Wesley Huff is a young Protestant apologist who has recently had a lot of success. He has admirable qualities, and he does better than many other Protestant apologists do.
In this video, Jimmy Akin—in a friendly spirit of “iron sharpens iron” (Prov. 27:17)—take a look at both some of Wes’s strong points and his weak points, particularly when it comes to his knowledge of how the biblical canon was formed.
Transcript:
Coming Up
WES: Did the Protestants take books out of the Bible? Did the Roman Catholics put them in? Should there be 66 books in your Bible or 73? Let’s talk about that.
Let’s get to it!
Who Is Wes Huff?
Today I’m going to be interacting with some material from a young gentleman named Wesley Huff.
He lives in Toronto, Canada, he works with Apologetics Canada, and he’s currently working on a PhD in New Testament.
Recently, Wes came to prominence after he had a debate with an author named Billy Carson.
Carson has a bunch of unusual views, including the idea that Jesus was never crucified.
In the debate, Carson repeatedly cited something that he called “the Sinai Bible,” which he said predated the King James Bible and did not record Jesus being crucified.
I kept wondering, “What do you mean ‘the Sinai Bible’? That’s not standard terminology in biblical scholarship. Do you mean Codex Sinaiticus? Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century Greek manuscript, but citing it would make no sense, because the Gospels in Codex Sinaiticus record Jesus being crucified—just as the Gospels in other Bibles do.”
Wes was apparently wondering the same thing, because he said:
WES: You mind if I ask a clarifying question?
BILLY: Sure.
WES: When you say, “the Sinai Bible,” what are you referring to specifically?
BILLY: It’s the biblical text that was written. It made it into . . . you can actually look it up on Amazon. It’s a Bible called . . . I have a version at home . . . it’s called the Sinai Bible—from Mount Sinai. I am assuming that’s the mountain that they’re referencing there. But they put together their own version of the biblical text prior to the King James Version being put out.
WES: Sure. So when you refer to the Sinai Bible, would you be referring to Codex Sinaiticus like the codex that comes?
BILLY NODS.
WES: Okay. That’s why I was trying to get some clarification because . . . so you can actually go and see . . . Codex Sinaiticus is at the British Library. So you can go and see it. It’s on display, and the British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript.
So I work with manuscripts in my linguistic work. I’m an expert on early Christian scribal culture, and particularly in Greek and Coptic manuscripts. I actually have a facsimile, so I have a photocopy that was done by the British Library of Codex Sinaiticus, that I work with in my office. So I have it here.
And the only reason I ask for clarification is because I want to make sure that what I am addressing is actually what you mean and not addressing something else. Because the Codex Sinaiticus in particular, is just a Greek . . . it’s a fourth century Greek manuscript. It comes from approximately between 325 and 350 A.D., and its text of the Gospels reads almost identical to the modern Greek text that we develop translations from.
So my curiosity is just simply in kind of exploring when you say that it denies the Crucifixion or that the Crucifixion isn’t there, I mean . . . I can go on, right now, Codex Sinaiticus, and I can look up the end of say, Matthew 27, where it has Jesus being crucified, and that’s in Codex Sinaiticus . . . or John 19 or any of the other ones. So I think my confusion is that it doesn’t read any differently.
This was a really great moment in the debate. The Gospels in Codex Sinaiticus do include the crucifixion of Jesus—contrary to Carson’s claims—and the fact Wes just turned around and grabbed a copy of it was particularly good. “Oh, look! I’ve got it here!”
Observers of the debate rightly concluded that Wes just devastated Carson’s position, and Wes got a lot of attention as a result.
Now, I don’t happen to agree with Wes on everything—I’m a Catholic and he’s a Protestant—and some people suggested that I have a dialogue or debate with him, and I’d be happy to do either!
But I don’t know that either will be happening any time soon, because Wes has been flooded with requests.
As he said in a video titled “I’m Probably Not Going to Debate You”:
WES: Since the Billy Carson thing, I have received, and I kid you not, hundreds, hundreds of debate challenges from all over the map, Billy Carson followers, atheists, Muslims, agnostics, Mormons, even other Christians who think that I’m translating the Bible wrong or using a Bible translation they don’t like. Everyone from just regular people who think I’m wrong to other people in related fields with PhDs themselves. So let me just quickly say something here. I don’t consider myself a debater. I’m not looking to become a professional debater. Have I done formal debates in the past? Yes. Will I do them in the future? Probably. But I am not obligated to agree to every debate challenge that comes across my desk, especially right now amidst the craziness that’s currently taking place in my life.
And I totally get that! I get more debate invitations than I can deal with, myself.
Now, I’ve seen some of Wes’s other material, and originally I wasn’t going to do a video interacting with it.
