Wes Huff Knows Christians Won't Check His Historical Claims

When Wes Huff appeared on Mikhaila Peterson's podcast, his historical arguments sounded compelling—but how well do they hold up when someone actually checks them?

original video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSumq-kIlqg

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0:00:00 Introduction: Evaluating Wes Huff and Michaela Peterson
0:01:35 Michaela Peterson's Journey to Faith & Vibes
0:09:05 The Alexander the Great Comparison DEBUNKED
0:12:19 Roman Historians & Proximity to Jesus
0:14:02 Does Popularity Prove the Resurrection?
0:17:37 Where Did the 11 Disciples Actually Go?
0:21:20 The Martyrdom Argument & Contradictions
0:26:42 C.S. Lewis's Trilemma Missed a Major Option
0:29:05 The Reality of Peterson Academy
0:32:15 The Gnostic Gospels vs. Canonical Texts

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Is your course aimed at secular people or Christians, or is it kind of applicable to everybody?

SPEAKER_03 0:05

My attempt is just to make it relevant to anybody who's who's tuning in. I mean, I obviously have the bias of the fact that I'm a Christian. I believe this stuff is true. And so I'm coming at something like the 66 books of the Bible with a presupposition that I believe that they're inspired. I believe that they have the mark of the divinity on them.

SPEAKER_05 0:23

At least he's up front about just presupposing that it's true, not pretending to be coming at this from a neutral position.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

One of the reasons why people have resonated with the material that I put out in the world is because I'm not actually that smart. I'm just really interested in the topic. Me too, Wes. Me too.

SPEAKER_05 0:48

Welcome to Apologia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians. And today we're back to the growing tiresome trope of not quite a PhD apologist, Wes Huff, appearing on a massive non-religion-centric podcast where both the host and the audience are entirely unequipped to know that what he's telling them is incomplete or even false in framing or substance. The most recent entry is Wes's appearance with Michaela Peterson, daughter of pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson.

SPEAKER_03 1:21

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on what we mean when we say trust and compare. Like I think sounds like my dad.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_05 1:30

Also known for advocating unorthodox and potentially unsafe dietary practice.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

In 2016, I went on this like really extreme paleo diet, and I was like, it's cured my autoimmune disorder. I'm off of all my medications. They're like, okay, Michaela. So that already happened. And then it was like, oh, my autoimmune disorder is back after Phi C. But now I'm on a meat diet. I'm on an all-meat diet. And my autoimmune disorder is in remission. I swear it's in remission because of the diet. Uh they're like, okay, Michaela, like I'm we see that it's working, but and Selena was like, God. I think God is real. They're like, okay, so now you're on the God train. And I was like, eh, whatever, whatever. You guys keep suffering.

SPEAKER_05 2:11

And who has relatively recently declared herself to be a Christian of some sort.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

