Wes Huff: Why the Bible Has Survived 2,000 Years of Scrutiny
Inside This Episode
For 2,000 years, the Bible has been copied, translated, debated, and relentlessly scrutinized. Some say it’s just a copy of a copy. Others claim books were removed, texts altered, or meanings lost in translation.
So can the Bible actually be trusted?
Bible scholar Wes Huff has dedicated his work to examining the historical evidence behind Scripture—and today, he reveals why the Bible has survived centuries of criticism and scrutiny.
WATCH "Can I Trust the Bible - Episode 1: The Right Books" ➜ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhVPBNBAGY0
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: Can the Bible actually be trusted?
Wes Huff: For me personally, they were historical questions. Is the Bible a translation of a translation of a translation? Am I just dealing with a telephone game? What do I do with Gnostic gospels? What do I do with how the Bible was put together? And can I trust, over the last 2,000 years, that what we have now is what the original authors wrote?
Eric Huffman: Why are there so many English translations of the Bible?
Wes Huff: My favorite verse in the King James Bible, which is "Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar," to which we all say, "Amen," right?
Eric Huffman: Bible scholar Wes Huff has dedicated his work to examining the historical accuracy of the Bible, captivating audiences, Christian and non-Christian alike. Today, he's tackling some of the most common objections to the Bible and what the historical record actually shows.
Wes Huff: A lot of the conspiracy theory around things like The Da Vinci Code, that the books of the Bible were chosen at Nicaea, and it was really this conspiracy between an emperor and bishops to try to shoehorn the books that they theologically wanted in and they rejected others, that's all nonsense.
Eric Huffman: Was there ever any point in the research that you've done where you just thought, "Maybe the skeptics have a point here"?
Wes Huff: I think there are such things as good rebuttals to the Christian faith. When we pretend that there's no good case for atheism or for whatever, I think we're fooling ourselves. There are good cases, but that doesn't mean they're true.
Eric Huffman: Wesley Huff, welcome to Maybe God.
Wes Huff: Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Eric Huffman: It's really cool to have you. I'm a huge fan and going to try to hold some of that fanboy energy back and we can get to it here. Tell us first of all, before we get into things about the Bible that you're doing a lot of work on, I'm just curious on a personal level, since you really skyrocketed into the public eye through the Billy Carson viral debate and then the Joe Rogan podcast appearance, how has it changed your life on a day-to-day basis on the home front? What's different now?
Wes Huff: Well, yeah, I mean, on a day-to-day basis in so many things, life is as it was before. I've had a baby in the last year, so we now have four children. We used to have three. But that kind of grounds you, doesn't it? Having the children at home and having to change diapers and just the goings-on of the craziness of... So many things are very, very normal.
And at the same time, the exposure, the opportunities, the ways that God has just kind of opened up the doors has just been amazing and significant and overwhelming at times. But it's all just a clear testimony to me personally that none of this could have happened without God's orchestrating. I didn't engineer any of it. I couldn't have paid anybody. I couldn't have micromanaged the things that have come to pass. Just all in all, very humbled.
Eric Huffman: I imagine. Do you ever feel like you'd like to go back to the old days when you could walk around and be not recognized and sort of a nondescript kind of private citizen?
Wes Huff: You know what? I do. There have been many times where I've had the thought that, you know, especially in places like airports... everybody is so well-meaning and everybody is so kind and gracious and... you know, it's totally understandable. But I have almost missed a couple of flights because I've been stopped and I've had to very kindly tell people, "I'm sure you're a great person. I appreciate you saying hi, but I have to get to my gate." So there have been times...
I don't know. My wife and I keep saying, "Does it get any more normal?" We get better at fielding it, but walking down the street and having people unroll our windows and yell at me with my name, I don't know if that will ever truly kind of feel like a normal occurrence.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, how could it? Maybe a little fake mustache you could keep in your pocket and stick on the lip whenever you need to be unrecognized, you know?
Wes Huff: That's right, yeah. Or a wig or something.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Send me a picture if you decide on the wig.
Wes Huff: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: So your work is incredible. You clearly have a great heart for people who question Christianity; you have a heart for skeptics. And I'm curious to know to what extent that is related to your own skepticism, maybe earlier in life, your own wrestling with doubts and questions about the biggest things: God, the Bible, Christianity, etc.
Wes Huff: Yeah, I think they are intricately related in that I identify as a skeptic to some degree. I've reserved judgment on a number of issues until I myself personally feel like I have sufficient evidence to come down on a conclusion based on those things. And I think that's the true definition of a skeptic. I think a lot of people look at what they assume is skepticism, and it's often cynicism, where people aren't actually looking for answers. The doubt is the end goal for them, and they've decided that the questions are going to just be hurdles that they're going to purposely put in their way.
But I think there is a healthy amount of skepticism. I think we were not called as Christians to have blind faith. We're called to always be prepared to give an answer for the reason for the hope that we have. And you even see in the Gospel of John, that biography of Jesus' life, closer to the end, the purpose statement of the Gospel is He says that He's written these things down so that you may believe. It's not, you know, "just trust me." It's, "Here's these things that have happened. I'm an eyewitness. I viewed these things. This is a credible, reliable testimony of what has transpired in real time in history. And I've written this down so that you may believe and have life in Jesus Christ."
I think that is part and parcel to my own kind of investigative endeavor to pursue these things. I'm genuinely interested, always have been, in history, but I think it goes hand in hand with: I want to get to the bottom of a lot of these things. And if they're not true, then I don't want to waste my life on them.
Eric Huffman: Amen. Me either. I can echo all of that. I love the idea that... I think it was Anselm who said that theology is a passion of the mind. And God gave us these minds to search and explore. The beginning of the search is often a doubt that you have or a question that you have. But I think it has to be said: In a lot of Christian circles and a lot of churches, doubt is seen as sin, full stop.
Wes Huff: Yeah, yeah. Well, it was Anselm who came up with the line "Faith seeking understanding". So that should be our pursuit.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, faith seeking understanding. And yet you have this sort of barrier sometimes in churches where if you have a question or a doubt, you're sort of persona non grata. I think a lot of people have experienced that. How do you distinguish between faithful doubts and cynicism, like you said before?
Wes Huff: I think it takes a lot of kind of discussion with people. There's a level of wisdom that comes with kind of picking up on the cues of people. Sometimes I just generally feel, when I'm having conversations, that something's not right. And in asking a few questions, it can often reveal what someone's motives are. Sometimes that's as simple as saying, These are great questions, but ultimately, let me just ask you, if Christianity were true, hypothetically, would you believe it? You know, the God that you have some sort of beef with that you're wrestling through these questions, let's just say hypothetically, all of those questions were answered, the God of the Bible is the Creator of the universe. Would you then submit your life to Him?
And I get people who tell me no. And at that point, you know, that's the rebellion of the heart that's speaking. It's not someone who is pursuing the truth. It's not someone who is really interested in that. They're angry, they're in rebellion, they're in suppression. In some ways, those conversations just need to be moved on from and we need to pray for those individuals. But it comes with the practice of having those conversations.