It’s clear that—unlike many in the Protestant apologetics world—he’s trying to be fair and balanced. He’s also being friendly and trying to keep the temperature low—all of which is great, and I want to give him his props!
But people have forwarded me some clips in which Wes makes a few mistakes, and that isn’t surprising, because everybody makes mistakes—and Wes is still a young guy who has room to grow.
However, it became clear to me in watching these clips that Wes’s knowledge is rather more circumscribed than I first thought. So I thought I’d do a friendly video interacting with some of his material.
As it says in Proverbs 27:17,
As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another (Prov. 27:17).
So let’s get started.
Wes on the Joe Rogan Podcast
Undoubtedly, Wes’s most well-known appearance after the Billy Carson debate is his appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, in which this exchange occurred:
JOE: So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that’s in the Bible?
WES: So that one is fascinating. So this isn’t true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages.
JOE: Whoa.
WES: Yeah. So it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars—like I said, this isn’t true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls—but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word-for-word identical to the Masoretic text.
JOE:
Word-for-word.
WES: Word-for-word.
JOE: Wow.
WES: Yeah.
When I heard Wes say that, I was shocked, because the truth is that the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls is not word-for-word identical to the Masoretic Text version of Isaiah.
It’s very close, but it’s not word-for-word, and since the question Joe Rogan had just asked was “how similar” the Great Isaiah Scroll is to the later version, it’s simply false to say that it’s “word-for-word identical.”
A scholar ought to know that. It would be totally fair for Wes to say that it’s “almost identical,” but it’s not accurate to say “word-for-word identical.”
Now, we want to bear in mind certain factors, like what Gavin Ortlund pointed out:
GAVIN: Now, one thing we have to remember here is Wes was speaking not from a manuscript, but spontaneously and organically in a three-and-a-half-hour conversation, in a highly pressurized context. People who’ve not done that have no idea how challenging that is. He’s also speaking at a popular level, which requires necessary simplification. So I think we should give some grace to matters of precise wording for someone to clarify the exact details.
And I agree with all that, so we should understand this charitably.
However, as one becomes a scholar, one learns to include qualifiers—even when one is simplifying for a popular audience. And I think it’s fair to point out here that all Wes needed to do was include one additional word: “almost.” The Great Isaiah Scroll is almost word-for-word identical.
I’ve heard that Wes has walked back some of what he said in this regard, so that’s a good thing, and I know that he makes a point of including qualifiers on other occasions, as we’ll see.
Wes By Himself
Now let’s look at a video Wes did by himself called “Why Do Catholics and Protestants Have Different Books in Their Bibles?” And I invite you to note how—despite disagreements on this issue—Wes is trying to be fair and balanced, and he does a better job than many Protestant apologists do.
WES: 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. The history of the biblical canon is a long one and one that in some ways is more simple than you’d think, and in others far more complicated than you might imagine.
So Wes is trying to be fair here. He’s trying to recognize truth in both Catholic and Protestant claims regarding how we got the Bible—in contrast to many of the caricatures that we often find in both Protestant and Catholic apologetics, and I really appreciate that!
At the same time, I don’t think he’s achieved quite the right balance.
You’ll note that he said that the idea Protestants removed agreed upon books from the Bible is simply inaccurate, but then he says that the idea Catholics added these books in response to Protestantism is a little too simplistic.
That makes it sound like the charge against Protestants—that they removed agreed upon books—is flatly false. It’s just not true.
While the charge against Catholics—that they added books in response to the Reformation—is too simplistic, meaning it’s only partly false.
From a neutral, scholarly point of view, this is not an adequate way of characterizing the facts of history.
The truth is that—from the end of the 4th century forward—there was a broad consensus that the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament are Scripture. There was a series of councils in Rome and in North Africa that included them in their lists of what belongs in the canon. These councils summarized the consensus of opinion across the Christian territories where they were held, and that consensus remained throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, in the 1400s the Council of Florence reaffirmed those same books for the whole Church.
Now, none of these councils spoke infallibly, but if we’re talking about agreed-upon books, these books were broadly agreed upon as Scripture.
At the same time—because the matter had not yet been declared infallibly—there was a minority opinion that held that the deuterocanonical books were not canonical, and this minority opinion had some notable supporters, including some popes in the pre-Reformation period.
So—if we’re going to be objective and unbiased in our presentation of the evidence—we’d have to say that there was broad agreement that the deuterocanonicals are Scripture in this period but that there was also a minority position that disagreed.
It’s therefore not a balanced and accurate statement to represent this by saying that the claim that the Protestant Reformers removed agreed upon books is just false while the claim that Catholics added these books in response to the Reformation is merely simplistic.
