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Wesley Huff is a young Protestant apologist who has recently had a lot of success. He has admirable qualities, and he does better than many other Protestant apologists do.
In this video, Jimmy Akin—in a friendly spirit of “iron sharpens iron” (Prov. 27:17)—take a look at both some of Wes’s strong points and his weak points, particularly when it comes to his knowledge of how the biblical canon was formed.
Transcript:
Coming Up
WES: Did the Protestants take books out of the Bible? Did the Roman Catholics put them in? Should there be 66 books in your Bible or 73? Let’s talk about that.
Let’s get to it!
Who Is Wes Huff?
Today I’m going to be interacting with some material from a young gentleman named Wesley Huff.
He lives in Toronto, Canada, he works with Apologetics Canada, and he’s currently working on a PhD in New Testament.
Recently, Wes came to prominence after he had a debate with an author named Billy Carson.
Carson has a bunch of unusual views, including the idea that Jesus was never crucified.
In the debate, Carson repeatedly cited something that he called “the Sinai Bible,” which he said predated the King James Bible and did not record Jesus being crucified.
I kept wondering, “What do you mean ‘the Sinai Bible’? That’s not standard terminology in biblical scholarship. Do you mean Codex Sinaiticus? Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century Greek manuscript, but citing it would make no sense, because the Gospels in Codex Sinaiticus record Jesus being crucified—just as the Gospels in other Bibles do.”
Wes was apparently wondering the same thing, because he said:
WES: You mind if I ask a clarifying question?
BILLY: Sure.
WES: When you say, “the Sinai Bible,” what are you referring to specifically?
BILLY: It’s the biblical text that was written. It made it into . . . you can actually look it up on Amazon. It’s a Bible called . . . I have a version at home . . . it’s called the Sinai Bible—from Mount Sinai. I am assuming that’s the mountain that they’re referencing there. But they put together their own version of the biblical text prior to the King James Version being put out.
WES: Sure. So when you refer to the Sinai Bible, would you be referring to Codex Sinaiticus like the codex that comes?
BILLY NODS.
WES: Okay. That’s why I was trying to get some clarification because . . . so you can actually go and see . . . Codex Sinaiticus is at the British Library. So you can go and see it. It’s on display, and the British Library has actually digitized the entire manuscript.
So I work with manuscripts in my linguistic work. I’m an expert on early Christian scribal culture, and particularly in Greek and Coptic manuscripts. I actually have a facsimile, so I have a photocopy that was done by the British Library of Codex Sinaiticus, that I work with in my office. So I have it here.
And the only reason I ask for clarification is because I want to make sure that what I am addressing is actually what you mean and not addressing something else. Because the Codex Sinaiticus in particular, is just a Greek . . . it’s a fourth century Greek manuscript. It comes from approximately between 325 and 350 A.D., and its text of the Gospels reads almost identical to the modern Greek text that we develop translations from.
So my curiosity is just simply in kind of exploring when you say that it denies the Crucifixion or that the Crucifixion isn’t there, I mean . . . I can go on, right now, Codex Sinaiticus, and I can look up the end of say, Matthew 27, where it has Jesus being crucified, and that’s in Codex Sinaiticus . . . or John 19 or any of the other ones. So I think my confusion is that it doesn’t read any differently.
This was a really great moment in the debate. The Gospels in Codex Sinaiticus do include the crucifixion of Jesus—contrary to Carson’s claims—and the fact Wes just turned around and grabbed a copy of it was particularly good. “Oh, look! I’ve got it here!”
Observers of the debate rightly concluded that Wes just devastated Carson’s position, and Wes got a lot of attention as a result.
Now, I don’t happen to agree with Wes on everything—I’m a Catholic and he’s a Protestant—and some people suggested that I have a dialogue or debate with him, and I’d be happy to do either!
But I don’t know that either will be happening any time soon, because Wes has been flooded with requests.
As he said in a video titled “I’m Probably Not Going to Debate You”:
WES: Since the Billy Carson thing, I have received, and I kid you not, hundreds, hundreds of debate challenges from all over the map, Billy Carson followers, atheists, Muslims, agnostics, Mormons, even other Christians who think that I’m translating the Bible wrong or using a Bible translation they don’t like. Everyone from just regular people who think I’m wrong to other people in related fields with PhDs themselves. So let me just quickly say something here. I don’t consider myself a debater. I’m not looking to become a professional debater. Have I done formal debates in the past? Yes. Will I do them in the future? Probably. But I am not obligated to agree to every debate challenge that comes across my desk, especially right now amidst the craziness that’s currently taking place in my life.
And I totally get that! I get more debate invitations than I can deal with, myself.
Now, I’ve seen some of Wes’s other material, and originally I wasn’t going to do a video interacting with it.
It’s clear that—unlike many in the Protestant apologetics world—he’s trying to be fair and balanced. He’s also being friendly and trying to keep the temperature low—all of which is great, and I want to give him his props!