I can I can remember in grade four somebody coming up to me and asking me if I believed in God. And I said, I don't know. So I probably identified as an agnostic until last August. And agnostic as in completely open to it, understanding that religion has value and hoping that one day I could find some sort of support like God that I'd heard Christians talking about. And then I had a I had like way too many really absurd experiences that I couldn't wrap my head around where I was like, my life doesn't make any this doesn't make any sense. This doesn't make any sense. This is too weird, like too coincidental. And that happened for like five years, like every day. I'm not sure how this resonates with a Christian audience, but I I took a lot of psychedelics, and I do think the psychedelics opened my mind to the possibility that there was something there I couldn't see. The reason that I've gravitated towards Christianity is well, mostly because that's the religion I'm most familiar with. And then also because of my husband, and also because of the feeling I get around other Christians. So that's a big part. I've always picked up on like I called them vibes. 99% of the Christians I've met give me really comforting vibes. I met somebody there and he's Christian. And he was like, Well, how are you managing with all these problems? And I was like, I'm not managing well. I'm really not managing well. And he was like, Well, that's why you need God. And I said, Okay, well, that's fine and dandy. So I was like, Well, I don't know. Like, yeah, okay, maybe that sounds great, but I don't know how to get there. Uh, and he said, just beg for him to reveal himself to you. Like, ask him to, that's what he said, ask him to reveal himself to you. And so I went back home and and like prayed and was like, Really, please, if you're out there, please show yourself. And the next day, and then I know like other people's experiences aren't this like obvious, maybe, but for me, a whole there were like four really parts of my life that were heading in a bad direction, and they all kind of turned to head in a better direction. And it was like, well, that could have happened, I guess, but I think that was God, and that was enough for me. I was like, things have been bad every day for years, like for my entire life. And I woke up feeling like calm and like kind of lifted, um, which I think was the Holy Spirit. And then everything was great for about two weeks. So I was praying, I was reading the Bible, I was like, this is fantastic, everything's working out. And then two weeks later, I was like, just a little bit, just one little thought that was like, well, you know, am I being silly? There are actual like more, more logical explanations for why things turned around. I went to sleep that night and I woke up at 5 30 in the morning and I had a dream. And this loud, thundering voice just yelled, do it in the dream. And I woke up at 5 30 in the morning and was like, I think I just got yelled at by God. I think that just happened. That's what it felt like. And then it occurred to me that I think what it meant was just go all in. Don't do this like 75% in. Anyway, so it's been a wild month. I'm doing really well. It's just, I'm like, I'm a little bit shocked. So one of the really intense I don't know what word to use other than spiritual things I went through, like when I got saved, because it was it was a very dramatic experience for me, was God telling me, and not in a like voice exactly, but showing me that I had been trying to rationalize like all the way down something that I couldn't rationalize. And I think it says in the Bible that you need faith is part of it, faith is faith is all of it. So I th what like what changed for me was obviously if somebody can somebody could explain the historical evidence, but I kind of knew the historical evidence, and that's not what really did it for me, even though that's what I thought would I needed to have that extra step of you have faith that this was real and faith that we were created in the image of God and everything that has to do with that, and that's part of what saves you. And that's what I was shown when I was saved, and I was like, oh, okay. And it was like this weight was lifted that I didn't have to understand all the way to the bottom, and that not only did I not have to, but I wasn't able to. Like I there was there's no way to to prove it. So I I think um it was kind of a roundabout answer, but I think a lot of people are stuck on proving why it makes sense all the way to the bottom when part of it is that you you need faith, and you can't explain something like God all the way to the bottom.

SPEAKER_05 7:12

So, whatever you think of that, Michaela doesn't claim to have come to faith through intellectual pursuits or having been convinced by arguments. She had experiences she attributes to the Christian God, and she is not burdened with knowledge about the details of the faith she professes.

SPEAKER_02 7:31

I grew up like with my dad telling me the psychological significance behind some of these Old Testament stories. He was always reading in the King James Version, and as a kid, I was like, oh my gosh, this is a lot. I'm not really sure what's going on. But then I felt like when I first became a Christian, I felt like I was cheating using using the ESV. Because I was like, I get it, it resonates, it feels good. Right. But like, am I am I doing things? I don't know, yeah, the easy way or something.

SPEAKER_05 7:58

As my neighbors to the south will say, so be it Joe Rogan, Sean Ryan, Stephen Bartlett, or Pierce Morgan, Michaela Peterson fits that perfect West Huff platform, a place where even modest knowledge is impressive and where he will not be challenged.

SPEAKER_02 8:16

I've read this before and just skimmed over that part. That's terrifying.

SPEAKER_05 8:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

I don't think I've heard that before. Wow. I don't know what I was expecting for an answer, but I wasn't expecting that answer.

SPEAKER_03 8:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

And I didn't know that that section from Paul, so that's that's cool. That makes sense. That makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_05 8:34

Um we'll skip the parts that were more pastoral than apologetic and see what Wes will come up with this time.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

I think I first saw you. I saw you before you went on Rogan, but I saw some of your stuff on Instagram and I was like, yes, this is the kind of thing that would have helped me, uh, the like the logical part of my brain uh before I became a Christian. And I didn't really see a lot of that or really any of that online. I probably could have dug deeper, but I wasn't a Christian, so I wasn't digging that deep.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

Not looking deeply is a theme here. So I do comparative analysis with a number of ancient literary works, but then because my area is it's New Testament studies formally, but it kind of crosses over into early church history and then kind of broader antiquity in general. I I get away with talking about a bunch of different stuff.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Wow. Okay. That's very niche. That's cool though.

SPEAKER_03 9:27

That's cool though.