Eric Huffman: Hey Maybe God family. Eric Huffman here. I really hope this conversation is challenging you in the best possible ways. I'm so grateful for Wes Huff and others like him who are willing to bring all their expertise, experience, and humility into these important conversations about the Bible and Christianity. My prayer is that this episode might help you find some clarity and insight that will help you wrestle with your biggest questions of faith.
If you value hearing from thoughtful and credible voices across the spectrum of Christianity and you love exploring these topics with honesty and respect, make sure you subscribe to Maybe God. By subscribing, you'll be helping more people discover these episodes and you'll be ensuring that you never miss a conversation that might speak directly into your own questions and doubts. So hit that subscribe button, drop all your thoughts and questions in the comments section, and stay connected with this community of curious, faithful, and courageous viewers.
Now, let's get back to my conversation with Wes Huff.
In your own case, whether it was in the past or more recent present, what were some of those hangups you had that sent you on this journey of pursuit? What were the specific areas of doubt or questioning that you had regarding God and Christianity?
Wes Huff: I think early on I was encountering... I mean, I came to faith when I was very young. I think my profession of faith when I was six years old was a genuine one, if not naive. But I mean, how much can you really know as a six-year-old?
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Wes Huff: And so I think in what six-year-old Wes could have understood, he genuinely put his faith and trust in Jesus. And that didn't mean that I didn't go through a process of wrestling with questions later on in life. I did. And a lot of those had to do with me having conversations with people who held differing worldview perspectives. And there were rebuttals coming down to, well, what you think of Jesus isn't really the Jesus of history, and the Bible you're reading is not trustworthy.
And so I myself wanted to take those objections seriously and look into them and read individuals who were coming from a secular, a skeptical, and atheistic or agnostic perspective and look at the angle of their perspective and say, "Okay, is there some legitimacy to this?" Because I think there are such things as good rebuttals to the Christian faith. I don't think they're true, but I think when we pretend that there's no good case for atheism or for whatever, I think we're fooling ourselves. There are good cases, but that doesn't mean they're true. That doesn't mean that there aren't answers that can, at least to some degree or another, shed light on these questions.
So for me personally, they were historical questions. Is the Bible a translation of a translation of a translation? Am I just dealing with a telephone game? What do I do with Gnostic gospels? What do I do with how the Bible was put together? And can I trust over the last 2,000 years that what we have now is what the original authors wrote?
Eric Huffman: Right. Yeah. I think a lot of people's doubts and questions really just circle back to the Bible and its veracity. Can it be trusted? We're going to dig in more in detail in just a moment. That'll be the heart of our conversation. But one more question about the value of doubts and questions, because in recent days, we've had another example of a prominent Christian coming out and saying something controversial and being dismissed or, you know, sort of ostracized for it.
Kirk Cameron, the great Hollywood actor turned Christian apologist and evangelist, has recently come out and said, you know, he rejects the idea of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment in favor of annihilationism. Could you just describe the controversy there? Why was that such a big deal for Christians to hear that? Why were so many offended? I guess the big question is, is Kirk Cameron in danger of going to Hell just because he doesn't believe in it?
Wes Huff: I think this is a good test case in some instances. Let me just right off the bat say that I hold to an eternal conscious punishment perspective. That is one that I have looked into and found that to be the perspective that I advocate for. However, I think in this particular case, what has happened is a lot of people have grown up on eternal conscious punishment, or eternal conscious torment, as it is sometimes referred to, and that's their default position and have failed to realize that there is a perspective out there.
And to give Kirk the benefit of the doubt, of whom I know personally and have actually done a program with him recently, what he said was not necessarily that he rejected ECT (eternal conscious torment), but that he was looking into... he was reading guys like Fudge and F.F. Bruce and John Stott and was finding that there was a whole form of argumentation that he hadn't explored because he'd just never been exposed to it, and that there was a biblical case for that. And I actually think that there's merit to that insofar as I think a lot of people assume that there's only one position and often don't understand what the, it's sometimes referred to as conditional immortality, position is from the biblical position.
So I have a friend, his name is Chris Date. He runs an organization called Rethinking Hell. And he's very purposeful in saying, "You know, this isn't a denial of Hell. We believe in Hell. We just believe that the 'second death' language is what is actually being referred to there, and that the reprobate are not resurrected to eternal life in the same way that those who are redeemed are, that they have a resurrected finite body, it's not a glorified body. And that in the feeling of the wrath of God, they will cease to bear the image of God and be annihilated at a certain point in time."
I think what I've found interesting in the reaction to that particular position that Kirk articulated is an exposure that a lot of Christians may not actually understand the diversity within Christian thought on topics like Hell. That it's not, say, a Jehovah's Witness annihilationism, which is literally, you know, "If I die and I'm not a JW, I just cease to exist automatically." I think that is rebutted by the biblical case. I think you can look at that in the same way that I think that universalism is likewise in severe error. I think, you know, the biblical case does not have any merit for that.
At the same time, not unlike the issue of the age of the earth, I think there is a clear position that is true on that, but I think that there's a diversity of opinion and has been throughout church history, and that you can be in error on these types of secondary issues and still be a genuine believer. Because thanks be to God, our salvation is not an intellectual test.
Eric Huffman: Right, amen.
Wes Huff: Otherwise we'd all be in trouble. And I think that there are some really serious secondary issues that I think we should take seriously, that we should really understand what we believe and why we believe them, that don't necessarily bear any witness on "I have put my full faith and trust in Jesus." And I'm going to stand before Him and I'm going to realize, you know, there's probably some things that I hold currently now in the 21st century as a finite human being that on the other side of eternity I'm going to kneel before the Throne and maybe even kneel in a little bit of embarrassment because of the things I held. But it's not an essential.
I think we need to keep essential what is essential. I think it was Luther who said, "In major things, unity, but in all things, charity." So we need to keep in mind some of us are on journeys, some of us are really trying to wrestle through these things and we should call out heresy where heresy is, but not all things are heresy. And we need to also be careful to not besmirch a brother or sister's character by calling them a heretic and failing to realize that some pretty significant individuals were, say, conditionalists, like Kirk Cameron is articulating, individuals like Athanasius of Alexandria-
Eric Huffman: A great Church Father.
Wes Huff: And so I just think we need to be careful when we articulate these things.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, unless we have some really uncomfortable conversations in Heaven one day with Kirk and Athanasius. Not every departure from every Orthodox position is equal to heresy, in other words. And I appreciated your tweet or your X or whatever they call it in defense of Kirk Cameron, because sometimes we need to step back and have a little bit of grace on these non-essentials.
