relationship and in love. Yeah, that's what John says in 1 John, God is love. And so God does not need to create in order to experience anything. Creation is an outpouring of his love. Now, this is different than, say, a Unitarian monotheistic faith like Islam. In Islam, in one sense, philosophically, God does need to create to experience love, because love requires an object and a subject. And so in order to feel love, the Unitarian God of something like Islam needs the subject. Right. And the object in order to feel that. That's not true for Christianity because the Spirit and the Father. The Father has been loving the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit forever, yet he chooses to create as an outpouring of his love, knowing full well that the creation will rebel against him because God loves us so much. So if it's only you're a piece of shit, that's a problem. That's a problem theology for I think what the Bible actually says, says, and the piece of shitness, this is a theological term, of course I went to seminary, is that we brought that into the world. Right. So when, when the garden and the fruit, we want to take that literally or like want to do the Jordan Peterson thing, whatever.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

What we get though is that God knows what's best for our flourishing. And when it says that you will know, know the difference between good and evil, it's less of like an intellectual understanding of what good and evil are and more of a choosing the shots on our own terms. I, even though God created me and knows all things, I actually think I know better and I'm going to eat the fruit because I, I, I think that that's better for me. And that's what sin is.

[Andrew Schulz]

You see people do this all the time. Yeah. They decide what God cares about the most and then they, you know, care their life according to, according to that. I guess in the circumstance with the person who lives on the island has never heard about Christianity, but what if he lives his life as a Christian without. Because God is omnipresent. Right. Like God maybe has given him the gospel in a different way than he gave it to you.

[Mark Yagnon]

The covenant's written on the heart is people.

[Andrew Schulz]

So it's like, what if that person is living a devoutly Christian life and the God that he's praying to might not be named Jesus Christ, but isn't it possible that God is up there? Like, I know who he's praying. He's praying to me because I put it on his heart. Is it possible that he's accepted in heaven? Again, I don't want man to decide what God is capable of. And I sometimes think that we do that. And I'm not trying to skirt out of the responsibility of just going, hey, I got to get baptized.

[Wesley Huff]

You're just going to put it on.

[Andrew Schulz]

Me, I'm going to put it on you. No, but like, some. Sometimes it's possible man is going like, hey, God doesn't know unless you do this exact thing. And then God's up there. Like, listen, I get the point, what you're trying to do. But like, the guy on the island who's living this perfectly devoutly Christian religious life.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

He gets in too, because I put it on his heart.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So I. I think ultimately that's a question that I don't know the answer to because it's not something that's directly outlined in Scripture. However, I think you can, like, extrapolate certain things in one way. Part of that is still saying you can earn it and that he's. He's doing the right things.

[Andrew Schulz]

And he. And he. He doesn't even know he's doing it. He's doing it because.

[Wesley Huff]

So I think God is not going to judge us based on what we don't know.

[Akash Singh]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

We would hope so. I am optimistic that I personally would not damn that individual because I. I don't know what's going on there.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And God is more than capable to reveal himself. I mean, Paul says in Romans that God's divine attributes and invisible qualities have been shown throughout creation, so that no man is without excuse. So there's an aspect of nobody can stand before God and say, I just didn't have enough and I didn't know enough. Because God is saying, creation is screaming at you that there's something.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. And I. And I think that, like.

[Mark Yagnon]

But the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ.

[Wesley Huff]

So that's. That's where it does get tricky. And there is a sense of Jesus saying, I'm the way, the truth and life. No one comes to the Father, but through me. I would say we have an imperative to tell that person about the God that they believe in and who that is. And that's what Paul does in Acts chapter 17 when he goes to Athens and he goes to the Areopagus and he says, you have a shrine to an unknown God. In one sense that, that's silly. But let me tell you about the unknown God so that you go worshiping, put a name to it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And actually tell you the person that your heart is actually crying out to because you bear his image. And in that sense we have to be careful because if we make it about like what we do and what we believe and what we. In that way, it's a merit, it's a, it's meritorious.

[Andrew Schulz]

I understand what you're saying.

[Wesley Huff]

And the commandments, something like the Ten Commandments, are less of a thou shalt not and more of a promise in that God is not a murderer. You're created in his image. Don't murder. God is not an adulterer. You're creating his image. Don't commit adultery. God is not a thief. You're creating his image. Don't steal things. It's actually calling you to live up to the standard of the image that you bear of God, even though you might feel inclined to do this flourish ultimately. But I would say that there's an aspect of the person who doesn't understand the, that sees those things as a burden and sees them as a rule. And I would actually say that it's a calling by our Creator to live up to the standard that he actually created us to be for the sake of human flourishing.

[Andrew Schulz]

And why do you think that we would like it to be merit based?

[Wesley Huff]

Because I think that's that, that we want to contribute. Humans are, are very.

[Andrew Schulz]

I also think we want, want heaven without subscribing to also the alternative of the religion. I, I think there's part of it that's there. It's like, hey, I'm a good person. Yeah, maybe I don't go to church and maybe I haven't accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, but I'm a good person, so I still get in. Right. It's like we still want in. We still wanted, we want the eternity.

[Wesley Huff]

Right.

[Akash Singh]

It's still begging the question, but the alternative is hell. That's the issue I have. If there was a first class, a business class and a coach, I'm with it. I don't gotta be first class. That's fine. But the idea that it is a, like God doesn't owe you heaven, he don't need to give you hell.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I think part of this is that we have these understandings of hell which might be skewed by Middle Ages.

