Joe addresses some of the misconceptions spread about the cannon of Scripture by people like Wes Huff and Dr. John Meade. With Wes’s rise to popularity from his debate with Billy Carson and appearance on Joe Rogan, we thought it’d be good to correct some of his errors.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe, Heschmeyer, and I want to belatedly talk about some of the arguments that were made by Wes Huff, both because I think he’s worth responding to in his own right and because I think the errors that he’s spreading are the kind of errors about the Bible that many Christians believe. Now, if you’re not familiar with who Wes Huff is, he got extremely famous in the world of Christian apologetics a couple months ago when in short succession he first debated Billy Carson on Christianity. That debate has millions of views and every single person I’ve seen review it said that Wes absolutely trounced Billy Carson’s crazy claims about the Bible. But then if that wasn’t big enough, shortly thereafter, Joe Rogan invites Wess on and they had what was honestly an amazing interview. Now, I rarely listen to the super long form stuff.
I’ve got three small kids and I rarely have three hours I’m looking to kill, but I think I listen to every word of that three hour and 15 minute long episode. Now, Wes was so clearly better informed on the history of biblical manuscripts and the like than most of the people commenting on YouTube doing apologetics or going on Joe Rogan. So naturally there were moments where he makes a few mistakes and I know people caught some of those, but he also quickly owned them. So I came away and press both with his intelligence and his humility. The mistakes frankly weren’t even the surprising part of that. Everybody is going to get details wrong in what’s essentially a 200 minute long episode in which they’re responding to random questions on everything from the Bible to ancient Egyptian history. What was surprising was how effectively he could remember even arcane information. Now, all of that is a long way of saying that I think we Huff is a good faith smart Protestant thinker who’s worth taking seriously. But when he talks about Catholicism, he often makes these just rudimentary errors, things that I’m genuinely surprised someone of his intelligence and goodwill, the caliber of arguments are just much worse than I would expect. So for instance, here he is arguing for why Catholic Bibles are bigger. I’m just going to take a 45 second clip and highlight three major things that he manages to get wrong.
CLIP:
Protestants continued to call them the apocrypha derived from the Greek word meaning hidden marking. The historically held distinction between books that were canon in scripture and ones that were not. Nonetheless, traditions that the papacy held to as doctrine like that of purgatory, worship of the saints and prayer for the dead could be proof. Texted out of many of the Deutero canonical books and this was defended as scripture vigorously by Catholic apologists following Trent on a lot of these grounds, Luther, Calvin and many other Protestant reformers noted that none of these doctrines could be found within the canon of scripture and therefore Rome must include them to justify their own traditions.
Joe:
So it manages to get a lot wrong in a very short time here first and most obviously there is no Catholic doctrine that says we are to worship the saints. Quite the contrary, the Catholic Church condemns that as idolatry. Now I know many Protestants argue that asking the saints to pray for you is really the same as worshiping them, but I think that argument is both a untrue and b unserious for a scholar to make to say there’s a doctrine teaching X when the church you’re accusing of having that doctrine says X is evil and don’t do X. Is it factual error in the falsehood? Now, you might put it like this, I think many Protestants prefer their personal interpretation of scripture over the 2000 year interpretive tradition of Christianity. But if I said there is a doctrine in Protestantism teaching people to do that, that would be false and unfair.
Just because I think you might naturally lead to this place you don’t mean to go, doesn’t mean that you have a doctrine telling you to go to that place. Second, and we’re going to get into this in much greater depth, he speaks as if the Catholic church is adding books in the 16th century to respond to Protestantism. Now as we’re going to see this is entirely false. You have in the 15th century before Martin Luther is even conceived the Ecumenical Council of Florence, which is declaring that the books of the Bible have 73 books and this is agreed to by the Catholic Church, by the Orthodox Church, by the Coptic Church, and none of this is in response to Protestantism because Protestantism does not exist and much before that, as again we’re going to see the early Christians often held to this Bible as well.
But the third factual error is that he’s wrong about John Calvin’s Bible, which is something many Protestants don’t realize that even though John Calvin rejected six of the disputed books, as we’re going to see, there are seven books that are in Catholic Bibles that are not in Protestant bibles and John Calvin rejected six of those seven, but he accepted the seven, the book of Baruch, and in fact, he refers to it as scripture multiple times in his own writings. For instance, in one of the first theological treatises that he writes, it’s an argument against soul sleep. He quotes the prophet and it’s Baruch. So he’s quoting from the book and speaking of it as a prophetic book. Likewise, in his commentary on one Corinthians 10, he speaks of the prophet Baruch and again, quotes in that time from Baruch four. So it’s clear from actually repeated references that he thought of Baruch as an inspired book.
