Carson vs. Huff
Scholarly response to Muslim polemic meets YouTube debate
Many of the things we write may attract little attention and even less appreciation. Par for the course, really. There’s a lot to read out there. Every writing initiative is both risk and adventure in offering to an unseen public something we consider worth sharing.
Sometimes, however, we may catch a break and see a much better response than we had anticipated and possibly even deserved. We may unexpectedly benefit from developments in technology and shifts in ways of communicating. This happened to me this past winter.
Ten years ago I published a book on a topic that pops up quickly in virtually every authentic faith conversation between Muslims and non-Muslims. Now just five months ago the modest monthly distribution of my book suddenly increased tenfold just through a brief favorable mention on a YouTube podcast. I was too busy writing to deadline at the time to process it properly.
My book titled The gentle answer to the Muslim accusation of biblical falsification deals with a very popular — by some accounts virtually ubiquitous — Muslim polemic: that the text of the Bible is hopelessly corrupted and/or willfully falsified, and therefore must not be permitted entry into any conversation about the identity of God, the truth about Jesus, or the way of salvation.
I wrote the book to fulfill a personal commitment. A friend in India asked me to write a response to a particular book by an Indian Muslim. Published in Istanbul in Arabic around 1865 as Idhār al-haqq (“Demonstration of truth”), and circulating widely in South Asia since 1965 in the Urdu translation Bā’bal se Qur’ān tak (“From the Bible to the Quran”), the polemic is a rough attack that doesn’t mind including rudeness and insults in its arsenal. Christian readers felt the sting.
This short column is not the place for an extensive description of what I wrote in The gentle answer, but one of the sections of my book sought to update information on discoveries of manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament from the facts available in 1865. This is evidently what jumped media lines to a quite different format.
The favourable mention came from University of Toronto PhD student and apologist Wes Huff. In October 2024 Huff was suddenly invited into an online debate with Billy Carson, a well-known YouTube personality. A recording of the two-hour debate is accessible here.
I leave it to readers to watch the full video if interested. The debate host is not very helpful, and Carson speaks extremely harshly about both the Bible and Christianity. Some of his content seems esoteric to the point of incredulity. But Carson’s opening gambit is quite understandable: he claims that the “Sinai Bible” does not mention the crucifixion of Jesus. What do you mean by “Sinai Bible,” asks Huff — do you mean the Codex Sinaiticus that is displayed in the British Library? Let me check, replies Carson. Oh, he says, actually I mean the “Gospel of Barnabas.”
This is a category of carelessness that can make even moderately-informed listeners wonder whether they can trust anything that Carson might say subsequently. Facts about manuscripts, however, are firmly within Huff’s wheelhouse. First Huff calmly tells Carson that each of the canonical Gospel accounts in the Codex Sinaiticus certainly does mention the crucifixion of Jesus in a major way. Then he points out matter-of-factly that the so-called “Gospel of Barnabas” is an acknowledged medieval forgery with manuscripts extant only in medieval Italian and Spanish.
The debate video went viral, and to date the unedited version of the debate has attracted more than 3.5 million views. Two months later Huff was interviewed on a friendlier podcast about what material he would have liked to include in the Carson debate if he’d had time. That December 10 podcast is accessible here. In that podcast Huff mentions The gentle answer as a helpful resource, perhaps because in that book I address both the significance of the Codex Sinaiticus and the deception of the Islamic “Gospel of Barnabas” (I also wrote an encyclopedia entry on this forgery).
In this way my book, written 10 years ago to help friends in India deal with Muslim polemic, found its way to many readers in North America and Europe this past winter. I’m glad I had completed the necessary research and documented the facts when I did. The facts are not trivial, and carelessness about the facts from a popular influencer is not excusable.
And believe it or not (we don’t seem to hear much about this), many young listeners are interested in exactly these kinds of facts. Comments on the debate video, still coming in today at about six an hour seven months after its original posting, have passed 64 thousand.