[Akash Singh]

Okay, I would love to hear that.

[Wesley Huff]

People burning.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

I would say hell is the concept of God's wrath against evil in eternal justice, but it's also a separation from his grace, goodness. And so you see these depictions, particularly from the Middle Ages of like demons burning people alive. And that's more. Both heaven and hell in the Middle Ages is drawn more from like Greek imagery of where the gods live and what the underworld is than it is from what scripture actually says. Actually says about these things.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I feel like Dante's Inferno defined hell for us and not scripture.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure. And that's like quintessential, you know, Middle age. Yeah, yeah. What does the scripture say hell is? Well, it's, it's separation. It's separation from God. Like God is not going to force you into his presence, into that. And if, if you are not choosing that, like, if you are not in Adam, you're in. Sorry, if you're not in Christ, you're in Adam. So Jesus is called the second Adam. Right. Adam brings sin into the world and taints everything. Christ comes into the world and renews everything. And so the gospel message is that you're either going to be found in Adam or in Christ. Yeah, that's it. And God is not going to force you into being under Christ's righteousness. And at the same time, I still don't deserve that. So this is where, like when I was talking about before all these, is these religious concepts, it's about the do the feel, the think. It's also about mercy or justice. Right. So I would argue that something like the Eastern philosophies, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, anything that has a reincarnation, that's, that's just right. You get what you deserve. The good you do in this life, you get in the next life. The bad you do in this life, sort of. There's a difference between reincarnation, Hinduism and Buddhism, but that aside, it's like just right. But we wouldn't necessarily say that it's merciful. You, you do get what you deserve.

[Akash Singh]

It's not.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah. Then there are other religious systems. And to a certain degree I would pin Islam in that group because every chapter of the Quran, bar one chapter, starts with the Bismillah God, the most merciful, the most benevolent. So in that sense, the God of Islam forgives but someone arbitrarily and it's at the expense of his justice. So if you, if God will forgive you, but the wrong you've done hasn't actually been been paid for. His law is kind of just winked at. Where Christianity is different is that the punishment that we deserve is taken on God himself in the person of Jesus. And so in that sense, justice is fulfilled. And because justice is fulfilled, his law is accomplished and now mercy. So justice is getting what you deserve, mercy is not getting what you deserve, and grace is getting what you don't deserve.

[Andrew Schulz]

So, so he yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

This is because you don't get what you do deserve, which is the punishment. Mercy happens, God forgives you, but he doesn't actually. And you don't deserve that either. But then he adopts you as his child. Yeah, that's grace. That's getting what you don't deserve. Yeah, right. And so when I look at something like comparative religious studies, what I see is all of these systems of the survival of the fittest that I talked about before. Christianity is the fittest stepping down and sacrificing himself for the survival of the weakest. And that changes things in that mercy and justice are not pitted against each other. It's not justice at the expense of mercy, it's not mercy at the expense of justice. They're actually accomplished together in the act of the cross. Cross where the self volunteering of Jesus going to the cross. Right. He says, no one takes my life from me, I give it of my own accord.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is why forgiveness is an accomplishable goal even for the most heinous act. Because God has already taken on the punishment for that heinous act that that person committed.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, forgiveness is costly. Right. Like there's always a cost to forgiveness somewhere.

[Andrew Schulz]

And so I'm just saying in general that lack of, perceived lack of justice to it doesn't exist. Yes. This person killed somebody. Yeah. Jesus died on the cross for that very thing that that person did. It's not this person killed somebody. All right, how are we going to reconcile this? Do we give him 20 lashes? What is the thing for this act and who gets to decide that? It's already been decided. So now we can go forgive.

[Wesley Huff]

It's not a point based system either. Which also gets hairy with Islam is this concept within the Quran of the scales.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, right.

[Wesley Huff]

So you do bad things, you just try to outweigh them with your good things. There's a weird subjectivity to that.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right. Because he decides. Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And the, the, the actually Isaiah says that our righteous acts are like filthy rags. And the term there, it's debated, but could actually mean something like menstrual rags. Like, they're like, they're not just dirty and gross. And it's like ritually impeded cure with stuff you don't want to get near. And so it's like, look, God. Look at all the good things I'm doing. And he's like, you don't understand compared to my holiness, how. How like, far that measures up. And so once again, God doesn't need to do any of this. God doesn't need to create. God doesn't need to forgive. God doesn't need to give mercy or justice. But the fact that he does and then calls us all into. Into that, to turn away. So the word repentance in Greek, metano actually means to change one's mind and actions and attitudes. Like, it's less of a. Just don't do it anymore. It's. It's more of like metanoia. Change your brain, like, change it entirely. Your thought patterns start. It's the. What I talked about before with the Ten Commandments, like, you're seeing it as a command and God is saying, no, it's a promise. You don't need to steal, you don't need to murder, you don't need to lie. You don't need to. Those are promises that God makes to you because of who you are through what he can do. And then if you don't change, you said you either become Adam or you become Christ, right? Well, you're. You're. Yeah, so it's like you're. When you stand before the judgment throne, you're either going to take the penalty you deserve or you're going to be covered in the righteousness of Christ. And that penalty is on him. And coming back as Adam would be a human who sins. So isn't that kind of like reincarnation? No, no. You're not coming. It's like a metaphorical language. The first Adam means like an Adam. It's almost kind of how they see.