So citing to him as if he’s agreeing with the Protestant position is in fact incorrect. So that’s three basic factual errors in 45 seconds, whether you agree with the Catholic side or the Protestant side, either way we should recognize those as errors. And unlike in the Joe Rogan interview, this wasn’t off the cuff, this was a short planned episode on his own channel. So it’s not that he was just caught off guard, he wasn’t expecting someone to ask him about those things. He voluntarily brings all of that up himself and it’s not just Wes himself. So in addition to the video that I’m going to be critiquing, he also uploaded a longer version of what’s essentially the same argument being made by Dr. John Mead of Phoenix Seminary who has a lot of interesting work in this area. Now, I want to stress here it’s not just that West linked to the talk, he actually uploaded it.
It’s on his personal website even though it’s not him speaking and it’s someone that he presumably invited to speak because he was speaking at the 2024 Apologetics Canada Conference, which is the group that West Huff is associated with. And because the two of them are making very similar arguments and because Mead’s about three times more depth in terms of just length, I’m going to be addressing both the claims that Wes makes as he often kind of points in the direction of an argument. And then in many cases Mead makes a more thorough version. So I want to try to intermix both of those. I don’t want to ever put someone in the position of having to defend somebody else if it’s not something they believe in, but in this particular case, given that he’s uploaded it, this seems to be a fuller presentation of his own argument.
So I’m hoping that I’m treating him fairly here of saying, okay, you said this, but you seem to have meant this argument that you didn’t maybe make in its full depth. So hopefully I’m treating him fairly and please, if you’re watching this Wess, if I’ve done anything short of treating your argument fairly, please let me know that as I see it, there are really two major arguments, maybe two and a half, and I’ll explain what I mean by two and a half when we get there. And the arguments for the Protestant Bible. So we should have seven fewer books than Catholics do. We should only have the 66 books that Protestants have. There are basically two arguments that I see Wes and Dr. Mead making. The first is that we should follow the Protestant Old Testament because it matches the ancient Jewish Bible and particularly this idea that it matches the Bible that was in use at the time of Christ.
Second, we should follow the Protestant Old Testament because this is the Old Testament used by most of the earliest Christians. So those are the two arguments. Before I get to what those arguments get wrong, which is going to be most of this video, I want to acknowledge at least a few moments what do they get right? And the first thing that I see them getting right is just West does a good job of laying out the basic terms of the debate. It’s very easy in videos like this to assume Catholics and Protestants are aware of what the differences are in our Bibles, and I know intellectually that’s obviously not the case. So here’s I think a good explanation. Very simply, Wes gives on Catholic Bibles, Protestant Bibles, Jewish Bibles.
CLIP:
So just off the bat, let me outline that. If you open up a Protestant Bible, you are going to find 39 books in your Old Testament. If you open up a Catholic Bible, you’re going to see 46 Roman Catholics then have seven more books as well as some additions to books like Daniel and Esther. It also might be useful to mention that the Hebrew Bible, that is the Bible that modern Jews read today has the same books as the Protestant Bible, but they group them in a different order.
Joe:
So I mean, I just think that’s an important thing to get straight in the beginning, and Wes is exactly right, the Jewish Old Testament, even though the numbering is different and the order is different agrees with the Protestant Old Testament, I think this is important to remember when we’re talking about the nature of the debate because we can sometimes exaggerate our differences and Catholics and Protestants agree on a lot here. All 66 books that are in the Protestant Bible are also in the Bibles that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have. We just have more books. Now we have two books that are in both Bibles, but we have a longer version that’s Daniel and Esther, but then there are seven entire books that are in Catholic Bibles and in Orthodox Bibles that you won’t find in a Protestant Bible. That’s going to be Judith Tobet first and second Maccabees, Baruch Wisdom in ak.
So I mentioned this for a few reasons. One, because we don’t want to exaggerate the differences, and two, if you are someone arguing, we should hold to the Protestant Testament because this is what the early Christians used. It should be important that you actually make sure they use exactly your canon, your list of books, because after all, when the entire debate’s really only about seven books and two partial books saying, well, they agreed with me on five of them isn’t really the same as them agreeing with you. If I tried to prove that the four gospels are Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, and I found a guy who said, it’s Matthew, mark, Luke, and Sam, yeah, the one that we’re disagreeing on matters because I can’t really rely on them for support me saying that is going to make sense when we get into this.