All right, thank you for that. You've been working hard on a new project called Can I Trust the Bible?, a video series that's on YouTube. I hope everybody watches it because it's amazing. And it's been coming out recently one episode at a time. But at this point in your life and career, why focus so acutely on the Bible's reliability instead of some of the bigger controversial questions about sexuality or suffering or Heaven and Hell, for that matter? Like, why focus on the Bible specifically?
Wes Huff: I think if the Bible is true, then all of those other things should fall into place. So if we can trust the reliable testimony of the biographical accounts that we find in the Gospels, and we can trust the testimony of the earliest Jesus community that we find in the rest of the New Testament, and that testifies to the veracity of the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, then I think everything else falls into place, whether that's a view on morality or sexuality or even philosophy and science. I think all of these things are predicated on the Word of God being that which is God-breathed and being that which we can put our full faith and trust in. Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
And as the author of Hebrews starts his epistle out saying, "In the past, God spoke through the prophets; He spoke in various ways and at many times; now He speaks through His Son." Well, that testimony of the Son is in what we call the New Testament scriptures. Jesus in the upper room, He breathes on His disciples, He gives them that authority, and then they go out into the world, they proclaim that, and that deposit, what some early Christians like Justin Martyr referred to as the "testimony of the apostles", that is then encapsulated in the New Testament.
And so by looking at its historical reliability, its textual trustworthiness, its ultimate veracity, I think that is the linchpin on which the entirety of all the other issues swing. And so if we can say to people, you may have these other objections, whether they be moral or scientific or philosophical or psychological, so on and so forth, if I can ground that in an ultimate reality that God has spoken and He's revealed Himself to us, His character is knowable, and He has actually given us things, not everything we want to know, but what we need to know, and on the basis of what we need to know, we can actually explain and maybe touch on some of the things that we want to know. So I'm deeply moved and encouraged and excited about the Word of God.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, me too. And your excitement comes through in those videos and all your talks. We know and hear the questions skeptics ask about the Bible. You mentioned the telephone game thing before that does seem to skeptics like the Bible was passed down and translated again and again and again, can it be trusted, all the different versions and translations that we have over the years, you know, mistranslations that have been discovered and try to be corrected and things like that, we'll talk more about that in a sec.
But whenever you went through this project or in any of your work regarding the Bible, I'm just curious if you ever came across something about the Bible that gave you any kind of pause, something that you didn't expect to find that sort of made you raise your eyebrows and go, "Wait a minute." Was there ever any point in the research that you've done where you just thought, "Maybe the skeptics have a point here," at any point in your work?
Wes Huff: Hmm. Yeah, I don't... It's less of, "Do the skeptics have a point?" and more I think that what scripture's meant to communicate on that's clear is clear. But that doesn't mean that there aren't hard passages to wrestle with. There are some genuinely hard passages. There are some passages that we would like to be clear. There are some questions historically that I think, at a certain level, I just need to say, "Listen, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to the text because I don't really understand what is going on here one way or the other." And usually those issues have nothing to do with the intention or the meaning of the text.
There's a very odd story in the Pentateuch where God is angered by Moses and then his wife has to go and cut off foreskins and she runs over and she drops them on Moses' feet so that it says Yahweh won't kill Moses. It's not clear what's going on there.
Eric Huffman: "You're a bridegroom of blood to me," or she says or something...
Wes Huff: Yeah, exactly. You read multiple commentaries and there are multiple views and everybody's just kind of saying like, "We don't really know what this means." You know, "here's one particular angle, here's another particular angle." But ultimately, I think getting to the bottom of what a "bridegroom of blood" actually means is irrespective of the broader narrative that's being communicated.
There are some things that are prescriptive in the Bible, you know, "Go and do this," there are some things that are descriptive, it's communicating history to us, and there are some things that are emotive, like the Psalms or certain poetic passages in the Proverbs. I think there's a certain aspect of, yeah, I'm wrestling with a lot of those things too. And I think there's room for interpretation. But at the end of the day, what is clear is the Fall, our state as human beings, how God rescues us, who God is and his character that can be understood, and the progressive revelation of the God who is three in one revealed to us, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and the beautiful work that comes together at the Cross where the Father sends the Son and the Son voluntarily goes to the Cross and empowers those who believe in his name by the Spirit.
Are we going to answer all of the questions of how that is done perfectly, the mechanisms by which God created the world, and the mechanisms by which justification is truly accomplished? Not on this side of eternity, I don't think. But it's exciting to be able to just look at even people who have devoted their lives to it and say, "You know, this isn't nonsense."
I've been reading Homer's Iliad to my kids and, you know, there's stuff in there that has the kind of aura of history. Troy was a real place. Some of these islands are real places, and yet it's very clearly a myth. And that's not what I think the Bible is. That's not how the Bible reads. The seriousness of the way that the Bible communicates, I read and understand in a very different way than when I try to extrapolate and explain Odysseus to my son.
Eric Huffman: I hear that. But I also appreciate your vulnerability and honesty around some of your own hangups and questions. I think that goes a long way when talking to skeptics. One of the big questions I hear a lot, and you probably do too, is that if the Bible is the true Word of God cover to cover, then why do all our different Bibles differ in some ways? And we got all these translations; we've alluded to some of them. My go-to is the trusty old NIV, but I've got a whole stack of them here. I've got the King James Version, which a lot of people still swear by today, the NASB, which my best friend is a huge fan of, and he's trying to talk me into, ESV, man, I've got the Revised Standard, the New Revised Standard with the Apocrypha in it. I've got the CEB, the CSB, the Living Bible, which was granny's favorite Bible. Most people have a granny that had the old dark green Living Bible.
What do you say to someone who has questions and maybe doubts about how the Bible came to be in all these different translations and versions? What's your general response to that line of questioning?
Wes Huff: What a tremendous place we are in history that we have so much availability to the Word of God in an understandable and approachable medium. I think we often look at all of these and we say, these are all different in their wording, therefore it's confusing. I think that's largely a modern convention.
A friend of mine, Mark Ward, who I recently had on my YouTube channel, who wrote a great book on the King James Bible, The Use and Abuse of the King James Bible, he made this really good point when we were talking back and forth and saying that there almost has never been a time when the people of God have not read the Bible in a translation. Especially when we're talking about the fact that there have been very few people in the grand scheme of history who have been fluent in both ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek at the exact same time. Fluent in the terms of this is their spoken language, right? I can read both those languages, but I wasn't raised on them. I'm not a native speaker. That's been true for the majority of history.
In fact, in the New Testament era in the time of Jesus, a lot of Jews, not exclusively, but a lot of Jews were reading their Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, in a Greek translation. Some were reading it in Hebrew, no doubt about that, but they were also reading it in Greek, which was the lingua franca, which was like if we're speaking English today, they were speaking Greek back then as just kind of the medium across the board from what is modern-day Portugal to what is, you know, the borders of Asia. The people were speaking Greek at that time.