SPEAKER_06 9:28

That's cool though.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

That's cool, that's cool. But um, just based on the text, like from a historian's perspective, uh, how does the Bible compare to other ancient documents that we do trust?

SPEAKER_03 9:39

Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on what we mean when we say trust and compare. Like I think Sounds like my dad.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

Yeah, pulling that out here.

SPEAKER_03 9:48

Um, but but I think you know, the the definitions matter in the sense of how we're defining those categories. Uh when we're talking about someone like Alexander the Great, we're waiting about 450 years between when he lived and when our first kind of comprehensive biographical material comes up. So there's a guy named Arian who who wrote our first kind of comprehensive biography.

SPEAKER_05 10:09

Ah, so West came across as someone who gives careful nuance by asking for the definitions of trust and compare. But he slides in the phrase comprehensive biographical material here so that he can be technically correct in the sentence he's saying, while simultaneously being blatantly deceptive about the point he's trying to make. Yes, the earliest surviving full-length narrative accounts of Alexander's life are from writers like Arian in the 2nd century CE, writing about 450 years after Alexander's death in 323 BCE. And there are others like Plutarch, Diodorus Sicullus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, and Justin. However, Arian explicitly relied on much earlier sources, especially works by Ptolemy Soter, Aristobulus of Cassandria, Nearchus, and Callisthenes. Most of these earlier works are now lost, but we know they existed because later authors quote, discuss, and sometimes disagree with them. In fact, there was a substantial body of Alexander literature within decades of his death. Scholars often refer to the Alexander historians, contemporaries and near contemporaries, who wrote accounts in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC. And unlike the so-called biographies of Jesus, Arian actually names and evaluates his sources. He repeatedly tells readers when Ptolemy and Aristobulus agree or disagree, and explains why he trusts one source over another. The gospel authors don't identify their sources in this way, which means historian can scrutinize Arian more directly than they can the Gospels. This is not an analogous situation that Wes is painting.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

And it's not that we distrust that biographical material. There's reasons to believe that Arian got significant details about Alexander the Great's life right. Yes, because of his many citations of earlier works.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

But it was 450 years later.

SPEAKER_03 12:06

It was, and that's not unusual for the ancient world. I think because we live in such a hyper-literate culture, we assume that people should be writing things down during the lifetimes of individuals. Yeah. Right. And that's just not how things operated in the ancient world.

SPEAKER_05 12:20

Maybe not generally, but the Alexander the Great example isn't a good one because there was plenty of writing and also inscriptions and coins and statues and other archaeological evidence from Alexander's lifetime.

SPEAKER_03 12:34

Some of the best biographies we have by individuals uh like uh Vileus Peterculus or Tacitus or Suetonius or Cassiodio of the Roman emperors are coming in periods after they actually lived, sometimes centuries afterwards, right? And and this is just the norm.

SPEAKER_05 12:51

Velais Peterculus was not writing centuries after the emperors he described. He was a contemporary of Augustus and personally served under Tiberius. Tacitus wrote roughly 80 years after Augustus' rise to power, not centuries afterward. Cassius Dio indeed wrote about 200 years after Augustus.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

And the fact that we're waiting a few decades for Jesus is actually closer in proximity. And interestingly enough, I would argue, within the kind of cultural and uh uh literary memory of Jesus than the vast majority of the people who we would just kind of assume existed within the ancient world.

SPEAKER_05 13:34

Of course, none of this affects positively or negatively the accuracy of what is written in the gospels. Pointing to works that are worse in some way doesn't somehow make yours good. Being the smartest kid in a dumb class is no reason to brag.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

Okay. Um, I've got a whole bunch of questions that I spent a bit of time on. Okay. And I don't was like sometimes I want to have a conversation, but there are a bunch of things I actually want answered. So I'm gonna run through a few of them.

SPEAKER_05 14:02

Okay. We're gonna skip through the in-house matters, like which version is best, the ethics of ending one's own life, divine sovereignty, speaking in tongues, and losing one's salvation.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Give me a sec. Did I delete it? Okay, I can just remember it.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

Okay. Best historical evidence for the resurrection.