But people have forwarded me some clips in which Wes makes a few mistakes, and that isn’t surprising, because everybody makes mistakes—and Wes is still a young guy who has room to grow.
However, it became clear to me in watching these clips that Wes’s knowledge is rather more circumscribed than I first thought. So I thought I’d do a friendly video interacting with some of his material.
As it says in Proverbs 27:17,
As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another (Prov. 27:17).
So let’s get started.
Wes on the Joe Rogan Podcast
Undoubtedly, Wes’s most well-known appearance after the Billy Carson debate is his appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, in which this exchange occurred:
JOE: So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that’s in the Bible?
WES: So that one is fascinating. So this isn’t true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the great Isaiah Scroll, previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Masoretic text, which is in the Middle Ages.
JOE: Whoa.
WES: Yeah. So it was literally a thousand years. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars—like I said, this isn’t true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls—but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word-for-word identical to the Masoretic text.
JOE:
Word-for-word.
WES: Word-for-word.
JOE: Wow.
WES: Yeah.
When I heard Wes say that, I was shocked, because the truth is that the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls is not word-for-word identical to the Masoretic Text version of Isaiah.
It’s very close, but it’s not word-for-word, and since the question Joe Rogan had just asked was “how similar” the Great Isaiah Scroll is to the later version, it’s simply false to say that it’s “word-for-word identical.”
A scholar ought to know that. It would be totally fair for Wes to say that it’s “almost identical,” but it’s not accurate to say “word-for-word identical.”
Now, we want to bear in mind certain factors, like what Gavin Ortlund pointed out:
GAVIN: Now, one thing we have to remember here is Wes was speaking not from a manuscript, but spontaneously and organically in a three-and-a-half-hour conversation, in a highly pressurized context. People who’ve not done that have no idea how challenging that is. He’s also speaking at a popular level, which requires necessary simplification. So I think we should give some grace to matters of precise wording for someone to clarify the exact details.
And I agree with all that, so we should understand this charitably.
However, as one becomes a scholar, one learns to include qualifiers—even when one is simplifying for a popular audience. And I think it’s fair to point out here that all Wes needed to do was include one additional word: “almost.” The Great Isaiah Scroll is almost word-for-word identical.
I’ve heard that Wes has walked back some of what he said in this regard, so that’s a good thing, and I know that he makes a point of including qualifiers on other occasions, as we’ll see.
Wes By Himself
Now let’s look at a video Wes did by himself called “Why Do Catholics and Protestants Have Different Books in Their Bibles?” And I invite you to note how—despite disagreements on this issue—Wes is trying to be fair and balanced, and he does a better job than many Protestant apologists do.
WES: The idea that Protestants somehow removed agreed upon books out of the Bible during the Reformation is completely inaccurate. In a similar vein, though, the idea that Roman Catholics wholesale just added these books as a response to the Reformers is also a little bit too simplistic. The history of the biblical canon is a long one and one that in some ways is more simple than you’d think, and in others far more complicated than you might imagine.
So Wes is trying to be fair here. He’s trying to recognize truth in both Catholic and Protestant claims regarding how we got the Bible—in contrast to many of the caricatures that we often find in both Protestant and Catholic apologetics, and I really appreciate that!
At the same time, I don’t think he’s achieved quite the right balance.
You’ll note that he said that the idea Protestants removed agreed upon books from the Bible is simply inaccurate, but then he says that the idea Catholics added these books in response to Protestantism is a little too simplistic.
That makes it sound like the charge against Protestants—that they removed agreed upon books—is flatly false. It’s just not true.
While the charge against Catholics—that they added books in response to the Reformation—is too simplistic, meaning it’s only partly false.
From a neutral, scholarly point of view, this is not an adequate way of characterizing the facts of history.
The truth is that—from the end of the 4th century forward—there was a broad consensus that the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament are Scripture. There was a series of councils in Rome and in North Africa that included them in their lists of what belongs in the canon. These councils summarized the consensus of opinion across the Christian territories where they were held, and that consensus remained throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, in the 1400s the Council of Florence reaffirmed those same books for the whole Church.
Now, none of these councils spoke infallibly, but if we’re talking about agreed-upon books, these books were broadly agreed upon as Scripture.
At the same time—because the matter had not yet been declared infallibly—there was a minority opinion that held that the deuterocanonical books were not canonical, and this minority opinion had some notable supporters, including some popes in the pre-Reformation period.
So—if we’re going to be objective and unbiased in our presentation of the evidence—we’d have to say that there was broad agreement that the deuterocanonicals are Scripture in this period but that there was also a minority position that disagreed.
It’s therefore not a balanced and accurate statement to represent this by saying that the claim that the Protestant Reformers removed agreed upon books is just false while the claim that Catholics added these books in response to the Reformation is merely simplistic.
The Protestant Reformers did remove books that the majority of Christians agreed to be canonical. Those books were in the Bibles that were in use prior to the Reformation. The early Protestant Reformers then moved these books to appendices with notes denying that they were canonical. And then later Protestants dropped the appendices and removed the books altogether.