[Andrew Schulz]

It where it's just like, hey, until.

[Wesley Huff]

You are enlightened, you're going to continue being a sinner until you are enlightened. I don't think that's the way because it's not. It's not in like a. It's not an. A spiritual or intellectual awareness in that sense. It's like God. Yeah, so it's tricky because the, the Eastern language, it doesn't compute with what's going on within the Semitic understanding of script scripture. So it's not like a nirvana. It's not like an awakening or an enlightenment. It's, it's Christ revealing to you who you really are and who he really is.

[Mark Yagnon]

What would you say in the case of children that die on the first day of life or someone with like a cognitive disability where they're not able to function in society or have any type of like intellectual understanding of Christ, what happens to them?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I would say everybody is born with original, original sin and we all deserve punishment. But from who I know God's character to be in Scripture, God is free to save whom he wants to save. And based on who God is, I see no reason why he would not save children who die in infancy. He would not save people with cognitive disabilities. I don't know the answer to that ultimately. But once again, like Scripture tells us what we need to know now we want to know. But I think based on the character of God and the fact that when the Israelites are told not to sacrifice their children, it's the only time that like a group is overtly described as the innocent, like the death of the innocents is what it's described to when these people are sacrificing their children to the, the pagan agricultural gods. So I think it's like extrapolating and it's conjecture, but I think based on what I see in scripture of who God is, that he's loving, that he's compassionate, that he's merciful, he's abounding in steadfast love, kindness. Right. That Exodus 34,6 that I see no reason to not say that if my wife has a miscarriage, that child I will be reunited with in heaven because of who God is and what his loving kindness is to humanity.

[Andrew Schulz]

So couldn't you extrapolate that to the guy on the island?

[Akash Singh]

That's what I would.

[Wesley Huff]

It could be, it could be. However, there is, is kind of a cognitive reckoning. This is where I would be careful to say that this is my opinion.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, we're not.

[Wesley Huff]

But yeah, I'm not denying that everybody.

[Andrew Schulz]

Is not like an orthodox Christian bishop or anything like that that we would really trust.

[Wesley Huff]

Name? Andrew Schultz.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, go on, go on.

[Wesley Huff]

So, but these, once again, these are like topics that are, are I've been discussed for 2,000 plus years.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

The Jews in the pre Jesus times were also coming up with these questions. So there's a lot of delineation, literature and debate about these things.

[Mark Yagnon]

But I think one thing scripture that hung me up when I was a kid is the idea of the Pharaoh of Egypt having his heart hardened by God. That God hardened his heart so that he couldn't see the truth of what was being revealed. And I'm curious why, in your opinion, God would see step in to, I guess, orient him in a way that was against what God wanted.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. Why doesn't he get the same forgiveness?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, to accomplish God's will.

[Andrew Schulz]

So the thing is, I guess at that point in time, Jesus hadn't died already.

[Mark Yagnon]

Yeah, it was Old Testament.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, God, I would go to the length of saying God knows things we don't because he's God. And so Paul talks about this in Romans, chapter eight and nine, where he comments on this and talks about the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. But it says both that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and God hardened Pharaoh's heart. So there's a mutuality going on in there in God's sovereignty and our free will. Both those things exist. And God uses Pharaoh as a tool to enact his justice. And yet also God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. And so he does these things even in instances where we might not totally understand what's going on, but it's ultimately for his glorification. And the purpose of this of God is the main character of the story. And the redemption of his people is accomplished through Pharaoh hardening his own heart and being bitter. And yet God also uses that in hardening Pharaoh's hearts to accomplish that narrative in. So the book of Genesis literally ends with the story of Joseph where Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery into Egypt. They want to kill him, God restrains, they're evil, they sell him into slavery, and he ends up climbing the ranks of being second to Pharaoh. And then there's a famine throughout the land. And the only place that has food because of the wisdom of Joseph via the, you know, God revealing this to him is Egypt. And so Joseph's brothers go back to Egypt and they meet with him, not knowing it's their brother. And eventually he reveals who he is to them. And he says, you know what you intended for evil, God intended for good in the saving of nations. And so God uses He. God allows evil for good. That often we don't understand. Wowza.

[Andrew Schulz]

Karma.

[Wesley Huff]

No.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes. No, no. You know, this idea, like, I think that we have a skewed understanding.

[Wesley Huff]

Can I drink this?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, sure. I think we have a skewed understanding of karma. And Aakash can speak to it more. But this idea. Idea, like it's transactional. I do a bad thing and then something bad happens to me later. But it might Be a little bit something more like you live within your karma. Doing bad things makes you feel bad about yourself and then you exist within this, this, this badness. Right. You just feel horrible because of these bad things that you've done. And you could maybe say the same is true about Christianity. Living this Christ like life makes you feel good, makes you. I'm not saying, you know, having heaven on earth, but that following this way not only gives you eternal salvation, but also makes your life better while you are here. Would you say that that would be true for most Christians, that aspiring to live a Christlike life will actually make you feel better and life of sin.

[Wesley Huff]

Oh, of course.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, so just, just.

[Wesley Huff]

So there's a pragmatism to it. I think that P. So far I'm.

[Andrew Schulz]

Not trying to pin you to anything, I swear to God.

[Wesley Huff]

I'm not.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm not.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, no, I get, I get what you're saying and I do think there's truth to that in that. Like I want Canada, the US wherever. I want laws to be based on Christian things. Cuz I think that's actually good for.

