Have you heard of Wesley Huff? He’s a Christian scholar specializing in ancient biblical languages & manuscripts, & is masterful at defending the Christian faith. I was amazed this week that someone of his caliber was given such a prominent platform to present evidence for biblical faith to millions of people when Joe Rogan interviewed him. I’ve come across Huff a few times online, & have been impressed, but didn’t know much about him until I watched the Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube. Granted, the program is typically littered with foul language, but has been ranked the most listened-to & influential podcast in the world. He is central to modern media, dwarfing legacy broadcasters.
This was the first time Rogan’s ever had a legitimate Bible scholar on, though I note that in 2023 he interviewed the brilliant Dr. Stephen Meyer, a well-known Christian professor who advocates for intelligent design & argues against Darwinism. In the past Rogan has been condescending to biblical faith, but now instead of mocking, he’s being respectful. Instead of arguing, he’s listening.
This belligerent & dismissive attitude has been widespread among the so-called intelligentsia & mainstream media for many decades now. They shut out intelligent believers from making their case either in the universities or the media. Students & the general population rarely get to hear any evidence in favor of the Bible. There is no real search for truth, only for advancing a humanistic, naturalistic, & materialistic worldview.
Huff presented lots of intelligent & fascinating information about the reliability of the Bible, especially in comparison to other ancient writings. This was especially intriguing to me as I spoke last Sunday on the book of Genesis, covering some of the same concepts about origins. Of course, he had over 3 hours to do so with Rogan, whereas I had to give the briefest of highlights & leave out much material. They discussed ancient Egypt, as well as Babylonian & Mesopotamian creation & flood stories which share some similarities with the Bible, but are mostly very different, highly mythological, & vastly inferior.
They covered how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed back our earliest copies of the Old Testament manuscripts by 1,000 years, & how the book of Isaiah remained exactly the same over all that time. They talked about the numerous New Testament manuscripts & how soon they were written after the actual events. The gap between the originals & the earliest surviving copies are minuscule compared to other ancient works. The number of manuscripts (about 23,000) is vastly larger than all other ancient documents. Huff argued that the New Testament is historically & textually reliable as the most attested document in all of antiquity. Huff explained why men hundreds of years ago like Wycliffe, Tyndale, & Luther wanted to translate & preserve the Scriptures so everyone could access them.
A wake-up call may be finally happening amid dark & confusing times. Maybe people are opening up to the possibility that the Bible is true after all. “Nothing else seems to be working, why not go back & try that Christianity thing?” People are hungry for truth, looking for meaning & answers. They’re tired of the lies we’ve been told about nearly everything–even by the scholars & scientists promoting personal propaganda & philosophies under the guise of science & research.
Huff was able to present the message of Christ persuasively & winsomely. He showed that Jesus is more than just a role model. He said: “Jesus condemns moralism…if Jesus is nothing but a moral example, then you can save yourself and you don’t actually need a Savior.” Rogan suggested that Jesus may not have died on the cross, citing a recent case of a man mistakenly declared dead. But Huff presented evidence about the improbability of anyone surviving Roman crucifixion. He stated that Jesus is God who died a physical death on the cross & was literally & factually raised bodily from the dead based on eyewitness accounts.
I hope you’re reading the Bible for yourself. You don’t have to be a scholar to understand it, defend it, or share it. But you do need to exert yourself to become familiar with it. Fill your mind with truth. The world begins to make more sense when you see it biblically. Awakening arrives when eyes are opened to the spiritual realities behind the scenes.
Satan hates God’s Word & wants to prevent you from reading it. But if that fails, he wants to bore you with it & make it seem irrelevant, tedious, & confusing so you’ll quit. If that fails, he’ll try to cause you to doubt it which leads many down a path to deconstruction. The devil will be satisfied if you just view the Bible as a nice story or allegory. After all, he’s a liar & deceiver. If Satan fails at all those attempts, he will allow you to read it & believe it–just as long as you don’t act on it.
Fight back! Learn it, love it, live it.