That is the way that God has done this, right? So we can question that. But the fact is that as my friend Mark said, when someone becomes a "new creature in Christ," God could just download Greek and Hebrew into their brain. And He's chosen not to do that. I think there's actually a good component of that insofar as there's this... in the Book of Acts, we have the Council of Jerusalem, where it's basically decided that you don't have to convert to Judaism in order to become a believer in the Jewish Messiah.
What that means is that we are not limited to any one language or culture or ethnicity in the same way that something like, say, Islam is. Islam, even though we have Muslims here in Toronto, where I live, you can go to Indonesia and find Muslims, you can go to Europe and find Muslims, North Africa, and even though they might not be ethnic Arabs like Muhammad (the seventh-century Arabian who founded the religion) was, they're still limited to largely speak and dress and act like a seventh-century Arabian. They're not supposed to read the Quran, the holy book of Islam, in anything other than Arabic. And not modern Arabic, but seventh-century Hijazi script Arabic.
And so in that sense, that religion is limited. It's limited in capacity and function and form to a particular culture, a particular timeframe, a particular language. Whereas Christianity has always been a proponent of translation. Early on it's translated into Greek, into Latin, into Old Church Slavonic, into Coptic, into... you name the language, the Christians were translating it into. And they never saw that as an issue because it was always the intention and the meaning.
When you pull out all those English translations... I have an ESV and LSB and a CSB on my desk right now. I have a bookshelf with a whole bunch more. And I think this is a great problem to have, to have the availability of the Word of God. I often look at that and I personally take a multi-translational approach. I think that there are benefits to all these translations in the spectrum of how they translate things.
So I can understand how that's confusing. I get people who come up to me... you know, my church is very ethnically diverse, and we have people from Asian and African and European backgrounds of all sorts. And I've had people say, "Wes, you know, there's really only a few translations in my native language, two, maybe three. I'm looking for an English Bible and I've got dozens. How do I navigate that?" And I can understand that feeling frustrating and overwhelming.
But really, the translations that you just mentioned are... you know, any one of those, I would say, you know, pick the one that you find most readable. I'm far less concerned about what you're reading as I am with whether you're reading it. There are caveats, obviously. But I think the best Bible for you is the one you're going to read.
Eric Huffman: I like that. That's really simple and attainable for a lot of people. Because a lot of people get hung up on, you know, which is best and all of that. In a minute, I'm going to make you rank them, so get ready. But for now, I think it's enough to say it's better to read the Bible than not pick the one that works for you and read it, because they're all good in their own way.
I think a common question... Well, first of all, let me say, when you mentioned Muslims, I had a couple of former guests on the show before that were Muslims, raised Muslim, and became Christian, and they talk about that. How when they were children, they didn't speak Arabic, but they were told to memorize verses of the Quran in a language they didn't know. So they memorized the Quran, but they didn't know it. They didn't read it or study it for themselves because they were told they shouldn't in their own languages.
If that's the alternative to all these different translations and versions, I would choose what we have as Christians every day because it allows for more access and not less. And I think that's a sign of its trustworthiness is that God's not afraid of everyone reading it and accessing it in their own language.
Wes Huff: Yeah. I think that's true. And like I said, there are obvious caveats. Not all translations are created equal, but it is a wonderful thing to have an availability of translations that you can understand. I had a Muslim friend years ago when I was in university, he was Indonesian and him and I were meeting and we were talking over various things. And he spoke English, and he spoke a little tiny bit of modern Arabic, and he spoke Indonesian mostly. And he said one day, "You know, Wes, I love my religion. I love doing the prayers. I love giving alms. I love memorizing the Quran." And he had almost memorized the entirety of the Quran.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Wes Huff: And he said, "One day I would like to get a translation in my own language so I know what it says." It's always stuck out in my mind as this illustration of, you know, his religious devotion was more about what he did than what he believed. And so in one sense, it was a secondary issue whether he could actually understand the phonetic memorized words that he had downloaded into his brain and would regurgitate during the prayers. Because even then, prayer was not communicative. It wasn't talking to God. It wasn't this kind of adoration and worship process that we as Christians would understand. It was more of, "This is what I do. I pray five times a day, and my prayer is a resuscitation of these particular verses from the Quran that I don't even know truly what all of them mean." But that's the aside.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, sure. And again, I would rather have what we have. But I do understand the questions and doubts about it because it's the question of interpretation, right? Everybody rightly believes that any interpretation involves some kind of bias, some sort of lens through which things are filtered. And I guess if I'm playing devil's advocate or skeptic's advocate here, it's the question of: how do we know that those people translating or committees translating these different versions aren't inserting themselves in saying what they want the Bible to say?
Wes Huff: Typically, you have a translation committee, which is a number of individuals. This works to weed out any one individual's kind of bias. Which is where, generally, sectarian translations, that is, a translation done by a single individual or maybe a sectarian group, like the Jehovah's Witnesses’ New World Translation or the Mormon's Joseph Smith Translation, where there's an obvious bias that's baked into the text.
I think when you look at mainstream, even evangelical translations, there's a diversity of individuals from a range, even sometimes denominational perspectives, that are incorporated into that process in order to prevent that.
And really, if you look at a translation like... something like the NRSV, the New Revised Standard Version, which is a translation that, you know, when I was doing my undergraduate work at a secular university, that is the translation we were supposed to be looking at because it was largely agreed upon that the translation committees were unbiased, quote-unquote. If you compare that to an ESV or an NIV, it's really not that different. There's some kind of differentiation in wording, but you're really not going to be all that different in the range and the spectrum. And we can talk about what the formal versus functional equivalent sometimes means in terms of translation style.
But at the end of the day, what you're getting is what the text has. Although it might not be the easiest thing, you can learn Greek and Hebrew and vet these things. And there are ways to go about that. And it's maybe not as complicated as a lot of people think. It's not some secret that only a select few people can access.
When I'm looking through my Hebrew Old Testament or my Greek New Testament, and I'm comparing it to my ESV, if I find something that I think is drastically off base, which I don't think I ever have, I can myself call that out. And that's...
Eric Huffman: And you can compare it. You pull out your other translations, your other versions, and see, you know, how the others put it, and come to your own conclusions with your own scholarship. And I think that's, again, a very helpful thing.
All right, with all that in mind, I want to do a little quick thought exercise, okay? I know you've done the research, you've done all the background, the Hebrew, Greek, all of it. And given these seven very popular translations, I'd like you to rank them, all right? And the criterion I'm looking for is accuracy. So, not just Wes Huff's favorite study Bible, but accuracy in terms of the text itself.
I've got the King James Version, New King James, NIV, NASB, the ESV, the Living Bible, and everyone's favorite, The Message. So if you could just briefly walk us through which of these are the most accurate in your opinion, one to seven. All right? I'm gonna lay them out here. Hopefully our watchers, viewers can see this. What do you think? Number one?
Wes Huff: It's sort of a trick question-
Eric Huffman: I know. I'm sorry.