[Andrew Schulz]

Society and just for people in general.

[Wesley Huff]

But I don't want then those to become immoral means to an end. Like don't make the laws based on the Bible because people should be doing good. Actually a friend of mine, Andy Bannister, who runs an organization out in Scotland called solas, he did this debate. It was him, it was the head of the secular society and it was a Muslim imam. And the topic of the discussion was what makes the flourishing society or what makes a good society? And the secular materialist guy and the Muslim basically argued for the same thing. We need to enact more rules. We need to make sure people are following them. And my friend Andy, his point was that's not going to work because everybody's going to try to find the loopholes in the rules or they're going to just do it so that they don't get in trouble. And so the more rules you put in, the more people are going to try to get around them for one reason or the other. Like only way, like Texas taxes. Oh, taxes, yeah.

[Akash Singh]

Make any tax law you want. We're going to find the loophole.

[Andrew Schulz]

Sure.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. And, and so it's not about rules, it's about changing people's hearts. They should want to do the good thing.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting that we like establish these rules and that's how society should function. What I am suggesting is what you're saying is that by living this life you will feel better and ultimately have a more fulfilling life. And while you, a devout Christian might say, yeah, that might be the case while you're here, but you're not going to get that eternal self salvation. But to those people who maybe they're not believers subscribing to the behavioral mechanisms not for eternal salvation, for happiness, while on earth they do get to attain some of that.

[Wesley Huff]

I think, you know, it's not an either or. It's not just about the afterlife or just about this life. It's a both and, you know, right ear will be done on earth as is in heaven.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. So that's, that's the Lord.

[Andrew Schulz]

You get it. Now I think that the people who take the Bible for metaphor, who you would call retards. Not retard. Sorry, you would call idiots. Sorry, you would call idiots. But those people who take it to.

[Wesley Huff]

Find a Canadian, more Canadian way of saying, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

By that, what's a good one?

[Wesley Huff]

Fools.

[Andrew Schulz]

Fools. Hockey pucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But those that take it as metaphor but still see like immense value in it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And living this quote, unquote. I wouldn't say Christian life, but Christian inspired life.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

They like many people, for example, who grow up like, Catholic, you know, like my dad grew up Catholic. Right. Not religious.

[Wesley Huff]

But is he proud of you now that you're Orthodox?

[Andrew Schulz]

He's very proud, yeah. No, no, no. But not, not religious as he, you know, he had some kind of like, kind of falling out with the church. Not on like some like, you know, pedophile, but just like, he just didn't.

[Wesley Huff]

Put words in my mouth.

[Andrew Schulz]

Everybody put something in their mouth, but like, especially this guy. But like, I don't know a person that is, I don't know, somebody that doesn't lead a more Christian life. You, if you asked him, he's like, yeah, I'm not. I'm just being a nice guy. You know, I'm trying to help people when I can. Like he is. So he still finds this immense value. Value, yeah. In this belief system, without the belief now, the cost could be eternal salvation, which sucks. But while you're here on earth, it seems to have really helped him.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure.

[Andrew Schulz]

You know, so I'm just curious how you reconcile that. Like, okay, there are these people out there that are leading these quote unquote Christian lives, but they're maybe not believing some of the things that you've said. So maybe they're not leading Christian life, but they're following they matter of fact, they might be leading better lives than some of these Christians who do believe all these things. So which one does God value more? Does God value the. The. The Christian who's like, you know what? I'm a sinner. I am a piece of. I believe that God is my savior. I'm going to keep on doing all this, but I am a piece of. That's why I'm doing it. But God died for my sins. But I'm going to try. But he's a piece of his entire life, and he hurts. Hurts people. Or do you think God is more favorable to the person who goes, yeah, I don't know if I really believe it, but I really like being nice to people and kind and trying to help my neighbor and trying to help anybody I can and trying to be a positive force on the world.

[Wesley Huff]

Well, I think at the end of the day, it's still like, you're in Adam or you're in Christ. And so, like, this is what I said when I was on Rogan and I was commenting on Jordan Peterson is like, we need to be careful that the law, the doing good things is the mirror. Don't try to clean yourself with the mirror. The mirror shows you how dirty you are. Right?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, he's. Yeah. I would believe a lot of these people aren't trying to clean themselves with it. I think that they're doing it because they just feel like that's the right way to. To be right.

[Wesley Huff]

And I would encourage them in that because ultimately I would.

[Andrew Schulz]

But don't you think God recognizes it? Like, don't you think God is smart enough to be like, hey, this person just found a way around the system. He just said, yo, I believe in that guy. And then he's just out here continuing to kill people. And this other person is like, I don't know if I believe him, but I am that.

[Akash Singh]

Isn't it also weird that he died for all of your sins except one? Every sin, except one.

[Andrew Schulz]

What's the one?

[Akash Singh]

Don't believe in him. Like, you don't believe in him, so you're going to hell. Everything else, you're good, but you don't believe. That's the one sin.

[Andrew Schulz]

Also, his own followers didn't believe in him until he came back. And now we got to believe with him, and we didn't even get to see him come back. So I, I can't, Like, I, I can't believe if his own followers, the people who saw him do all the crazy cool stuff the second he dies. Like, yeah, he was Bullshitting. And then he comes back, they're like, okay, we're on board. Yet we have to have this. This undying faith that even his own closest followers couldn't have. And he has a higher expectation for us than them.