SPEAKER_03 14:26

Oh, okay. Best historical resurrec uh evidence for the resurrection. I mean, I take I take kind of a cumulative approach to the resurrection in that one of the best pieces of evidence that I think speaks to the tangibleness of the resurrection is that you and I, Michaela, are talking about it 2,000 years later.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:49

In that there are other messianic movements in the ancient world. But I bet you couldn't name any of the individuals involved in those.

SPEAKER_05 14:58

No slight to Michaela, as it's just not her field of interest or study. But I don't think she could name six of the twelve disciples or even list the books of the Bible, even though she professes to be a Christian. Her personal ability to name Messianic movements in the ancient world isn't really evidence of anything less.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

And there's a reason why we're asking questions about Jesus of Nazareth and Nara and not Simon Barkokva. And that's because Simon Barkokva led a revolt and died, and his movement died with him. And so I think there's something unique about the movement of Jesus that requires an explanation for what's going on.

SPEAKER_05 15:37

Yes. What's unique is that it's popular, not that it's supernatural. We can explain why Christianity is popular without requiring that a resurrection happened. Popularity is incredibly common. There are many things in human history that became popular that are based on lies or mistakes. It's also common that out of any collection of like concepts, groups, or organizations, that one becomes disproportionately more well known than the others. In the mid-1970s, a company called MITS created the Altair 8800, the first truly personal computer. ImSI appears in the movie War Games. Chromeco, North Star Computers, and Processor Technology all came and went. But here we are, still only talking about Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world. Zet Divine? Also in the 1970s, there were many sci-fi movies like Logan's Run, The Black Hole, Battle Beyond the Stars, Buck Rogers in the 25th century, and Silent Running. But only Star Wars has a day on the calendar. May the force be with you. So therefore the force is real? Or maybe you prefer religious figures from 6th century Arabia like Museima, Tulaya, Saja, Alaswar Al-Ansi. Yet all we hear about today is the Prophet Muhammad, or 19th century visionary prophets like Jemima Wilkinson, Ann Lee, William Miller, or John Humphrey Noyes. Yet here we are only talking about Joseph Smith from a crowded environment around India of wandering teachers, philosophers, and ascetics like Makali Gosala, Ajita Kesakumbali, and Bakuda Chakayana, all we ever hear about is Buddha, these 2500 years later.

SPEAKER_03 17:20

In my investigation of something like Buddhism, it could have been another character who came up with the physical philosophical system that eventually was described as Buddhism.

SPEAKER_05 17:31

This is not an argument. Popularity and longevity do not demand supernatural explanations.

SPEAKER_03 17:38

Because we see the disciples scared and hiding when the crucifixion event takes place. We don't see that, Wes.

SPEAKER_05 17:47

That the disciples were scared and hiding is something claimed by the Gospels. It is not a fact to be explained. It's a pretty mundane claim, but let's not pretend that we know this outside of Christian propaganda literature. Peter, who's supposed to be the good guy, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:06

He is like Jesus' right-hand man, tells Peter, you're going to, you're going to deny me. And lo and behold, that's what he does, right? When push comes to shove, Peter decides three times to say, I don't even know who that Jesus guy is. Again, mundane and gratible, but still. And the disciples, the 11 of them, because Judas has gone and hung himself, are hiding in an upper room, scared and cowering. What takes them from that to being this incredible missionary force? To be able to go back into Jerusalem on something like the day of Pentecost, proclaiming the resurrection to a group of people who very well could have seen Jesus crucified.

SPEAKER_05 18:56

Here's where we can start branching up from the Bible to see what we have. In the authentic letters of Paul, we learn that two of these eleven men, Peter and John, presumably the son of Zebedee, are active in the church. That's it. That's all. That leaves nine men that Wes is claiming were proclaiming resurrection without a shred of evidence that these nine acknowledged the resurrection, experienced anything at all from Jesus after he died, that these nine spent a single minute preaching it. These nine drop from reliable history, never to be heard from again until legendary exploits a few centuries later. It's equally likely or more likely these nine went back home to fish or make a life or find the next messianic hopeful to hitch their wagon to. There are even passages like Matthew 28:17, where it says some disciples doubted, or Luke 24.11, where some disciples didn't believe them. These admissions are potentially there to appease the earliest adherents who might wonder why only two of the 11 are still involved in the church.