And—while Catholics did infallibly declare these books to be Scripture following the Council of Trent in the 1500s, in response to the Protestant denial of them, this wasn’t “adding” them to Scripture. It was infallibly reasserting what had already been taught—for example at Florence—and they were then retained in Bibles, where they had been included in for centuries.
We can thus see how Wes is putting his thumb on the scale to favor the Protestant position in how he frames this issue.
Still, he is trying to be fair. For example, he says:
WES: It’s clear that there have been Christians since its earliest inception who did consider a lot of what would eventually be labeled the deuterocanonical books as Scripture.
So that’s good! However, Wes is not accurate in everything he says. For example, regarding Jews in Jesus’ day, he says:
WES: The Jews in this ancient period likewise consider these writings as valuable, but they did not consider them as scriptural.
Here Wes is himself engaging in an oversimplification. He’s speaking of “the Jews” as if they had a single position that universally rejected the deuterocanonicals as Scripture, and this is not true.
Wes appears to be making this claim based on outdated scholarship, but the truth is that the Jewish community did not have a single view of the canon of Scripture. Instead, different Jewish communities recognized different canons of Scripture, and some of these had fuzzy boundaries.
As I summarize in my book The Bible Is a Catholic Book, we can identify at least 5 different canonical traditions in first century Judaism:
- The Samaritan Tradition
- The Sadducee Tradition
- The Pharisee Tradition
- The Qumran Tradition
- And the Septuagint Tradition
We also have evidence for other, lesser-known traditions, but we’ll stick with these.
I won’t go through the details of what was in each tradition, but what happened was this:
- The Samaritans considered themselves Israelites rather than Jews, and so their tradition did not go on to influence mainstream Judaism.
- The Sadducees were too closely tied with the temple in Jerusalem to long survive its destruction, and so their tradition faded.
- The Qumran community was too fragile to long survive the war with the Romans, and so theirs also faded.
That left us with the Pharisee tradition—which was inherited by modern, rabbinic Judaism—and the Septuagint tradition—which was inherited by Christianity.
This is because 80 to 90 percent of the time—depending on how you count it—the New Testament quotes from the Septuagint when it quotes the Old Testament, and so it was natural for Christians to receive the books contained in the Septuagint, which includes the deuterocanonicals.
Meanwhile, the Pharisee canonical tradition was still in flux in the Christian age. There were certain books that were eventually included as Scripture—like Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Ezekiel—that some rabbis disputed. And there were other books that were eventually left out of the Jewish canon—like Sirach—that some rabbis considered Scripture. The Pharisee canon thus had fuzzy canonical boundaries, and it did not finish solidifying until the 3rd or 4th century—the same time that the Christian canon was solidifying.
This is something Gedaliah Alon discusses in his book The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age. It’s also discussed by Timothy Lim in his book The Formation of the Jewish Canon and by Lee McDonald in his two-volume set The Formation of the Biblical Canon.
In any event, as more recent scholarship has shown, there simply was no uniform opinion among Jews in the first century about what books were and were not Scripture.
WES: Jerome and Rufinus stood on the other side of Augustine and Innocent, though, promoting the narrower Jewish cannon and placing the deuterocanonical books in a secondary list of books that were useful, but not on the grounds of standing for faith, doctrine, and practice of the Church.
Protestant apologists often cite Jerome as an opponent of the deuterocanonical books—as Wes does here—but the reality is more complex.
While in some places Jerome denies the canonicity of certain deuterocanonical books, he also makes statements that are supportive of others.
For example, in his prologue to the deuterocanonical book of Judith, he tells his patrons that:
Because this book is found by the Nicene Council [of A.D. 325] to have been counted among the number of the sacred scriptures, I have acquiesced to your request—or should I say demand! (Prologue to Judith).
to translate it. So it appears that he deferred to what he understood the Council of Nicaea to say on the deuterocanonical book of Judith.
Similarly, Jerome defended the deuterocanonical portions of the book of Daniel on the basis of the Church’s authority. He wrote:
What sin have I committed in following the judgment of the churches? (Lives of Illustrious Men 59).
In the same place, he stated that what he said concerning Daniel in his prologues was what non-Christian Jews said but that it was not his own view. This may indicate that Jerome changed his mind or that his reporting of Jewish views doesn’t indicate his own opinion.
But—one way or another—it reveals that the situation with Jerome is more complex than Wes and other Protestant apologists make out.
Of course, Wes is entitled to his own opinion!
WES: I—as a Protestant—side with the Reformers, but not out of some blind allegiance. I believe the apocryphal books to be useful, but thoroughly uninspired.
And I respect Wes’s opinion, as I hope he would respect mine.
I also appreciate his efforts to be fair in his presentation of the facts, even if he does not always succeed in striking the exact right balance.
Now, after I initially watched that video by him, I didn’t plan on doing a response to his material. But upon watching some videos that other people sent me, I became more concerned.