[Wesley Huff]

It's a. It's a good find because if he.

[Andrew Schulz]

Did come back, I guarantee we'd be like, hey, I'm choosing.

[Akash Singh]

Yeah, I'm back.

[Andrew Schulz]

I do what all your homies did, too. But why do you have a higher expectation for us? And we never even met you?

[Wesley Huff]

So the answer to that is that it's not like faith isn't simply about believing the right things. Right? Because even in Matthew's Gospel, at the end, Jesus has been with them, right? Luke tells us 40 days. And at the end, he commissions them, go make disciples of all nations. And it says that they worshiped him, but some still doubted. So you've been with the resurrected Jesus. What are they doubting about? And that's where I think that ultimately, I think Christianity is true, because I ultimately believe that the public, publicly available evidence communicates that it's true. But salvation is not merely an intellectual endeavor, in that I can't just think of all the right things, and that gets me to where I need to be. There's something that's different.

[Andrew Schulz]

You're making my argument.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's not about thinking it, it's about doing it. And I.

[Wesley Huff]

It's not about doing it either.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Wesley Huff]

It's.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's.

[Wesley Huff]

It's about you being changed by the spirit to not just feel, think, or do the right things, but to actually be. So when Jesus says to Nicodemus, so.

[Andrew Schulz]

What defines change by the Spirit?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So here's the thing. When Nicodemus, who's. Who's John?

[Andrew Schulz]

We're about to get there. We're about to get the world that.

[Wesley Huff]

He gave his only son, right? John 3:16, the most famous verse. Then Jesus says that you need to be born again. There's a play on words there in the Greek, which means both born again and born from above. Yeah, it's the same term, Greek. And Nicodemus takes it as I need to be born again. He's like, well, how can I do that? Back of my mom. It doesn't work like that. And so. But there's something that goes beyond the, like, carnal in the life of the believer. That's what being born again means, is that there's a. Not an awakening in an Eastern way, but an understanding of the fact that Christ has reached into your life and he's revealed something that is beyond the simple facts.

[Andrew Schulz]

Why? I guess my concern is God is all knowing, all powerful. If you feel that change or transition.

[Wesley Huff]

In you, you're feeling a transition, Is that what's going on? Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, no.

[Wesley Huff]

Like every woman who makes yourself men.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes. But you don't think God is aware that that's him?

[Wesley Huff]

What do you mean?

[Andrew Schulz]

Like you think that that person on the island or the random person that grows up in Ohio or New York or Japan or anywhere that realizes that I'm going to live a better life and I'm going to be a better person and I'm going to do all these things which now we know through scripture says will give you eternal salvation. And the one thing he doesn't say is, I know that Christ is reaching in me to do it. He feels like something is reaching in him to do it. Maybe he chalks it up to evolution, maybe he chalks it up to his God. His God, whatever it is. But you don't think God, the one God is smart enough to go, I know he's talking to you, think he needs up to say him by the one specific name? And then God goes, well, he said the name. Okay. To me it seems belittling to God to assume that he's not capable of understanding all the languages that we speak to the highest power in.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So I don't disagree with you. And I think that's where God, like what I said before, is not going to judge us on what we do. Don't know he's going to judge us on what we do know. That doesn't mean that we're innocent. At the exact same time, I think there, the spirit of God is constantly speaking to us and convicting us. We call it a conscience. Right. So like there's an aspect of God's means to. Of grace that is just general to everybody in that we understand that murder is wrong and that grief, arguably everybody throughout history, barring a few wackadoos.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yep.

[Wesley Huff]

Believes that. And that is the image of God that we are created in. Screaming out, this is.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes. Same page.

[Mark Yagnon]

So I'm curious. Even in the book of James, the Epistle of Straw, as Luther would call it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. By some pious Jewish.

[Mark Yagnon]

Yeah. Perhaps that in this book God says, without works, faith is dead.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

Faith without works is dead, rather.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Mark Yagnon]

So how do you reconcile that with this idea?

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah. So you're not saved for your works, but you're saved. No, sorry. You're not saved by your works, but you're saved for Your works. So that's the fruit in the cursing of the fig tree. It's like, if I see a friend and he's claimed to be a Christian, but his entire life is reflecting the Christian complete opposite. I would say to him, listen, I don't know what's between you and God.

[Andrew Schulz]

I.

[Wesley Huff]

That's not my place. However, I have no evidence to see that the things that you actually confess have an actual, like, outpouring in that. And I think that that should worry you. I want to grab you by your baptism and I want to say, like, I'm going to hold you to the standard that you yourself, you. You yourself are claiming. And so.

[Andrew Schulz]

So what's the invert? Fruit?

[Wesley Huff]

The fruit is that which Jesus says, you will know my followers by their fruit. And that's why it's problematic when we see Christians doing things that are unchristian. Right. That's why people point out things like the Crusades or the Inquisitions. I think these are legitimate things that we can point to and say, you know, if you pour out the substance. Here, let me give you an illustration. So the methodology of form and substance. I said it's slow. So you don't think you very much. Methodology of form and substance had this idea that this is Black Rifle. Oh, sweet. We don't have this in Canada, you know, we don't have this.

[Andrew Schulz]

Of course not.

[Wesley Huff]

Every time I come, it's American, baby.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's freedom, man.

[Wesley Huff]

We don't have. We don't have that up north.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, we know.