When you see Wes Huff and Dr. John Mead citing to people who allegedly support the Protestant Bible, and then when you go and read them, it turns out they don’t. It’s much more of a Matthew, mark, Luke, and Sam where it’s, well, sure they agree on a few things, but they disagree on a few things too. So those are the terms of the debate. Another area that is helpful that I want to give credit to Wes Huff for laying out is acknowledging that even when there were disputes over the juro cannon, these seven disputed books, and there were disputes, make no mistake, there were Christians who didn’t think all of these books should be in the Bible. All seven of these have this kind of status of being spoken against book. That’s just what that means, like a spoken against book, a disputed book. And so it’s completely fair for Protestants to point that out.
We don’t want to say, oh no, these were undisputed. They weren’t. They were disputed. They were Christians on both sides of the question. For every one of these books, what does a good job of pointing out, and I wish more Protestants pointed out was that even when that’s the case, the people who argued against the books didn’t make the modern Protestant argument that they should be out of the Bible entirely. They still treated them as important in having this role that was edifying, that they were church books, that they were useful in building you up in the faith, et cetera. So they didn’t just reject them entirely as many modern Protestants do. So if you were to open up a modern Protestant Bible, you won’t find those books at all. If you were to open up, say, an original King James Bible from the 17th century, you would find those books in there just in a separate section. That’s an important shift that I think many Protestants aren’t aware of. Their Bible is extremely new in the grand scheme of Christianity.
CLIP:
It’s clear that there have been Christians since its earliest inception who did consider a lot of what would eventually be labeled the Deutero canonical books as scripture.
Joe:
That’s going to be another important point that Wes makes that we’re going to want to come back to. If it’s really true, as West is going to claim that the Old Testament was totally set in the time of Jesus and everybody just knew which books were and weren’t in the Bible, it’s going to be hard to square that with the fact that as he just said, the early Christians didn’t have a clear consensus, and from the very beginning we find Christians believing that these deutero canonical books, these disputed books belong in the Bible. Not every Christian to be sure, but that position is certainly out there and I think I’m going to make a pretty strong case for it being the majority view. That’s going to be hard to spare with the idea that while everybody just knew what the books were of the Old Testament during Jesus’s time, the last point I want to highlight here is that Wes is absolutely right with one of the broader points that he’s making, which is that both Protestants and Catholics tend to have a sort of oversimplified narrative that in many ways the whole process of how we got the Bible, whether you’re a Catholic or a Protestant, whether you’re Orthodox, whatever, whether you’re Jewish for that matter, the story of how you get the Bible with exactly the books that you have is more complicated than we usually tell, and even in this video, I will probably have to oversimplify at times just because the amount of nuance and complication can be really in depth at times.
So on all of that, I want to say, yeah, I agree with a lot of that framework, but I should also address some areas that we disagree and that includes areas where I know Wes is trying to be even handed, like right here.
CLIP:
The idea that Protestants somehow removed, agreed upon books out of the Bible during the Reformation is completely inaccurate. In a similar vein though, the idea that Roman Catholics wholesale just added these books as a response to the reformers is also a little bit too simplistic.
Joe:
Again, I appreciate that Wes is trying to be even-handed with this and saying, oh, both sides make some mistake, but what he’s highlighting as the strongman, he’s getting both of these things wrong. So first of all, there really were Bibles, right? If you were to take a time machine back before the Reformation, or if you were to go to a library that has ancient books, you’ll find old bibles from before the Protestant reformation. You’ll also find a lot of ancient church documents and ancient Christian writings talking about the books of the Bible. We can say, as a matter of fact, that the Latin Vulgate had 73 books in it. Seven of those are removed to create the 66 book Protestant Bible. That’s not totally inaccurate, that is accurate, and he says, well, it’s not as if there were 73 agreed upon books. Well, there were in fact, at the Ecumenical Council of Florence, the 73 book Canon is described as the inspired books.