SPEAKER_03 20:01

Something happens, and I think there needs to, at minimum, be an accounting for that.

SPEAKER_05 20:07

I don't need to spend a single minute accounting for these men until Wes demonstrates that these men were doing the things he wants me to explain. And no one should let Wes or the other apologists get away with this.

SPEAKER_03 20:21

And you talk to secular scholars and they will grant, okay, the disciples had some sort of experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 20:28

Apologists always want to phrase the position of the scholars that the disciples had some sort of experience, smuggling in the inference that that was all eleven. What actual secular scholars say is that some of the disciples had some sort of experience. Maybe one disciple, maybe a few. This is an important distinction bordering on a flagrant misrepresentation. Right?

SPEAKER_03 20:55

Something motivated them to do this because it just seems a little bit crazy.

SPEAKER_05 21:02

I mean, it's not crazy at all, particularly in the clinical sense of the word. Grief hallucinations, individual visions, dreams, cognitive dissonance, moral injury, social contagion, and so on and so on are psychological phenomena that happen in otherwise mentally healthy individuals.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

There's the adage that uh uh liars make poor martyrs, in that you will die for something you you believe to be true, but something you know to be a lie, it's a lot harder to actually go to your grave to.

SPEAKER_05 21:35

Is Wes going to nuance for Michaela that of the eleven disciples, only Peter has strong evidence of martyrdom and that his death was from Nero framing Christians for a fire and nothing to do at all with his ideology? No, he is not, because he knows she's just gonna accept the exaggerated version that he's implying. Why be accurate and nuanced for an? Audience like this.

SPEAKER_03 22:01

Yeah, you won't push yourself that far. Yeah. So sometimes when people hear, you know, liars or sorry, yeah, liars make bad martyrs, point to something like suicide bombers or or those who flew the the planes into the towers on 9-11.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

True. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

And my answer to that is that those aren't martyrs, those are murderers. A. And B, they don't actually know definitively that what they're dying for is true. They might believe it's true, but the difference between them and the disciples is that the disciples both were there when Jesus died.

SPEAKER_05 22:33

Not two minutes ago, Wes said the disciples were not there when Jesus died.

SPEAKER_03 22:39

We see the disciples scared and hiding when the crucifixion event takes place.

SPEAKER_05 22:46

But more importantly, show me the evidence that James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alpheus, Simon the Zealot, or Judas, son of James ever claimed to have seen a resurrected Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Outside of you can't.

SPEAKER_05 23:03

I mean, you can't actually demonstrate that Peter or John claimed to have seen resurrected Jesus either when push comes to shove. Just that they were part of the church. We don't know what they believed. I don't need to explain things that Wes hasn't demonstrated.

SPEAKER_03 23:17

I think the breadth of the historical case for the credibility of the gospels is comprehensive enough.

SPEAKER_05 23:24

If you're a regular viewer of my channel, you may have seen my previous upload, which was a two and a half hour takedown of inspiring philosophy's self-vaunted six plus hour case for the reliability of the gospels.

SPEAKER_04 23:36

When we did that 15-part series on gospel reliability, we went through like data point after data point after data point of what conservative these evangelical fundamentalist scholars have put out. And no one addresses their points.

SPEAKER_05 23:50

No one addresses their points? Suffice to say, I'm unimpressed with the breadth of the historical case for the credibility of the gospels. So I'm not granting these details nor feeling compelled to explain them.

SPEAKER_03 24:03

That it gives us a basework to say that the disciples were not lying.

SPEAKER_05 24:08

I've probably beaten the lack of evidence for the disciples doing anything into the ground for today. But let's just be clear that the gospel authors weren't disciples, and that we don't have to assume the gospel authors were lying, per se. They were Greek-speaking men who never met Jesus, writing now stories about Jesus, inspired by what they've heard from others for theological, literary, and evangelical purpose.

SPEAKER_03 24:34

That they believed what they were doing to be true, and that the account for that, all of the kind of alternatives to Jesus' resurrection, I think ultimately fall short. Whether we're talking about group hallucinations.

SPEAKER_05 24:48

Why group hallucinations? A single individual hallucination, plus whatever Paul's vision was years later, is enough. We're not trying to explain group hallucinations until you demonstrate group appearances.