[Wesley Huff]

So Black Rifle Energy. Okay. I come in the room, I say, andrew, can I drink this? And you say, yeah. I say, what is it? You say, Black Rifle Energy. I crack it open, I take a sip. It's gasoline.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Okay. It is Black Rifle Energy. Energy drink in form and that it claims to be, but not in substance, and that the actual contents are not what the can is describing. So when we look at the contents, when we look at the. What Christianity actually dictates, and we see things like Jesus saying, love those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you, turn the other cheek. And then you look at something like conversion by the sword, we can say, based on the actual contents of what Christianity and the Bible claims to be, that that is it in form but not in substance. And that person either is in a lot of trouble and that they're claiming to be something they aren't, or they really need to figure out what's what and that they're. They're going down a dangerous road.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yep.

[Wesley Huff]

And so I forgot the original intention of this illustration.

[Mark Yagnon]

Faith and works.

[Andrew Schulz]

Faith and works.

[Wesley Huff]

So, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

So you explain one version, then what's the inverse of that? What are the person that don't claim to be Christians, yet everything in the their works shows that they are.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure. I would say all substance is Christian.

[Akash Singh]

But the form is not.

[Wesley Huff]

Right. So I would say that when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. All the good works, if they're not done in the love of God, that is actually a commandment that someone who doesn't believe cannot fulfill.

[Andrew Schulz]

My wife. Say it again. Yeah, say it again.

[Akash Singh]

Crazy dude.

[Andrew Schulz]

Say it again.

[Wesley Huff]

So I, I get asked sometimes, like, is, is there, is there something that a Christian can do that an atheist can't?

[Andrew Schulz]

Morally, there's something a Christian can do that atheist can't.

[Wesley Huff]

Morally, no. And I would say yes. And it's love God. The atheist doesn't want to. He's not going to do it, and he can't do it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And that is when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? That's the, the thing he points to.

[Andrew Schulz]

See, I see. See, this is where like, I think that we're not giving God enough credit because I think God is looking at the atheist who lives a quote unquote Christian life. And the atheist goes, I don't believe in God. And I think God's up there. Like, gotcha.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, so. Because.

[Andrew Schulz]

But that's. Right, but that's how high I view God.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, I feel like God is so powerful, so intelligent that he's aware of our little intellectualizing of who he is and how we behave.

[Akash Singh]

I agree.

[Andrew Schulz]

And he's like, it's like when your kid first starts learning stuff in school and they're like 11, they start trying to tell you what the stars are. And you're like, yeah, yeah, sure, it's exactly what they are. And that's exactly how history is. And you just got adorable.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

You know what I mean? Like, so that's what I assume God is doing. And that's how I. I guess that's how I solve the problem for the person on the island or the good person, person that was never given Christianity or the person that was given like this horrible, bastardized version of it. They were molested by some priests and they're gonna feel that disconnect to this beautiful source because of that horrible individual. And now they don't get eternal salvation because of what this horrible person did, like, yet the rest of their life, they're being good and they're being pure and they're being true. You know, like, despite them saying they don't. I think God is looking at that like, listen, I know your heart and you're doing the right thing. And I think God is looking at those people who say they believe in God, but they're doing these horrible acts and they'll be like, you're not going to trick me. I'm not. Because you're acting like I'm stupid.

[Wesley Huff]

Right, right.

[Andrew Schulz]

I feel like that's insulting a guy.

[Wesley Huff]

There's layers to this, I think. You know, Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it. And I think there's an aspect of. Should I say it's lower?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes. The heart is deceitful above all things that know it.

[Wesley Huff]

Who can know it, who can know it. So the idea is that even our good things are going to be done with a motivation apart from from actually understanding who God is and what our relationship to him is properly. They're going to be. It's the people who are feeding homeless people and making YouTube videos about it.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think that's profound. I think that's like. I think that's a great way, if you were someone who maybe wasn't religious of understanding, like, our evolutionary biology and why we're inclined to do certain things. And. Yeah, I think that's a really profound way of understanding human.

[Wesley Huff]

In the end, there's still a selfishness to which is.

[Andrew Schulz]

Which is. Yeah, that. That's what the evolution.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

What would you call them? The evolutionary list? What would evolution. Yeah, that's what the evolutionists would say.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah. And, and, and they could be consistent in that way. However, the. The survival of the fittest doesn't actually give you a grounding standard for being moral in the sense.

[Andrew Schulz]

I agree that.

[Wesley Huff]

So my friend Glenn Scrivener, who wrote a great book called the Air We Breathe.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

He describes it in this way. I mean, he's British, so he talks about trousers. But when we say the atheists, when we ask them, where do you get your morality from? Often the response I get is the people think I'm accusing them of not being moral. I'm not doing that. Right. I think atheists can be moral because I think they're created in the image of God and that's like outpouring from them. But when I say, where do you get your morality from? Glenn says, it's like asking Mark where Do you get your trousers from? And Mark going, I'm wearing trousers. You're like, no, no. Where do you get it from? Like, how dare you tell me I'm not wearing trousers. Yeah, it's like, no, that's not the question I'm asking. I'm asking the origin of the morality to actually ground doing something that is good. I fully believe that you can do good things. I'm just asking where is the objective idea that that actually stems from? Because. Because evolution doesn't get you there.