Wes Huff: Because I don't really know what you mean by accurate. And part of this is that what's sometimes referred to as formal equivalence or "word-for-word" is a translation that's trying to attempt to get to how close the wording is to... so if there are, say, 11 words in Greek or Hebrew, you try to get 11 words in English. And it's interesting because I was reading something yesterday from Josephus, who was a Jewish writer at the end of the first century, and then a guy named Maimonides who was a very famous Jewish rabbi in the Middle Ages. And they were both commenting on Bible translation, and both of them were saying, "If you're trying to get a formal translation," I'm paraphrasing them even, "if you're trying to get a formal translation and get closest to the wording, you're missing the point, because the point is to get the meaning of the message."
Actually, it's interesting that Josephus, even when he's talking about the Ten Commandments, he paraphrases them. You'd think if there was anything that he's gonna quote word-for-word, it's the Ten Commandments. He paraphrases the Ten Commandments because largely, in a Jewish ancient context, to be able to paraphrase it is to illustrate that you actually can understand it and communicate it in your own words. And so there's a difference there in that they were looking at a formal translation, 11 words in the Greek, you try to aim for 11 words in the English or in their case, you know, whatever it is in the Hebrew and Latin.
And they're saying, actually, if there is a word that is not necessarily the same number of words, but you can structure it in the sentence to get it as accurate as possible, that's what you should go to. You should go for the function and have a functional translation more than you should go to a formal translation. So...
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Let's go for functional accuracy then, not 11 to 11.
Wes Huff: Okay. So in this list, I would say the most formal translations on the list are probably the NASB and the ESV. Often, particularly in the Old Testament, I don't love reading the ESV. And the joke is that the NASB is just the ESV with semicolons. Sometimes I'll go to the ESV and I'll be reading through, say, 2 Chronicles and I'll think, "This is really awkwardly worded. Let me see what my NIV says." So I'll pop over the NIV and see what the NIV says.
Interestingly enough, I probably would, with the caveat of The Message, and I'll answer that in a minute, I'd probably put the KJV as my least favorite on this list, simply because I think that there's a good argument for the archaic language in the KJV just being enough that there are certain verses in the KJV that will not be understandable no matter what. And it's not because the King James translators were wrong; it's because we don't speak 17th-century Elizabethan English anymore.
To illustrate that, my favorite verse in the King James Bible is this 1 Chronicles 28:16, which is: "Parbar westward, four at the causeway and two at Parbar."
Eric Huffman: What?
Wes Huff: To which we all say, Amen, right? Or we needed the interpretation of tongues, one or the other. The answer is like, that made sense in 1611. At Parbar westward, four at the causeway and two at Parbar. But if you go to your NIV, it says something to the equivalent of, "As for the court to the west, there were there were two at the court and four at the road itself." And so you think, okay, these words don't mean what they used to mean, right? There's a different understanding of them.
I would put the KJV last in the list simply because I think in terms of all of the spectrum of "I want you to understand what you're reading and I want it to be an accurate translation". And I think for just structure's sake, the KJV is not the greatest translation in that.
Eric Huffman: Again, just because it's today, right? It's not necessarily a judgment on the merits of when it was written. But I understand that.
Wes Huff: Yeah. And for people who are interested in that, once again, I mentioned my friend Mark Ward, his book, The Use and Abuse of the King James Bible, has some great illustrations of that. So I guess if we're ranking these.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, let's rank them.
Wes Huff: It's tricky because I would put a lot of them on top of each other.
Eric Huffman: You can have some ties if you wanna tie.
Wes Huff: I mean, the ESV followed by the NIV followed by the NASB followed by the NKJV followed by the LB. And then the Message is a caveat because it's not actually a translation, it's a paraphrase.
Eric Huffman: Can throw it out. That's what I wanna do.
Wes Huff: Well, so here's the thing. I don't dislike The Message nearly as much as I think a lot of people do. I think that there actually is a time and a place for The Message in that paraphrases are supplements. Your diet should be good enough that you don't need supplements. So if you're getting enough protein in your daily diet, you don't need to take protein shakes. If all you're doing is drinking protein shakes, your digestive system is going to be a mess. So if the Message is your daily driver, if it's your like, "This is my devotions in my study Bible," I think you're in trouble because you're not getting what you need to or should be in that regard.
Eric Huffman: That's kind of what I said about The Chosen, Christians that watch The Chosen and think they're reading the Bible. It's a supplement. Read your Bible.
Wes Huff: Yeah, yeah. And I said, because I recently, at one of our conferences with Apologetics Canada, whom I work for, we were asked about The Chosen and in a Q&A, I explained the story where I talked about, I had a friend who watched the Lord of the Rings movies before he read the books. And when he started to read the books, he started to think, "Well, that's not how that happened." And it was because he was confusing the subject matter, right?
My only worry with something like The Chosen or really any other dramatic reenactment of a biblical story is that we're making sure that we're getting the source material clear. I shouldn't be reading the Bible and picturing Jonathan Roumie. Right. And I shouldn't be, you know, finding the biblical Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew a little bit harsher than the Jonathan Roumie Jesus. If those things are happening, I probably need to step back. But that's an aside.
Eric Huffman: All right. Well, that's a great... I like the ranking with the Message kind of being out on its own here, but the others, I think I... I don't know. I might put the King James before the Living. I think the Living Bible is actually a paraphrase, too. I think it literally says it.
Wes Huff: Yeah, I think you might be right.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I like it. I like the list. Thank you for entertaining my little project here. I understand asking an academic like yourself to boil it down so succinctly might not have been fair, but I appreciate you doing that.
Wes Huff: Yeah. Maybe I should add that that's a personal opinion rather than an official scholarly...
Eric Huffman: No, don't back out of it now. All the King James people are coming for you.
Wes Huff: They already are, so it's nothing new.
Eric Huffman: All right. Aside from the different translations, another really common question you probably hear about the Bible is just how do we even know the books that are in there are the ones that are supposed to be? Weren't there some that were left out? Aren't there some in it that might... maybe shouldn't be or are problematic? What do you say to that general line of questioning about the books that we have and how they were chosen? Was it some grand conspiracy behind closed doors? How do we know that it's the Word of God?
Wes Huff: So episode one of Can I Trust the Bible? that we did, where we are in Egypt and we went to places like Nag Hammadi and where the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip were found and filmed the story of the discovery of that particular thing in that location, we try to answer that question.
In episode three, which is gonna be coming out in the new year, we filmed in Nicaea in what is modern-day Iznik, Turkey, because a lot of the conspiracy theory around things like The Da Vinci Code, that's ground zero for them. That the books of the Bible were chosen in Nicaea and it was really this conspiracy between an emperor and bishops to try to shoehorn the books that they theologically wanted in and they rejected others. That's all nonsense. But we wanted to communicate why that's nonsense in the location that it actually took place and then kind of draw out some of the evidence of why that's not the case.