SPEAKER_02 25:03

That was great. I I already I had known about the like if you if you don't believe in the lie, then you're not going to be a martyr for it. I knew that, but I hadn't connected that to they had also seen him be crucified, which everybody basically even secular scholars believe.

SPEAKER_05 25:21

So not even Wes believes they saw Jesus crucified. Charitably, she means saw resurrected. But man, this is all just very sloppy. And being accepted like it's wondrous knowledge being disseminated from Wes as a divine intellectual giant. It just makes me sad. She doesn't know enough to question any of this.

SPEAKER_03 25:42

Yeah. And they know that it's costly. So a few, a few uh, you know, uh a short time after Pentecost, Stephen, who is, you know, part of this inner group, he's not one of the disciples, but he's part of this inner group, he is then proclaiming the you know the gospel message, and then he gets stoned to death. And the disciples see this, and so that's like a warning shot across the bow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 26:01

As far as non-miracle accounts go, the story of Stephen is one of the most universally rejected as non-historical stories of the New Testament. It's so obviously attempting to recreate Jesus for theological purposes with a character never heard from before or after, and retconning Paula to the scene. As far as arguments one could make that witnesses were putting themselves in harm's way, I'm not sure Wes could do worse than this.

SPEAKER_03 26:30

Maybe we can slow our role in this whole conversation on the Jesus stuff, but that's not what they do. They seem to be more empowered than ever.

SPEAKER_05 26:37

According to no reliable source Wes can point to, other than tradition and vibes.

SPEAKER_03 26:43

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity has the whole uh that what's referred to as the Lewissian trilemma. That Jesus is either a liar, he's a lunatic, or he's Lord. And and I think that's still I think that still applies today.

SPEAKER_05 26:56

It does not still apply today, because this trilemma demands that we first blindly accept that the most hyperbolic words written in the gospels accurately represent the words of the historical Jesus. Lewis left out the most obvious answer that these words are legend.

SPEAKER_06 27:14

If Jesus said he was God and knew he was wrong, he was a liar. If he said he was God and didn't know that he was wrong, then he was a lunatic. So if Jesus isn't either a liar or a lunatic, he has to be the Lord. He must be God. There's a problem with this argument. It's based on an unexamined premise. It assumes that Jesus called himself God. Did he? How would we know either way? The only sources for Jesus' sayings that are at all reliable are the four gospels of the New Testament. But scholars have known for a long time that these gospels are not always reliable in everything they relate. And so we'll have two questions. Do the early Gospels actually say that Jesus called himself God? And if they do say that, can we accept that as historically trustworthy?

SPEAKER_03 28:13

Though, of course, not everybody agrees that that actually happened, that Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection and then pulled it off.

SPEAKER_05 28:21

That's correct.

SPEAKER_03 28:22

Not all of us agree that happened. And I have a friend who likes to say the people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead.

SPEAKER_04 28:31

Is it Frank Turek? That sounds like Frank Turek. And I just have a personal policy, Hayden. If somebody predicts and accomplishes his own resurrection from the dead, I just trust whatever the guy says.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

That's good. I'm going to use that in conversations with people. Unsuspecting people.

SPEAKER_05 28:47

I hate to break it to you, Michaela, but on this topic, you are the unsuspecting person who has been tricked. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Who aren't Christians yet? I'm going to remember that. The Stephen part is good too. Because yes, and they see other people suffer for okay.

SPEAKER_05 29:02

That's perfect. She's so blindly accepting everything he says. It's painful.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

Okay. Um I'm going to wrap up, but I want to ask you a few PA questions.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 29:13

Uh like I said, I'm really glad you came to teach. I think people on the platform are going to be absolutely thrilled. And I've heard good things from everybody who was there.

SPEAKER_05 29:24

By PA, she means Peterson Academy. According to reviews, like this one at Slate. The Peterson Academy is an unaccredited, university-flavored subscription video platform built around Jordan Peterson's brand, where ideologically friendly talking heads sell long-form lectures as if they were a serious alternative to a bachelor's degree. It's Prager U Meets Masterclass for Peterson fans. Expensive, non-degree granting, structurally sloppy, and marketed with academic cosplay about world-class education and intellectual freedom that it doesn't come close to delivering. So say the reviewers.