[Andrew Schulz]

I would say that. I would say evolution gets you part of the way. What I would say is that your evolutionary inclination to be moral only scratches the surface of the euphoria you can experience when you lean into the will of God or being a good person. In other words, just not killing doesn't make me feel good. I've not killed my whole life. Helping my neighbor for no other reason than to just help him. And in the moment, like, feels annoying. I'm like, why am I going to go do this? Immediately afterwards, I'm like, man, I'm really glad that I did that. I felt connected to that person. They felt really grateful. And like, wow. I feel really. That act of altruism made me feel really good.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And this is what I would say would be walking closer to God. And I think Christianity and other. Other religions give this really compelling argument for. Hey, hey. Yes. You are doing these things. Atheists, you're already doing these good things. You could even lean further into that and feel the fruit of that connectivity. I'm just saying I think there are people who have realized this sometimes in spite of religion and sometimes without religion, and they've continued to lean into it. And I think God is smart enough to realize that they're getting to the same place. And that might be what Hinduism is seeing. That's. Yeah, that might be. Now, I'm not trying to make an argument for it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, I get you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Obviously, you know what side I'm on. But. But I. I get. But. But I guess there is this objective beauty to it and there is so much to glean from it.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

I just think that there is a potential. I don't want to say this, but, like, belittling of God's ability to recognize his greatness within people.

[Akash Singh]

I tend to agree.

[Mark Yagnon]

But like, even that idea of, like, you'll know my followers by their fruits. It's like if you see a Hindu or like a Sikh that's feeding people at their temple or a Muslim that's living like a Very pious life. Perhaps they're living a Christian life. Is it possible that that is the fruit that you can know them by?

[Wesley Huff]

A Christless Christian life. Life isn't a Christian life.

[Andrew Schulz]

So how do you know he's not in there? It's. It's written on your heart.

[Wesley Huff]

Sure. But if he's confessing Sikhism, the tenants of Sikhism.

[Akash Singh]

Confessing.

[Andrew Schulz]

God's going.

[Akash Singh]

Confessing.

[Andrew Schulz]

God's going. God's going. I listen. You could call it that. You're.

[Wesley Huff]

So here's. Here's the thing. All religions.

[Akash Singh]

I'm hating Christianity more and more.

[Andrew Schulz]

You making me.

[Akash Singh]

You moving me from Christ.

[Wesley Huff]

That's okay than I was an hour.

[Akash Singh]

And a half ago.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'll pray for you.

[Wesley Huff]

I'll pray for you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Now.

[Wesley Huff]

We're cooking, though, that belated living thing that Christians say, right?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Wesley Huff]

Thoughts and prayers.

[Andrew Schulz]

Bless your heart.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, all religions at their core are saying counter things.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Like I said before, like, they can't be all true. It's the equivalent of. If we say, like their altar is the equivalent of the me saying, I went to the library and I read all the books and I came to the conclusion that all the books, despite their differences, are really saying the same thing. They all have words, grammar, syntax, letters, numbers. You know, everything from one fish, two fish, redfish, blue fish, to mine co is the same thing.

[Andrew Schulz]

Whoa. Right.

[Wesley Huff]

You could conclude one of two things.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

I didn't read all the books, or I read the books so poorly that I'm not giving justice to what the conflict content of the books is.

[Andrew Schulz]

I didn't read all the books or I read them so poor that I'm like, yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

And I would say the same goes for worldview perspectives. If we say that all of them are saying the same thing or getting to the same result, we either are not studying the religions themselves and what they actually say, or we're not doing justice to the fact that they say mutually exclusive things.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think that's 100% true right now with us and I. And I think, unfortunately in this argument. And I don't want to speak for Mark or Akash because you guys are.

[Wesley Huff]

Go ahead, speak for Mark.

[Andrew Schulz]

You guys are far more aware of what your religions say and dictate, whereas I think Alex and I were a little bit removed. I was more aware more than I am, you know, more about Hinduism than I am.

[Wesley Huff]

He's got back from India.

[Andrew Schulz]

Exactly.

[Wesley Huff]

He knows it all started a war, if anybody's aware.

[Andrew Schulz]

But like Alex And I don't know exactly what the scripture is saying. So it's very easy for us to ascribe like the most open minded terms for us. Cause we're like, I want to get some heaven. You know, God knows my heart. So I understand what we're doing is incredible. You could frame it in that way, but remove us. And whether we go to heaven or not and we can put it on other people that we don't even know that we think might be good people. We're hoping there is some salvation for them if that heaven does exist. I don't know what the point that we were trying to make here was though.

[Akash Singh]

Gandhi was right.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, no. But it is tricky because you are so aware of exactly what the scripture and the religion is saying, the requirements, comments are. And we're here going, yeah, but isn't it kind of like this? And you're like no, that's not what it says. We're hoping that there's a little extra room. And you're like listen, there's a way, you're welcome, you're invited, just come in the door. But these are the rules to be in there. So it is kind of like yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

I wouldn't say that it's rules but I, I do get yours. I understand, like stop putting words in my mouth.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, this is so interesting.

[Wesley Huff]

It's like, you know, I get you and I think, I think it is.

[Andrew Schulz]

Possible if you nod and agree to me saying rules, there's going to be a video of. So I understand the, your understanding people make response videos. Yeah. But you, I, so, so like I am delicate with that but like I'm just throwing out the words that like fit my narrow minded version.

[Wesley Huff]

It's very narrow minded.