I think what we can say is, there's a broader conversation. And if people are interested in this, a friend of mine, John Mead, who teaches at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, He has a talk that's actually on my YouTube channel, he did it at our conference a couple of years ago on the Old Testament canon of scripture. Because there are kind of two sides of this. There's the apocryphal gospels, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary, you know, why aren't those in our Bible, is there a conspiracy to reject them or hide them or are they secret?
And then there's the conversation about, you know, what you mentioned in one of your Bibles has an Apocrypha. While the Apocrypha, this kind of Apocrypha formal, these books that are in the Old Testament of say a Roman Catholic Bible that aren't in a Protestant Bible. So those are two separate conversations, but they are kind of intricately linked in that it can appear that these were books that were rejected at some point in time. And ultimately they were never there to begin with, so they were never rejected is basically how I would put it, in that, we know what the Jewish canon was in and around the time of Jesus. Josephus, who I mentioned earlier, gives us a number, and that number is our 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament.
He numbers them differently, but they are the same books. They're just numbered in a different order because they wanted the exact number of books for the exact number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. And so where we have 1 and 2 Chronicles, 2 and 2 Kings, they only have Chronicles and Kings. They group some of the prophets together, whereas we split them. But they are the same book.
Eric Huffman: And Josephus was early, I mean, it was end of the first century, right?
Wes Huff: Yeah, end of the first century. And he talks about, you know, "We don't have an infinite, innumerable number of books like the Greeks do. We have a set number of books," and he refers to them as being laid up in the Temple. So there's an aspect of that. You see in the New Testament Jesus refers to the fulfillment of Him coming as being predicted in the Law and the Prophets and the Writings. That's kind of a synonym for what we have in the Law, the first five books of the Bible, the Prophets, and then the Writings are the Psalms and Proverbs and a few others. That's the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh: the Torah, the Nevi'im and the Ketavim, the Law, the Writings and the Prophets.
Jesus is using this kind of catch-all term. And so I think we can say at least to some degree that there was a finality of, and I think there's good evidence to even push it before that, of what we have in the Old Testament. But there were other books that were written by Jews in the period between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. Some of these were historical, some of them were theological. It only becomes a debate later on.
The Jews never thought these were scripture, but there is a debate later on where you have heavy hitters in the church history, guys like Augustine sparring with guys like Jerome on the books that should or shouldn't be there. Jerome goes with what would essentially be a Protestant canon. Augustine's arguing with what would be closer to a modern Roman Catholic canon. There's a long history of debate right up until the Protestant Reformation. And the Protestants didn't reject those books as much as they just sided on one side of the argument that was always going throughout the first 1,500 years of church history.
But at the end of the day, if we're answering the question "How do we know that we have the right books?" well, I think in the early church, Christians inherited a perspective from the Jews because the Jews believed that God's promises, God's covenants were followed up by written texts. And so when God makes a promise with Moses, you have the Torah, you have the Law, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Likewise, when God makes promises throughout, you even see statements in the Prophets like "write this in a tablet and scribe this on a scroll." So there's all of that understanding.
And so Jesus comes, He establishes the New Covenant. There's a New Covenant meal in the Lord's supper. The apostles see themselves as continuing the New Covenant and they're arbiters of the New Covenant. I think the natural process that we see being asked is, we have the covenant, where are the writings? And so that gets the conversation going.
And really, when the early Christians are discussing these things, what they ask is, "Are there books that we can tie to someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus?" That early apostolic witness. Can we get back to that credibility, the authority that Jesus held? Those are the 27 books in our New Testament. Those are the books, historically, that get us closest to Jesus, and theologically, that tie us to the earliest Jesus community. All the others fall outside that spectrum.
Eric Huffman: So all the others being those Gnostic gospels you mentioned earlier, the Gospel of Thomas, Mary, etc., those were not written by eyewitnesses or people who knew eyewitnesses. Is that the only reason they were excluded or is there more there?
Wes Huff: That's part and parcel of the primary reason. Thomas was long dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas was written. His name and authority are being appropriated by the individuals who wrote that. But also there's a piggybacking of pagan philosophy within those writings.
It's interesting when you look at the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jesus appears to be a Jewish itinerant rabbi, which would make sense in first-century Judea. That's what He should be. In the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, Jesus is kind of a pagan. He's kind of a pagan mystic. He's more of a pagan philosopher than He really is a Jewish rabbi.
And so is it more likely that Jesus was a pagan philosopher and then later on was written back into the timeframe as a rabbi, as a Jew, or is the opposite true? And I think just from a prima facie, Occam's razor, what is going on? What's the simplest answer? I think we can say it's far more likely that they were trying to make Jesus palatable for the pagan audience. They were incorporating Him into the ideals and the ideologies and the philosophies that were going on in the broader Greco-Roman world. And in that sense, they've ultimately appropriated Jesus. They've appropriated the other guys for the names, for the authority, but they're reading back onto the lips of Jesus things He never said.
Eric Huffman: We don't have time to get into it, but one of the most fascinating things that you sort of unearthed in episode one of Can I Trust the Bible? that I hope everybody will go and watch because it's awesome is just clues like names and things that were being identified, places and names that were not contemporary to the time and place of Jesus. They were clearly contemporary to when they were written centuries after. It's clues like that that I would say thinkers, scientists, researchers like yourself can point to and help the rest of us to see why exactly a later text can be identified as later and why it shouldn't have been included in the original canon of Scripture. That just helps dispel some of the myths around closed-door meetings and grand conspiracies.
There are some other questions people ask about the texts we have in the New Testament. For example, I had a member of my congregation text me recently and say, "Hey, I was just reading the Bible and there's a verse missing." I think it was John 5, maybe John 5:4, I think, that's just not there and just a footnote saying, "Oh, this shouldn't have been there in the first place," or "The oldest manuscripts omit this." And that's not the only example. There are others, some individual verses, some longer stories that some of our Bibles will say, "You know, maybe this wasn't in the earliest manuscripts." What do you think that says about the veracity of scripture? Is that sort of a knock against the Bible's trustworthiness, or is it actually a feather in the cap of it?
Wes Huff: Yeah, ironically, whereas a lot of people might find those things and think that that's compromising to this narrative of the reliability of the Bible, I don't think it's compromising. In fact, I think it elucidates clarity on the text of the Bible because we know that, right? You can see that in your modern translation.
Remember that the chapters and verses are later attributions. The original authors didn't come up with those. The chapters came around in the Middle Ages, the verses much, much later on in the 16th century. And those are a good addition, right? They help us to find passages quicker, to keep track of where we are. To cite chapter and verse is very useful in preaching and teaching and in devotions, all of these things. But they are imposed on the text. And did so a long time ago, right? Centuries ago.
When it is discovered that John didn't write John 5:4, do we reverse the entire Bible? No, that's not always useful. You're not gonna reverse every commentary that's ever existed since the verses were put into place. It's not a useful thing to do. So what do you do? You go John 5:3, John 5:5, and then you put a citation note at the bottom of the page. Because we know what happened at something like John 5:4.