The Protestant Reformers did remove books that the majority of Christians agreed to be canonical. Those books were in the Bibles that were in use prior to the Reformation. The early Protestant Reformers then moved these books to appendices with notes denying that they were canonical. And then later Protestants dropped the appendices and removed the books altogether.
And—while Catholics did infallibly declare these books to be Scripture following the Council of Trent in the 1500s, in response to the Protestant denial of them, this wasn’t “adding” them to Scripture. It was infallibly reasserting what had already been taught—for example at Florence—and they were then retained in Bibles, where they had been included in for centuries.
We can thus see how Wes is putting his thumb on the scale to favor the Protestant position in how he frames this issue.
Still, he is trying to be fair. For example, he says:
WES: It’s clear that there have been Christians since its earliest inception who did consider a lot of what would eventually be labeled the deuterocanonical books as Scripture.
So that’s good! However, Wes is not accurate in everything he says. For example, regarding Jews in Jesus’ day, he says:
WES: The Jews in this ancient period likewise consider these writings as valuable, but they did not consider them as scriptural.
Here Wes is himself engaging in an oversimplification. He’s speaking of “the Jews” as if they had a single position that universally rejected the deuterocanonicals as Scripture, and this is not true.
Wes appears to be making this claim based on outdated scholarship, but the truth is that the Jewish community did not have a single view of the canon of Scripture. Instead, different Jewish communities recognized different canons of Scripture, and some of these had fuzzy boundaries.
As I summarize in my book The Bible Is a Catholic Book, we can identify at least 5 different canonical traditions in first century Judaism:
- The Samaritan Tradition
- The Sadducee Tradition
- The Pharisee Tradition
- The Qumran Tradition
- And the Septuagint Tradition
We also have evidence for other, lesser-known traditions, but we’ll stick with these.
I won’t go through the details of what was in each tradition, but what happened was this:
- The Samaritans considered themselves Israelites rather than Jews, and so their tradition did not go on to influence mainstream Judaism.
- The Sadducees were too closely tied with the temple in Jerusalem to long survive its destruction, and so their tradition faded.
- The Qumran community was too fragile to long survive the war with the Romans, and so theirs also faded.
That left us with the Pharisee tradition—which was inherited by modern, rabbinic Judaism—and the Septuagint tradition—which was inherited by Christianity.
This is because 80 to 90 percent of the time—depending on how you count it—the New Testament quotes from the Septuagint when it quotes the Old Testament, and so it was natural for Christians to receive the books contained in the Septuagint, which includes the deuterocanonicals.
Meanwhile, the Pharisee canonical tradition was still in flux in the Christian age. There were certain books that were eventually included as Scripture—like Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Ezekiel—that some rabbis disputed. And there were other books that were eventually left out of the Jewish canon—like Sirach—that some rabbis considered Scripture. The Pharisee canon thus had fuzzy canonical boundaries, and it did not finish solidifying until the 3rd or 4th century—the same time that the Christian canon was solidifying.
This is something Gedaliah Alon discusses in his book The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age. It’s also discussed by Timothy Lim in his book The Formation of the Jewish Canon and by Lee McDonald in his two-volume set The Formation of the Biblical Canon.
In any event, as more recent scholarship has shown, there simply was no uniform opinion among Jews in the first century about what books were and were not Scripture.
WES: Jerome and Rufinus stood on the other side of Augustine and Innocent, though, promoting the narrower Jewish cannon and placing the deuterocanonical books in a secondary list of books that were useful, but not on the grounds of standing for faith, doctrine, and practice of the Church.
Protestant apologists often cite Jerome as an opponent of the deuterocanonical books—as Wes does here—but the reality is more complex.
While in some places Jerome denies the canonicity of certain deuterocanonical books, he also makes statements that are supportive of others.
For example, in his prologue to the deuterocanonical book of Judith, he tells his patrons that:
Because this book is found by the Nicene Council [of A.D. 325] to have been counted among the number of the sacred scriptures, I have acquiesced to your request—or should I say demand! (Prologue to Judith).
to translate it. So it appears that he deferred to what he understood the Council of Nicaea to say on the deuterocanonical book of Judith.
Similarly, Jerome defended the deuterocanonical portions of the book of Daniel on the basis of the Church’s authority. He wrote:
What sin have I committed in following the judgment of the churches? (Lives of Illustrious Men 59).
In the same place, he stated that what he said concerning Daniel in his prologues was what non-Christian Jews said but that it was not his own view. This may indicate that Jerome changed his mind or that his reporting of Jewish views doesn’t indicate his own opinion.