Wes on Stand to Reason
For example, on the Stand to Reason YouTube channel, there is a clip in which Wes is discussing the number of books in the Jewish canon, and he says this:
WES: We have the exact same number. So you’ll see this number thrown around in ancient writings like Philo or Josephus, some of those early Jews who you may or may not recognize their names, and they throw either the number 22 or 23 out.
Now, this is a very small thing, and it may just be a slip of the tongue, but the number of books that is cited by ancient Jewish sources isn’t 22 or 23 but 22 or 24.
Also, Philo doesn’t use that number. In fact, there is a debate about what canon Philo honored, though Josephus does say 22 books.
These are just minor errors on Wes’s part, but they’re the beginning of what I noted as a rising number of errors in this area.
WES: And in fact, any Hebrew publication is translated by the same document that any Christian publication, it’s called the Hebraica Biblia Stratagensia. And so we’re dealing with the same texts.
This is another minor error that could be a slip of the tongue, but as you can see from the book Wes is holding in his hand, the name of the book is not Hebraica Biblia Stratagensia but Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
I can understand how an English-speaker might invert Biblia Hebraica into Hebraica Biblia, but I would not expect a scholar to convert Stuttgartensia—meaning of the city of Stuttgart, Germany—into Stratagencia. That’s not the kind of mistake I would expect a scholar to make—especially for a work that is as commonly used as this one.
In any event, a mounting number of errors.
Also, Wes seems to be exaggerating the role of this work. He appears to say that both Jews and Christians are using this work as the base text for their translations of the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament, but that would be an oversimplification.
The Jewish Publication Society does offer a straight translation of the BHS, but Christian publishers also use other texts, such as the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Biblia Hebraica Quinta, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the targumim, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, Theodotion, Symmachus, Aquila, and others. So the situation is more complex than what he says.
WES: It’s a key thing to understand that the Jews throughout history never thought that those other documents were scripture unanimously.
Notice how Wes gets in the qualifying word “unanimously” in here, so he does make an effort to include scholarly qualifiers.
Except, as we’ve seen, Jews did not unanimously accept any single canonical tradition prior to the time of Christ.
The only books we can say with confidence that they accepted unanimously are the five books of Moses. Other books are matters of debate, and the modern Jewish canon that we have did not finish crystalizing until the same time period that the Christian canon was crystalizing.
WES: Now, an interesting thing with some of these other writings, in fact I think it’s all of the other writings, is that they only exist in Greek. There are no Hebrew copies of say, Maccabees or Tobit. Those documents have their origin in Greek.
Here what Wes says is simply inaccurate. It is not true that all of the deuterocanonicals originated in Greek.
Sirach, Baruch, and 1 Maccabees were written in Hebrew. We have part of the Hebrew of Sirach, and Origin and Jerome note that 1 Maccabees was originally in Hebrew.
Judith and Tobit were both written either in Hebrew or Aramaic. Fragments of Tobit in both languages survive, and Jerome used an Aramaic version of Tobit when translating it for the Vulgate.
The only two books that appear to have been written in Greek are 2 Maccabees and Wisdom, and that’s not a challenge to their canonicity since Greek had become a Jewish language by this point, and the entire New Testament is written in Greek.
WES: And we can also look at things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls included all of what would include what we would consider our Old Testament apart from Ruth. And I don’t think that necessarily proves anything that they didn’t think Ruth was Scripture or something.
So here we have another minor error that could be yet another slip of the tongue—though frankly these are getting to the point that I’m afraid that I have to conclude Wes just doesn’t know this area as well as he needs to.
It’s not true that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain texts from every protocanonical book except Ruth. There are texts from at least four different copies of Ruth.
What Wes should have said is that there is text from every protocanonical book except Esther and Nehemiah—although Nehemiah may have been considered part of Ezra.
Wes is also omitting the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain texts from numerous deuterocanonical books—as well as other books, some of which the Qumran community considered canonical—like Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and the Temple Scroll, as James VanderKam discusses in his book The Dead Sea Scrolls Today.
Getting back to Esther, though, while its absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls doesn’t prove that the Qumranites didn’t regard it as Scripture, there are significant reasons to think this was the case.
Esther was one of the last books to be canonized, and it was opposed by some Jewish rabbis in the early centuries A.D. The protocanonical version of Esther never refers to God at all. And the book of Esther is all about the holiday of purim, which was not on the calendar used by the Qumran community—and the Qumran covenanters were fanatics about their calendar, so you can see why they might not regard as authoritative a book about a holiday they didn’t recognize.
WES: So I think we can say definitively that the Jews in Jesus’ day had the same canon of scripture that we have as our Old Testament.
No, we can’t say that—much less say it definitively—as the example of Esther illustrates, and as recent scholarship has showed regarding the fluid canonical traditions within Judaism in this period.