[Andrew Schulz]

Very, so narrow. So narrow though. I accept everybody.

[Wesley Huff]

No, no, I, I, I get what you're saying and I think like once again I'm not saying that people of all worldview perspectives cannot do good things, cannot be good people. Y cannot actually articulate what would be like, even if it's superficial fruit. I think that's great. Good. And I would, I would implore everybody, right. Of whatever atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, even the Scientologists, even the Scientologists to do good things. Right. Like I want people to do that because I think it's just better for humanity.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Wesley Huff]

Ultimately though, I want everybody to confess Jesus Christ as Lord. But on a superficial level, I think just for the sake of human flourishing, for what is good for society, Society, I want to Implore people to do good things. And I think that the foundation for that is actually a Judeo Christian one that comes from the scripture. Because I believe that everybody's created in the image of God and everybody is intrinsically worth in their value. Nobody's worth more than anybody else.

[Andrew Schulz]

Agreed. Agreed to that. Now, I know you have to get.

[Wesley Huff]

On a flight to go back to me.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, I want you to be here for like, two more hours and, like, talk. But you. You have to. To be a good parent. That's the thing you're being.

[Wesley Huff]

My son has a soccer game that I got to get to.

[Andrew Schulz]

I love this. I think this is great. Okay, so we let you get out of here. Last question, and then you go. And then we should order him in car right now, just so it's waiting downstairs.

[Wesley Huff]

Jesus, heard of him.

[Andrew Schulz]

Father, Son, Holy Ghost.

[Wesley Huff]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

He is God.

[Wesley Huff]

Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think that a lot of time there are people going, okay, isn't he the Son of God? He is the Son of God. He gave God. Gave his one and only true son, but, like, he also gave himself. So why is the language. Why is the language his son? Why is he giving us his Son? And why does that discrepancy kind of exist? And at what point in time in, like, Christian historical record are they all synergized?

[Wesley Huff]

Summarize 2000 years of Trinitarian theology before the uber comp. Okay. No, it's a good question, because I think what you see in the biblical New Testament and the early Christians are resting, wrestling through this, because we have the benefit of standing 2,000 years down the road, and they've hammered out the language we use today.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[Wesley Huff]

So they're wrestling through this. The Father is called Yahweh God. The Spirit is called Yahweh God, and Jesus is called Yahweh God. There's only one Yahweh. How do we figure this out? So what they do is eventually they come up with this language of being and person. Being describes what you are. Person describes who you are. This chair has being. Right. It's what philosophers called ontological status. Right. But it doesn't have personhood. I didn't ask its permission to sit on it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right.

[Wesley Huff]

But it does exist. And so being is what you are. So God is Yahweh. And we see this in the sense that Jesus tells his disciples to go baptize in the name Onomon Greek. It's a singular. And then he says of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So he says the singular name. But then he describes Three persons. And so this is the question the early church is wrestling through when they say, okay, Jesus is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds and the seat of God. It's an acronym, hands. The Spirit is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds and the seat of God. And the Father is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds and the seat of God. There's only one God. How do we understand this? Now the ancient Jews actually already had a concept of this in that they weren't unitarian fully. They understood that God is complex within his unity and that God can rule and reign in heaven. And yet the Ark of the covenant could still have God's presence. And we even see examples when before Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham is met by three individuals. Two that are identified as angels and one that is identified as Yahweh God. The angels go off to Sodom and Gomorrah to find Lot and his family. Abraham dialogues with Yahweh. Eventually Abraham leaves. And then in chapter 19, Genesis 19, it has this really interesting passage where it says that Yahweh on earth reigns fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven. Now you only have one Yahweh. So what's going on there? Well, we would say within like a Christian framework, this is the pre incarnate Christ. Okay, he is not, you know, in fleshed in who Jesus is, but this is the complex unity. And the Jews understand this. And even early on in rabbinical Judaism, there's a concept of the Shuk China glory, which is the presence above the ark, that God is willing and reigning in heaven. And yet there's also this idea that kind of gets fleshed out in cabalism of the Shavrot, which are like the presence and spirit of God all throughout the earth. So in that sense, ancient Judaism, sometimes it's called the two powers in heaven. I don't love that kind of articulation. But in academia that's what it's called. That God is ruling and reigning in heaven and still has a presence on earth, that God is complex within his unity. Only, only one God. But there's something else going on there that maybe we don't fully understand, but then is teased out in its fullness in the New Testament with the Son, which is a title of familiarity. It's not like a birth son, but the Father and the Son. Those are kinship terms, but they have existed, like I said before, in a set of living, loving relationships. It has always been three. And they've existed eternally finally as three. The spirit is teased out a little bit. In the Old Testament you have these kind of like these Easter eggs of Jesus throughout the burning bush, right? It says that the, the messenger of God spoke from the bush. And so you have these sort of things. The early Christians are wrestling through these things and coming up with some good ideas, some bad ideas in order to formulate the language of this. Eventually they come up with this idea. One being in three persons being describes what you are persons describe who you are.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it, got it. So the. Yeah, yeah. So the. Your form 1, 3, 3 forms. That was really good. All right. Get back to Canada, dude. Thank you so much for taking the time, Wes. Appreciate you.

[Wesley Huff]

You guys are great.

[Andrew Schulz]

You're awesome.

[Wesley Huff]

So glad it worked out.

[Akash Singh]

I'll see you in hell, buddy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Peace. I love it. Great, man.