But—one way or another—it reveals that the situation with Jerome is more complex than Wes and other Protestant apologists make out.
Of course, Wes is entitled to his own opinion!
WES: I—as a Protestant—side with the Reformers, but not out of some blind allegiance. I believe the apocryphal books to be useful, but thoroughly uninspired.
And I respect Wes’s opinion, as I hope he would respect mine.
I also appreciate his efforts to be fair in his presentation of the facts, even if he does not always succeed in striking the exact right balance.
Now, after I initially watched that video by him, I didn’t plan on doing a response to his material. But upon watching some videos that other people sent me, I became more concerned.
Wes on Stand to Reason
For example, on the Stand to Reason YouTube channel, there is a clip in which Wes is discussing the number of books in the Jewish canon, and he says this:
WES: We have the exact same number. So you’ll see this number thrown around in ancient writings like Philo or Josephus, some of those early Jews who you may or may not recognize their names, and they throw either the number 22 or 23 out.
Now, this is a very small thing, and it may just be a slip of the tongue, but the number of books that is cited by ancient Jewish sources isn’t 22 or 23 but 22 or 24.
Also, Philo doesn’t use that number. In fact, there is a debate about what canon Philo honored, though Josephus does say 22 books.
These are just minor errors on Wes’s part, but they’re the beginning of what I noted as a rising number of errors in this area.
WES: And in fact, any Hebrew publication is translated by the same document that any Christian publication, it’s called the Hebraica Biblia Stratagensia. And so we’re dealing with the same texts.
This is another minor error that could be a slip of the tongue, but as you can see from the book Wes is holding in his hand, the name of the book is not Hebraica Biblia Stratagensia but Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
I can understand how an English-speaker might invert Biblia Hebraica into Hebraica Biblia, but I would not expect a scholar to convert Stuttgartensia—meaning of the city of Stuttgart, Germany—into Stratagencia. That’s not the kind of mistake I would expect a scholar to make—especially for a work that is as commonly used as this one.
In any event, a mounting number of errors.
Also, Wes seems to be exaggerating the role of this work. He appears to say that both Jews and Christians are using this work as the base text for their translations of the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament, but that would be an oversimplification.
The Jewish Publication Society does offer a straight translation of the BHS, but Christian publishers also use other texts, such as the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Biblia Hebraica Quinta, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the targumim, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, Theodotion, Symmachus, Aquila, and others. So the situation is more complex than what he says.
WES: It’s a key thing to understand that the Jews throughout history never thought that those other documents were scripture unanimously.
Notice how Wes gets in the qualifying word “unanimously” in here, so he does make an effort to include scholarly qualifiers.
Except, as we’ve seen, Jews did not unanimously accept any single canonical tradition prior to the time of Christ.
The only books we can say with confidence that they accepted unanimously are the five books of Moses. Other books are matters of debate, and the modern Jewish canon that we have did not finish crystalizing until the same time period that the Christian canon was crystalizing.
WES: Now, an interesting thing with some of these other writings, in fact I think it’s all of the other writings, is that they only exist in Greek. There are no Hebrew copies of say, Maccabees or Tobit. Those documents have their origin in Greek.
Here what Wes says is simply inaccurate. It is not true that all of the deuterocanonicals originated in Greek.
Sirach, Baruch, and 1 Maccabees were written in Hebrew. We have part of the Hebrew of Sirach, and Origin and Jerome note that 1 Maccabees was originally in Hebrew.
Judith and Tobit were both written either in Hebrew or Aramaic. Fragments of Tobit in both languages survive, and Jerome used an Aramaic version of Tobit when translating it for the Vulgate.
The only two books that appear to have been written in Greek are 2 Maccabees and Wisdom, and that’s not a challenge to their canonicity since Greek had become a Jewish language by this point, and the entire New Testament is written in Greek.
WES: And we can also look at things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls included all of what would include what we would consider our Old Testament apart from Ruth. And I don’t think that necessarily proves anything that they didn’t think Ruth was Scripture or something.
So here we have another minor error that could be yet another slip of the tongue—though frankly these are getting to the point that I’m afraid that I have to conclude Wes just doesn’t know this area as well as he needs to.
It’s not true that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain texts from every protocanonical book except Ruth. There are texts from at least four different copies of Ruth.
What Wes should have said is that there is text from every protocanonical book except Esther and Nehemiah—although Nehemiah may have been considered part of Ezra.
Wes is also omitting the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain texts from numerous deuterocanonical books—as well as other books, some of which the Qumran community considered canonical—like Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and the Temple Scroll, as James VanderKam discusses in his book The Dead Sea Scrolls Today.
Getting back to Esther, though, while its absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls doesn’t pr... Read more on Catholic.com