Now, the mistakes Wes has been making thus far tend to be small ones, and I don’t want to exaggerate their individual significance, but they’re so numerous that I think it’s clear that Wes does not have a firm grasp of the material that he’s discussing.
Wes on Melissa Dougherty
In today’s episode, I want to look at one more clip involving Wes. This one is from an interview he did with Melissa Dougherty’s YouTube channel. The video is called “Five Myths About the Bible (And How We Got It).”
We start with a question from Melissa.
MELISSA: Myth number three: The Catholic Church—the Roman Catholic Church—gave us our Bible. What are your thoughts on that?
So before we get to Wes’s response, I’ll answer Melissa’s question, and then we’ll see how well Wes does with it.
“Roman Catholic”
To start with, we need to be clear on our terminology. Melissa asked for a response to the statement that the Roman Catholic Church gave us our Bible.
Properly speaking, the phrase “Roman Catholic” means a member of the Latin or Roman rite of the Catholic Church. There are many other rites that are part of the Catholic Church, such as the Maronite rite, the Chaldean rite, the Syro-Malabar rite, and so forth. All of them are in union with the pope, but none of them are Roman.
Therefore—properly speaking—it would be correct to say that the Roman Catholic Church did not give us the Bible, because the Latin rite of the Catholic Church did not uniquely give us the Bible. It was an something that the entire Catholic Church was involved in.
But this is not what Melissa is asking. She is using the term Roman Catholic in another sense. This usage is an outgrowth of Reformation polemics. After Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church, it became common in England to use insults like Romanist, Romish, and papist to refer to Catholics. Then, as the Online Etymology Dictionary notes:
Roman Catholic is attested from c. 1600, a conciliatory formation from the time of the Spanish Match, replacing Romanist, Romish which by that time had the taint of insult in Protestant England.
So the term Roman Catholic started as an attempt to be less insulting, but—because of what linguists refer to as the euphemism treadmill—it began to pick up the connotations of an insult again, as euphemisms tend to do.
These connotations have faded somewhat—to the point that even now some Catholics use the term—but the connotations are still there, particularly when Protestants insist on using the term Roman and don’t want to leave the proper term Catholic by itself. In any event—on this usage—the term Roman Catholic is simply a synonym that was introduced by Protestants for the historic term Catholic.
The Catholic Church and the Bible
So what if we pose Melissa’s question in those terms? Did the Catholic Church give us the Bible?
This statement can be understood as either true or false depending on what one means by it.
It would be understood as false if one took it to mean that:
- God did not give us the books of the Bible or that
- The books of the Bible gained their inspired authority from the Catholic Church.
Neither of those claims would be true because Christians of all ages would acknowledge that God gave us the books of the Bible and that they have authority for us because they are divinely inspired. These points are not in dispute and are agreed to by Catholics just like other Christians.
However, if one is asking about what role the Catholic Church played in the history of the Bible, the statement that the Catholic Church gave us the Bible can be understood as true in at least two senses:
- The books of the Bible were handed on or written by members of the Catholic Church, and
- The Catholic Church served as the means by which God identified these books as having inspired authority.
The books of the Old Testament were handed on as divinely authoritative by the apostles and their associates, who were the first two generations of the Catholic Church. And the books of the New Testament were written by apostles and their associates—again members of the first two generations of the Catholic Church.
At this point, there was no separation of the Church into the divisions that exist today, and the term catholic was introduced in the late first century to refer to the Church as a united whole—in contrast to local bodies that separated from it. Thus we find the term Catholic Church as an already established usage at the beginning of the second century in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch, around A.D. 108. He writes:
Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be;
just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church (Smyrneans 8:2).
Some would argue that it was later in the second century that the term acquired this precise nuance, but it remains the case that from this very early period onward, the term Catholic Church was used to refer to the Church that Jesus had founded in the first century.
Members of the first two generations of the Church thus handed on the books of the Old Testament as authoritative for Christians, and they wrote the books of the New Testament, and so one may correctly say that the Catholic Church gave us the Bible in this sense.
They also gave it to us in the sense that the Catholic Church was the means by which God made it clear which books belong to the Bible. This was a process that took centuries, but God guided individual Christians and bishops, and later councils, to recognize the contents of the biblical canon.
By the early 300s, the canon had partly but not fully solidified. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea summarized common Christian opinion by using three categories: the accepted books, the rejected books, and the disputed books.
Some books—like the four Gospels—were accepted by all orthodox Christians.
Some books—like the Gnostic writings—were rejected by all orthodox Christians.
And some books were disputed, with some orthodox Christians accepting them and others rejecting them. In Eusebius’ day, these included books that were later canonized—like Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation.
Other works that some orthodox Christians thought canonical—like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Gospel of the Hebrews—were not ultimately canonized.
The situation was clearer by the late 300s, when a series of councils agreed on the precise books that we have in the Bible today—both Old Testament and New Testament. These included the Council of Rome in A.D. 382 under Pope Damasus I, the Council of Hippo in 393, the Council of Carthage in 397, Pope Innocent I in 405, and another Council of Carthage in 419.