John 5 is the story of the woman, or sorry, not the woman, the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, right? And this John 5:4 is actually an articulation of there's an angel that comes down and stirs the waters and then all the lame and sick people try to go into the water because they believe an angel is the one that's doing that. And if they're the one that can get into this like bubbling area in the middle of the pool, they'll get healed.
Well, we know based on the manuscript tradition of particularly the Greek, but not limited to it, that that was... what ended up being John 5:4 was most likely a commentary that was written into the margin by a scribe in terms of explaining what the pool was. So someone knew what that pool was, they wrote it into the margin to say, like, "Let's give context to this." It's almost like a commentary note. Scribes are very purposeful to not leave anything out. In fact, scribes are so careful to miss nothing that even if they're not sure, they'll write it into the text. And we might have a problem with this today. But you know what that means? That means that 100% of the text is in there. It also means that 110% of the text is there, right?
So scribes are far more likely to add something in than to take something away. But because the Christian manuscript tradition, there's handwritten copies, is so diverse and so rich, we're able to pinpoint those things because it usually happens geographically, it usually happens in certain areas with certain traditions. The tradition that ends up being the one that included John 5:4 is just the one that ends up in the collection that the King James translators end up using. That's why it ends up in our quote-unquote modern English Bibles or doesn't end up, for that matter.
Eric Huffman: I think it's great. I understand why it's a little disconcerting to your average faithful Christian reading the Bible and coming across a missing verse. But if you really sit back and think about it, it really lends credibility to the canon because we have so much evidence, so many manuscripts that we can compare, especially the oldest ones, the originals that we have, not the original, but the oldest manuscripts and copies, and come up with as accurate a picture as we can. And that means correcting some mistakes or additions that have been made erroneously over the years.
John 5:4 is not a big deal. Some of them hit me a little harder. In some of my Bibles, notes about like John 8, where Jesus has His famous encounter with a woman who's caught in adultery and He writes in the sand and, you know, the "cast the first stone" kind of story. Every preacher loves to preach that story. But there are notes now that will say this story probably didn't appear or doesn't appear in the earliest manuscripts. My question then, Wes, is, as a preacher, as Christians, what do we do with that? With a story as well-known as that one, should preachers still preach John 8 and Jesus' encounter with that woman if it wasn't included in the earliest manuscripts?
Wes Huff: Yeah. My personal opinion is that I'm interested in what John wrote more so than what a scribe wrote later on. I think there's room for, in terms of a pastoral angle, to come to our congregations and be clear with them on what is going on there and saying, "Because of the availability of data that we have, we're able to see what's happening." And that should, like I said before, encourage you that we're not trying to hide this. We're very transparent with it. And the reason we know it's not original testifies to the fact that we do know what is original. I think there is room for interpretation.
That story is debated as to its originality. I don't think it is original, but at that point in time, I would say this fits with the character of Jesus. I have no reason to believe that the gospel authors exhausted everything that Jesus did. In fact, John says that they didn't. Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary says that that's his favorite Bible verse that's not actually from the Bible.
Personally, I wouldn't preach on it as scripture, but I would educate the congregation and say, "Here's what's going on. Here's what you're seeing in the note."
Eric Huffman: It's a teaching opportunity.
Wes Huff: It's a teaching opportunity to help them so that they don't get confused if they come across that passage and go, "Wait, what's going on here? Why is my Bible saying this?" Or if a skeptic is aware of it and catches them off guard. I think we should be aware of these things. I don't think it should scare us. I think that there are people who do think it is original to John's gospel, and they have good reasons to articulate that, even if I disagree with them.
Eric Huffman: I think especially these days when the internet makes everything available, I don't know why we would keep that information from our congregations. I think it, again, lends credence if we come out and teach people these interpretive tools when reading their Bibles. I think the lesson for preachers is: be honest with your congregation. There's nothing to hide, there's nothing to fear.
So the center point, the centerpiece of scripture obviously is the Gospel, it's Jesus. And if people have reason to doubt Jesus, they'll see reason to doubt the whole Bible. One thing you hear people say is the Gospels, the four stories of Jesus, don't even agree with each other on everything. How many women were at the tomb on Easter Sunday, for example, and in what order did all of these things happen? What do we say as Christians to someone who says, "You have four versions of the same story that don't even line up. How can you tell me this is the truth?" What's your response?
Wes Huff: Yeah, it's an interesting observation, isn't it? That we have four Gospels. If it was only one unified story, we'd only need one. But I think that is... it's something unique within ancient history. There are very few individuals that we have that much kind of biographical information and different points.
I would say that actually what we get is a unique picture because the different authors are coming at different angles on the same stories, and they have different intentions and audiences in mind. So actually, it gives us a different perspective on what is going on regarding the historical Jesus that allows us to find out who Jesus was, maybe even better than if we only had one.
And because the authors draw on different points, right? Like Matthew has a very particular perspective where he is attempting to look at Jesus from a Jewish perspective and he is seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of Moses, as the fulfillment of David. When Moses does things like he goes up on a mountain to receive the law, Jesus goes up on a mountain to give the law. There's all these connections with Moses and Jesus that are being drawn out by Matthew.
Luke has an angle in mind. He's a very rigorous, careful historian. Mark historically is referred to as a traveling companion of Peter. And so he records that particular perspective from Peter, which is very interesting because Peter doesn't look very good in the Gospel of Mark. So that kind of-
Eric Huffman: Self-deprecating.
Wes Huff: Yeah, yeah, gives that. And then I think John is coming around later knowing that the other apostolic witness has probably passed away, he's probably the last apostle. And so he goes, "Okay, I'm not gonna repeat what everyone else is saying. Let me give you the rest of the story. Maybe from a way you haven't heard it before."
So I think this is like, this is the diamond with the different kind of facets to it. That we can look at it and we could say, you know, this is really unique to have this perspective in this picture and to have these different eyewitness testimony angles on the person of Jesus. And that only helps us to understand. It's not a Polaroid, it's not an abstract painting. It's much more like a fresco where there's room for interpretation in terms of the angles and the light and all these different things. But that doesn't mean that there isn't one image.
Eric Huffman: I agree. I love it. Honestly, I'm like you. I'm kind of wired to be a skeptic. And even now as a Christian, I'm skeptical about everything. I try to keep it healthy, productive doubts and not the cyclical, cynical ones. But if I were a skeptic looking at the Bible and it was four versions of the same story that lined up perfectly, just verbatim, four different repetitive stories, I'd be way more cynical about the Bible than I am with these different angles. Even if it was just one consolidated, uniform story, I'd be way more slow to accept it as truth.
I think for a true skeptic, having these four different vantage points on the same story is actually kind of helpful. It's kind of refreshing, even when they don't always line up perfectly. They line up on what matters, and that's obviously Jesus and His identity and what He came to do.