SPEAKER_03 30:32

But I think that there's room for broadening the categories of how we educate people.

SPEAKER_05 30:37

Peterson has repeatedly pitched it as a way to get a degree equivalent education for roughly $4,000, around $4.99 a year. Framed as an antidote to idiot ideological nonsense and woke universities. The Better Business Bureau lists Peterson Academy is a non-accredited business with a C rating, citing complaints about false promises of college-level accreditation, price hikes, and lack of any system to contest decisions or safeguard against false claims.

SPEAKER_03 31:09

A lot of the universities are turning into diploma mills. And where education is becoming sort of this fuzzy category of you have a piece of paper or some letters behind your name, but you don't seem to have any actual knowledge, is becoming complicated. And so I think there's room for expanding the category of what we understand as post-secondary education.

SPEAKER_05 31:37

Wes is starting to sound like someone who's been too busy going on podcasts and making YouTube travel videos to actually complete his degree in the time allotted, and is therefore setting the stage for why it doesn't matter that he'll never actually finish or publish any peer-reviewed material. Or maybe not. Maybe his PhD is going great.

SPEAKER_03 32:01

That we do have the relevant historical, um, in the case of the New Testament, I think, you know, eyewitness accounts of who Jesus was, in juxtaposition to other books that were floating around bearing the names of Jesus and the apostles that just had no credibility. Well what are those? Okay, so like the Gnostic Gospels or things like that, like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas.

SPEAKER_02 32:26

I don't even know if I know about these.

SPEAKER_03 32:28

Oh, okay. So the podcast is not done.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

Okay, but then then it can be done. But what is this? Yeah, so there were other books at the time written by other eyewitness people.

SPEAKER_03 32:36

So Gnostic Gnostic literature often has Jesus, uh, he he's very secretive, and unlike the the more public ministry that we see in the biblical gospels, Jesus is whispering the secret knowledge into the ears of whoever is the claimed individual. Interestingly enough, it's never the individuals that are the key people in the biblical gospels. It's never uh Peter, James, and John. It's it's always the it's always Judas or Thomas or Philip.

SPEAKER_05 33:03

Could that be because, exactly to my point earlier, Peter, James, and John were known active members of the church, while these other disciples were nowhere to be found and could therefore be assigned personalities and beliefs that no one could check?

SPEAKER_03 33:18

But the Gospel of Thomas has a number of key features to it. It's uh I mean, right off the bat, all of these are written when people that are associated with their names are long dead. So Thomas is dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas is written, which is a key indicator that you know this isn't reliable.

SPEAKER_05 33:36

One of the many reasons why the canonical letters of James and First and Second Peter are not reliable. They too are written long after those men were dead.

SPEAKER_03 33:45

But then it has teachings like the last line of the Gospel of Thomas has one of the disciples saying to Jesus, Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life. Okay. So starting off on a good note. Yeah. And then Jesus replies and says, Don't worry, because I will make her appear male as you males. And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

Wow. They're really ahead of their time.

SPEAKER_03 34:13

I know, right? Just think how different Christianity could have been. Paul is preaching on Mars Hill at the Areopagus, and it seems that his audience of like Jewish of Greek philosophers are tracking with him until he drops the word anastasis, resurrection. And then all of a sudden they're like, no, we're out. And it's because an idea of a bodily resurrection, they're like, that's the opposite of what we're trying to attain. I'm stuck in a meat prison because I'm a spirit that is stuck in a body. And I death actually releases me from this. So this whole Jewish narrative idea of a resurrection of the dead, I want nothing to do with that. Actually, I get that. We're stuck in a meat prison. And so this is a platonic thought that is adopted by Gnosticism. And so they have no hang-up with Jesus being God. They just deny entirely that he was physical.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

Wow. It's no wonder you've gone deep on this. It's kind of tempting. It's kind of tempting. Wow, that was cool. Okay, Wesley, where can I direct people to online for anyone listening?

SPEAKER_05 35:19

Just literally any huge podcast where the host says they're Christian or wants their audience to think that they're Christian, but they don't actually understand the first thing about Christianity. Wes will be a guest on that show eventually. This is enough of that one. For more of this former Christian, take a look at the claims of Wes Huff. Tap on the thumbnail on screen now for the full playlist, and I'll see you over there. Until next time. Later.