These popes and councils included all and only the books we have today in the New Testament. They also included both the protocanonical and the deuterocanonical books Catholics have in their Old Testaments.
This general agreement on the books of the canon remained in place for the next 1000 years, though there was a minority position that disagreed with the deuterocanonical books.
The Council of Florence (1431-1449) reaffirmed this traditional canon. And after the Protestant Reformation started and the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the matter was settled infallibly.
Through all these events, the Holy Spirit was guiding the Church to recognize which books have inspired authority for Christians, and so it is true to say that the Catholic Church gave us the Bible in this sense. It was God’s instrument in identifying the inspired books.
In particular, Church authorities identified the 27 books we have in the New Testament that is broadly used by Christians today, and they identified the Old Testament books that are used by Catholics, although Protestants rejected this identification and adopted the canon used by the European Jews who they were familiar with, though the Jewish canon had not been finalized until centuries into the Christian age.
Wes’s Answer
So now let’s look at Wes’s response to this question. What does he think of the idea that the Catholic Church gave us the Bible?
WES: It’s not true of the historical data. I think it’s even a little bit anachronistic. So an anachronism is to use an idea or a term in a specific time that doesn’t fit.
And I know many Roman Catholics will push against this, but I think even using the term Roman Catholicism to talk about the time period where the canon of scripture was being discussed is an anachronism.
Actually no, depending on what you mean. If you’re referring to the early period—before the councils that met at the end of the fourth century—then I wouldn’t give any pushback at all. It would be an anachronism to apply the term Roman Catholic to that period, because the term wasn’t invented until around 1600, when Protestants invented it.
In the 300s, the term that the Church used for itself was Catholic Church, just like it does today.
On the other hand, if you’re not referring to the period when the initial consensus view emerged but to the controversies that took place during the Reformation, the term Roman Catholic is not an anachronism, since Protestants started using it around 1600—during the Reformation.
In fact—as we heard earlier, in Wes’s own video that he did by himself on the canon—he seemed to be of the opinion that the content of the Old Testament was up for discussion among Christians to the time of the Reformation, with many Christians holding that it should include the deuterocanonicals and others denying this. That state of affairs continued up to and including the post-Reformation period, and by then Protestants had coined the term Roman Catholic. So it would not be an anachronism to talk about Roman Catholics settling the canon—for them—in this period.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that the term is anachronistic if you’re maintaining that the canon of the Old Testament hadn’t been decided in the period when the term Roman Catholic began to be used.
Now, as we’ve seen, there was a widespread agreement that the deuterocanonicals are Scripture from the fifth century onward, even if there was a minority position that disagreed. But on Wes’s own construction of how the canon of the Old Testament developed, he couldn’t say that the term Roman Catholic was anachronistic.
He doesn’t seem to notice this, however, and he focuses on the early centuries before the solidification that took place in the late 300s.
WES: What we know of as modern-day Roman Catholicism—its ideas, its teachings, its dogmas would have been foreign to the first few centuries.
Okay, so Wes is referring to the early centuries, but here he’s making another problematic claim. He says that the Catholic Church’s current ideas, teachings, and dogmas were foreign to the first few centuries.
There has been doctrinal development in the Catholic Church by which some doctrines have come to be articulated more precisely and more authoritatively since the first few centuries, but these are developments of things that were there in the early Church.
If you want to read more about that, you can see my book The Fathers Know Best. In it, I document the continuity between early Church teaching and modern Catholic teaching on almost 50 subjects.
There has also been doctrinal development in the Protestant community in the 500 years of its existence, so if you’re going to identify “modern Protestantism” as in continuity with “original Protestantism,” you’re going to need to apply the same standard when it comes to early and modern Catholicism.
However, at this point it’s sounding like Wes is entertaining the idea that Catholicism came into existence at some date several centuries into Church history. The most common version of this claim in Protestant circles holds that it was the legalization of the Christian faith under the emperor Constantine in the early 300s that created Catholicism. However, let’s see what Wes says.
WES: I would argue that you don’t get what I would consider to be Roman Catholicism until the ninth century.
Really! The 9th century! Wes is going way beyond what anti-Catholics typically claim. For what reason would he argue that?
WES: And the reason I would argue that is because at the ninth century, it’s the first time that the Pope—the Bishop of Rome—chooses the Roman Emperor Charlemagne and not the other way around. So it’s the first time where there’s a shift in that you have what’s considered the Carolingian . . . what’s the term I’m looking for? . . . Renaissance, the Carolingian Renaissance, where you have under Charlamagne the Great. But all of a sudden there’s a shift in power where now you have this idea of a Holy Roman emperor, and he’s kind of been given his authority by the Pope rather than the emperor having political authority and the Bishop of Rome being a religious figure. Although you could argue that before that there was political messes tied up, and I think that that’s granted.