On that topic as we wrap here, Wes, you've been masterful at fielding questions regarding Jesus and His mission, but also His exclusivity, His uniqueness, how He's not one of many gods, He's the one true God, and that has implications for all of us. How do you respond to those kinds of questions about people that are like, "You're telling me Jesus is the only way and that's a bridge too far for me"? What do you say to someone with that line of questioning?
Wes Huff: I mean, I say truth by its very nature is exclusive. We can bristle with that, but that doesn't make it any less of a reality. There are certain things that are subjective and there are certain things that are objective. I can say two plus two is four and you can say two plus two is six. And that might not in the moment have any drastic implications until we start to do our taxes. And it really does have implications, right?
So there's an objectivity to certain aspects of reality. I can't just decide if I'm a diabetic that one day I don't need insulin. That actually my body is, you know, in my own view and opinion and in my worldview, insulin really isn't that helpful. It might actually be damaging to me. The opposite would be true, wouldn't it?
I think we need to follow the facts where they may lead and truth sometimes is inconvenient, right? I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, "If I wanted happiness, a good cigar and a bottle of scotch could get me there." That's why he wrote an autobiography called Surprised by Joy, because he was pursuing the truth and he actually thought that it was going to kind of put a damper on his life. And it didn't. He was surprised by joy.
But I think it's the exclusivity of Christ that might often feel controversial to us, but I don't think it's any less controversial. Everybody is going to exclude something. And the person who says that Christ is not the only way is then excluding me. So, you know, we're all just playing games to a certain degree in that.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, that's true. But what is it specifically about Jesus that makes His message so hopeful for everybody? I think the common critique would be, "He just came for a few people, you know, Christians, and everybody else is just, you know, toast." What is it about Jesus and His message that people really need to hear in terms of its exclusivity, but also its inclusivity?
Wes Huff: Yeah, well, I said when I was on the Flagrant podcast earlier this year, when this question was brought up, I said that Christianity is inclusive, although the call is "all can come." And you come as you are, but Jesus loves you too much to leave you where you are. And so in that sense, the call is unconditional, everybody is invited to come, but it's not unconditioned that there you do... all you need to do is give up your life, right? Take up your cross and follow Jesus.
In one sense, you don't need to do anything because Christ has done it all. However, you are saved by works; they're just Jesus's work. And it's the accepting of that work and the realization that I can't do it on my own. I'm not gonna get there, but I have this freedom. I have this release in Jesus Christ that I'm not saved by my works, but I'm saved for works. And it's when I realize how free the gift of God of eternal life truly is, I can't help but have that change my life.
The reason why Christianity is so amazing, I think, is because there's this giant historical component to it. I think we can see the historical Jesus play out in real time, but it goes beyond that because Jesus has changed my life. He has made me a new creation. That goes beyond historical facts because, in one sense, it's subjective, but it's also supernatural. There's a natural aspect of it that I love.
I love digging into the manuscripts and the history and the internal and external verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, likeliness, and probability. But I think that only gets you so far because it's no less about that, but it's also so much more about that. You're not saved by just believing these things. It's putting your trust in Jesus. It's being made a new creation. God has taken my heart of stone. He's giving me a heart of flesh. That's a work that goes beyond anything that I think I could argue anybody into in terms of the Kingdom of God.
Eric Huffman: Amen. It really is the best thing the world's ever heard. The Gospel, there's nothing like it. And I know everybody expects Christians and preachers and people like me to say that, and you as well. And yet the difference that He's made in my life, I can't begin to quantify that He would save a sinner like me, just a filthy, selfish, depressed sinner like me. That He would save me and give me this opportunity to talk with you about Him and hopefully have this conversation fall on other people's ears and hearts and maybe change their lives too. I can't imagine anything greater than grace. It's really the heart of the Gospel is the grace of God shown to us in Jesus. Thank you for that, Wes. You've blessed me with that message. You're a preacher in addition to a great apologist and scholar.
One last question, brother. I know there's people watching right now that probably are in with Jesus and they're following Him faithfully, but they love people who are not Christians, and they want to have better conversations with them. As someone that's been dedicating your life to having better conversations with unbelievers, what kinds of advice or wisdom would you share with them about preparing themselves to have more fruitful, productive conversations with folks who disagree?
Wes Huff: I would say we need to make sure that we're being good listeners, that we're asking good questions. And we need to realize that there's a questioner behind questions. A lot of people often ask questions for reasons that may not actually be the reason they're asking the question. And so I think we need to be wise as serpents and as tender as doves. Not everybody is going to be a wolf. In my experience, most people are sheep and, you know, the wolves in sheep's clothing are very few and far between. Most people are misled. Most people misunderstand. Most people themselves are searching.
I think it was G.K. Chesterton who said that the man who walks into the brothel is looking for God. People are... it's not a matter of if you're worshiping, it's what you're worshiping. And so as image bearers, we're looking for something that's gonna fulfill us, especially in this day and age where questions of meaning and morality and identity are so on the forefront of our society. I think we have a unique opportunity to really listen to what people are asking, how people are talking, what is moving people, issues of justice, and saying, "Wow, those are really good topics. Why do you think that's in the news? Why do you think that's the discussion of the day? Why do you think we're so moved by this?" You know, who put that lump in your throat? I think it was Jesus.
I'm always trying to be a purposeful listener, to listen for the sake of actually trying to feel where people are at and to speak to people, not at people. That was a mistake that I made very early on. I thought I needed to look at the Gospel. You know, the Gospel is... a friend of mine, Tim Barnett, works for Stand to Reason. He has a great line where he says that the Gospel is like a flashlight. And the main purpose of a flashlight is to show people how to get out of a dark area, right? You can use the flashlight as a club. You definitely can. And maybe sometimes you need to. But the main function, the normative function of the flashlight is to shine the light. And that's the Gospel message.
So, unfortunately, sometimes we get into situations and we think the flashlight is a club. And sometimes we get so used to using it as a club that we forget that it actually has a button that we can turn on. But ultimately, the flashlight is how we got out of the dark. Let's allow people to also know where the path out of the darkness is.
Eric Huffman: Amen, yeah. I love the idea, just keeping in mind behind every question is a questioner, a human being, an image bearer with all kinds of life experiences, maybe some pain and difficulty that shaped their worldview and shapes their questions, but it's a human being that God wants in His family. So shine the light, turn on the flashlight. I love it, brother.
Wes, thank you so much for spending this time with us today. Thank you so much for your ministry. I hope everybody watching will say a prayer for you and your family and your safety. Just as you continue to share the Gospel with the world, I hope everybody will watch that video series, Can I Trust the Bible? You can find that on YouTube. Is there anything else you want to tell the folks about before we wrap up? How to find you or how to follow your work.
Wes Huff: Yeah, if you go to WesleyHuff.com or apologeticscanada.com, both places will guide you to what I'm doing and where we as a ministry are gonna be.
Eric Huffman: Awesome. All right. Thank you again, Wes. God bless you, brother. Keep going.
Wes Huff: Yeah, I appreciate that. It's a pleasure.