We’ll get into that in a little more depth later on in this episode, and this is agreed to by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the Coptic Church. This is well before the reformation, before Martin Luther is born. So it is not inaccurate to say there was a consensus. Now granted, we should caveat that by saying there were dissenters from that consensus. There were people who argued that consensus was wrong, but at the level of churches, there clearly was a consensus on a 73 book Canon, and even in ones where maybe it’s a little more amorphous in the East, it was still clearly much larger than the Protestant canon. If anything, it was more than 73 books. The reformers absolutely reduced the number of books recognized as part of the Bible. That is objectively true. Whether you think that’s good or bad to deny that that happened is just denying a historical fact.
On the flip side, when he says, well, we can’t just say Catholics just added them wholesale in response to the reformation, they’d be a little too simplistic. Now, it wouldn’t be a little too simplistic. They’d be flatly untrue. We can see these books in Catholic Bibles now, unless your argument is that Catholics in the 16th century perfected time travel and they went back and they fixed all the Bibles in the Middle ages to match the Council of Trent, well then you have to just acknowledge no, even though he’s trying to be even handed here, neither of the things Wes has said here are actually true. Another area where he tries to find some common ground, and I admire this, but he does it in a way that isn’t true, is when he claims that the 66 books of the Protestant Bible were undisputed from very early on.
CLIP:
Let me pause, because there was very little doubt extremely early on concerning the 66 books agreed upon by modern Protestants and Catholics. Those were always considered scripture. The discussion then is about the other books,
Joe:
Look, I don’t want to nitpick, but this just is not true. I mean, many of the very same people that Wes Huff and Dr. John me are going to be citing to if you actually read which books they have in their Bible. While it’s true, they don’t always have the 73 book Catholic Bible, they also don’t have the 66 book Protestant Bible. They’ll have books that Protestants don’t have, but they’ll also reject books that Protestants do have books like Esther. So I’m going to give you just a helpful tool if you’re doing any research in this and you start reading early Christian lists on which books are in the Bible, there’s a few to be looking for. You should look to see what a particular author has to say about Esther, about Lamentations and about Baruch. Remember, Protestants today accept Esther and Lamentations and reject Baruch, but they’ll support this by citing to people who reject Esther and accept Baruch, and you say, well, that doesn’t matter even if you have the same number, you’ve got different books.
This is Matthew, mark, Luke, and Sam instead of Matthew, mark, Luke, and John. It doesn’t work. Now in talking about that, I’ve only looked at the disputed books in the Old Testament. There were also disputed books in the New Testament. This was not nearly as common. It’s true, but pretty famously, Martin Luther in his original version of the German New Testament highlights four books that he rejects. So you can’t just point to consensus to prove the canon of the old or the New Testament if you’re arguing from a Protestant consensus, it’s more complicated than that. Anyway, I just wanted to get a few of those kind of details out of the way, and now I want to dive into the heart of the argument. The first argument he makes is these books were not in the Bible in Jesus’ day. So there are really two arguments that go into this One, this idea, we should accept the Protestant Testament because it’s the Jewish one. Within that argument are two sub arguments if you want to call it that. Number one, that the Jewish people had a closed Bible. They had a clear list of which books were and were not considered scripture at the time of Jesus, and that this matched the Protestant Old Testament. Now West says very clearly that this is true of the ancient Jews. In the video I’m critiquing
CLIP:
The Jews in this ancient period likewise consider these writings as valuable, but they did not consider them as scriptural,
Joe:
So that’s his argument that these seven books were clearly rejected among the ancient Jews. Now, he doesn’t say how ancient he’s talking about, but in an interview he claims that this was true in Jesus’s own day, and that’s going to be pretty important if you just say Jews, after the time of Jesus rejected some of these books. Well, Jews after the time of Jesus rejected Jesus. So it doesn’t have a lot of rhetorical weight. You’re having to point back to the Old Testament messianic awaiting Jewish people, and so that’s what he claims.
CLIP:
I think we can say definitively that the Jews in Jesus’ day had the same canon of scripture that we have as our Old Testament.
Joe:
Then there’s a related argument to this, which is that okay, not only did the Jews have a very clear Old Testament, but that the early Christians, many in fact we’re going to see even most according to Wes Huff and Dr. John Mead use this as their Old Testament as, and Wes is going to say that it’s really good that they did this because in Romans three verse two it says, the Jews are entrusted the Oracles of God. So that’s the argument. This was the ancient Jewish Bible. They’re the ones given the biblical authority to figure out what is and isn’t in scripture, and the early Christ... Read more on Catholic.com