This is a really extraordinary claim! The idea that Catholicism didn’t exist until the time of Charlemagne—who died in A.D. 814—is simply unsupportable, and I know of no scholar who endorses it.
The claim is particularly problematic because Catholicism is a religious group, not a political one. And so, as Wes earlier alluded to, we need to look at its ideas, teachings, and dogmas. Although these would undergo development, just as Protestant teachings have, they were there from the earliest centuries, long before Charlemagne, and even further before the Holy Roman Empire.
The fact is that neither Charlemagne—nor any other temporal ruler—nor the Holy Roman Empire—is an object of Catholic teaching. Thus today the pope doesn’t install kings, and the Holy Roman Empire is long gone. Specific kings and kingdoms are things that come and go, separate from the teaching of the Church.
So I hate to say it, Wes, but if you want to draw a line between Catholicism and some earlier state in the Church, you need to appeal to doctrine—not politics.
But that’s going to be really hard to do. As we’ve seen, the Church was already calling itself Catholic by the late first century, it was already teaching doctrines like baptismal regeneration, infant baptism, liturgical worship, the Eucharistic sacrifice, and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist from the earliest centuries—all of which are covered in The Fathers Know Best.
WES: If I was going to pick a timeframe, I would say what we refer to as modern Roman Catholicism—with kind of the Magisterium, with the Pope having this position as the Bishop of Rome and that superseding all other bishops and this kind of thing, the Vatican—I would say you get that understanding at its kind of earliest fruition in the ninth century.
I’m sorry, Wes, but you really need a more accurate understanding of Church history. Whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, the idea that the Catholic Church had its “earliest fruition”—meaning the earliest point at which it was realized—in the ninth century is just inaccurate.
The Magisterium—including popes, bishops, and Church councils—had been in place for centuries.
We’ve already cited multiple Church councils before this, which were collective expressions of the teaching authority or magisterium of the bishops—like the 4th century councils that taught on the canon of Scripture.
And each bishop had his own teaching authority in his own diocese, as was always recognized.
When it comes to the pope, as the head of the bishops, the bishop of Rome had been recognized as the successor of Peter centuries before Charlemagne came on the scene. To cite just one of many examples from the early Church, the acts of the Council of Chalcedon state that—in A.D. 451—
After the reading of the foregoing letter [i.e., the Tome of Pope Leo I], the most reverend bishops cried out: “This is the faith of the fathers, this is the faith of the apostles. So we all believe, thus the orthodox believe. Anathema to him who does not thus believe. Peter has spoken thus through Leo!” (Chalcedon, session 2 [A.D. 451]).
So Peter was regarded as speaking through his successor—Pope Leo I—long, long before Charlemagne.
But, setting aside this issue, let’s hear Wes’s fundamental response to the idea that the Catholic Church gave us the Bible.
WES: And I would say that the Church doesn’t make the Bible, the Bible makes the Church. The Bible is not a product of the Church, the Church is a product of divine revelation in Scripture.
“The Church doesn’t make the Bible, the Bible makes the Church” is clever phrasemaking, but here Wes is confusing two different levels of analysis. Nobody disagrees that the books of the Bible are divinely inspired and so they come from God.
Neither does anybody deny that they inform the Church’s life and teaching. That’s not to say that they’re the only source for the Church’s life and teaching—that’s a separate subject. But nobody denies this, and Wes is engaging a straw man if he thinks this is what the Catholic Church teaches. It doesn’t.
Wes is failing to consider the human level through which all this happened. It was members of the Catholic Church who either handed on or wrote the books of the Bible for us today, and it was members of the Catholic Church who were the Holy Spirit’s instruments in identifying which books belong in the canon.
Now I want to look at something Wes says that I can wholly get behind:
WES: After the apostles die and the early Christians are talking about what books should and shouldn’t be Scripture, their main criteria is does it have apostolic authority? Can we tie it to either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus? Why? Because that period has a level of credibility and authority.
Here Wes is absolutely correct. For later Christians—during the early centuries when the canon was still under serious discussion, like in that list from Eusebius in the early 300s that we saw—the criterion for canonicity was apostolic authority: Did a book have the endorsement of the community of apostles or not?
He’s totally correct about that, and he’s doing better than some Protestant apologists do.
Apostolicity was the criterion used to determine canonicity.
And this applied to both the Old and the New Testament. With the Old Testament, the apostles and their associates who wrote the New Testament quoted the Greek Septuagint 80 to 90 percent of the time when they quoted the Old Testament, and so Christians naturally inferred that the apostles endorsed the Septuagint, which includes the deuterocanonical books.
When it comes to the New Testament, the matter was a little more complex since you can’t just read a book and know whether it was endorsed by the apostles. So how did Christians determine that?
The answer was: by Tradition. Early Catholics used Tradition to determine whether a book was apostolic or not, and they did so in two ways, using both traditions external to a book and traditions internal to it.
First, when it comes to external traditions, they would ask if the churches had a long-standing tradition of reading the book in church. If there was no such tradition, if a book had not been read in the churches for as long as anybody could remember, then it was regarded as a recent composition than something that went back to the days of the apostles.
And second, when it comes to internal traditions, they would ask whether the book’s contents agreed with the apostolic teachings or traditions that had been passed down to the Church through the bishops. If the book agreed with the teachings of the apostolic Tradition, that was evidence it would be approved by the apostles. But if it didn’t agree with these traditions—as, for example, the Gnostic writings did not—then it is not canonical.
We thus see that it was by Tradition that early Catholics recognized which books are canonical and which aren’t.
Unfortunately, Wes doesn’t seem to have a clear understanding of this. In fact, he doesn’t have a good understanding of this historical period. Thus he says:
WES: Commonly, the cannon of Scripture is kind of pinned on . . . oh it’s Athanasius. So Athanasius wrote a . . . it’s called his Festal Letter. It’s an Easter letter that he writes, and in it—as part of it—he includes his canon list. And so a lot of people say, well, that’s kind of, he lists the 27 authoritatively, and so that’s the kind of pin we’re going to put on . . . okay, we can say in, I think it was around the 380s, so around the 380s, that’s when the canon of Scripture is officially established because you can look Athanasius’s list, and that’s the official list.
Okay, a few notes on this. First, Wes’s memory is wrong. The festal letter in question wasn’t in the 380s. It was Festal Letter #39, which was written in A.D. 367.
Second, Athanasius’s Old Testament canon is not in use by anybody today. He includes most of the protocanonicals, but not all of them. He omits Esther from his canon—which is more indication of how late the acceptance of this book was in both Jewish and Christian circles—and, as Edmond Gallagher and John Meade note in their book The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity, Athanasius appears to reject the protocanonical books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
On the other hand, he accepts some of the deuterocanonical books. He definitely accepts Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah, which he considers part of the book of Jeremiah. He also appears to accept 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras, which are part of the Orthodox Bible.
When it comes to the New Testament, he does list the twenty-seven books that are honored by Christians today, but nobody regards Athanasius as having settled the New Testament canon.
Wes seems to be describing a position taken by some low-level Protestant apologists, but nobody serious would regard Athanasius as having settled it. Athanasius was just one bishop and only had authority in his own diocese. He couldn’t settle the canon of Scripture for an entire area or for the whole Church, so he’s just one witness to early Christian views. People may take note of him because he had the same twenty-seven books in his New Testament that we do, even though his Old Testament canon was different, but he didn’t settle this matter.
In fact, Wes says:
WES: I think if you were to go back and ask Athanasius, he would be aghast that anybody is pointing to him as the person who establishes the final authority of the canon. I think he’d be very confused and a little horrified that that’s what happened.
And Wes is correct. Athanasius would be aghast, confused, and horrified that anybody would think that he—alone among all the bishops of his day—had officially settled the canon for everybody.
A Word to Wesley Huff
I’d like to close out today’s episode with a special word to Wesley Huff.
First, Wes! I really like you, and I want to congratulate you on your debate with Billy Carson! You were extremely effective, and you deserve all the congratulations and opportunities that you’ve received as a result!
I wish you well in all your future endeavors, and I hope that your life settles down, that you complete your doctorate, and that you have a long and fruitful career that you use to bring glory to Our Lord Jesus Christ.
At the same time, a few notes of constructive criticism. I really appreciate the fact that you try to be fair and balanced in your presentations. You don’t always hit the balance exactly right, as I sought to illustrate earlier, but you still do much better than many apologists do.
Also, be sure you get in the habit of slipping in the needed qualifiers, even when you’re presenting to a popular audience.
And you may not want to go too deep into some of the areas we’ve talked about today—particularly with regard to the history of the canon. You need a better grasp of the material pertaining to this field, as you made quite a number of errors. Some of these could be dismissed as lapses of memory and slips of the tongue, but given the number of slips in quick succession in such short clips, it’s clear that your mastery of the canon is not what one would want if you’re going to be going into this much depth.
In fact, I wouldn’t have made this video if I hadn’t noticed so many slips in the clips that people sent me.
I hope that you receive this in the spirit I intend it, which is a friendly one of “iron sharpens iron.”
I hope this helps, and God bless you!
* * *
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!
VIDEO CLIPS USED IN THIS EPISODE CAME FROM:
“Full Unedited Unaltered Wes Huff vs. Billy Carson Debate”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7ngjtT43-4
“I’m Probably Not Going to Debate You”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfihScZhDbA
“Joe Rogan Experience #2252—Wesley Huff”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwyAX69xG1Q
“Wes Huff Is UNTOUCHED by Alex O’Connor’s Critiques”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxAnxJD3ZYM
“Why Do Catholics and Protestants Have Different Books in Their Bibles?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7umE5uqpxPs
“Wes Huff—Why Protestants and Catholics Have Different Bibles”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmveYAzhkRA
“Five Myths About the Bible (And How We Got It)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pufepRfYV6s