He alluded to a typical comparison between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus, saying, “I’ve even seen some as simple as Horus gets in a boat and Jesus gets in a boat.”
“It’s in the specifics where these things die,” Huff said.
Among the more outrageous claims about Christianity the two discussed were that psychedelics were responsible for Christianity’s origins, a theory Knowles called “stupid” and “silly.” Huff explained that the man who came up with this theory was a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar named John Allegro who “had credibility in terms of his credentials.”
“However, he wrote a book called ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ where he really starts to go off the rails,” said Huff. Knowles interjected, pointing out that the book came out in the 1970s when using mushrooms became popular in culture.
Huff said Allegro’s peers “chastised him quite a bit” and that Allegro had concluded that “Jesus did not exist and the gospels were more or less a hoax and that what Christianity turned into was nothing more than a misunderstanding of ancient fertility cults.”
No scholar of any religious persuasion, said Huff, accepts Allegro’s “fringe” theory based on his own arguments, and few scholars actually believe that Jesus never existed.
Other topics Knowles and Huff discussed included the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, reincarnation, how Christians get the doctrine of the Trinity even though the word “Trinity” is not in the Bible, and questions pertaining to the biblical canon.
Alluding to his Catholic faith, Knowles asked Huff (who is Protestant) if Catholics added books to the Bible at the Council of Trent in response to Protestant Reformation. While the Protestant Bible is composed of 66 books, the Catholic Bible includes seven additional books, known as the Deuterocanonical books, or the Apocrypha.
“There is certainly precedent for both the Protestant and Roman Catholic canon traditions,” Huff replied and pushed back against the idea that either Catholics or Protestants added or removed books from the Bible. To say either tradition added or removed books oversimplifies a “complex” question and “is probably not being honest with the data,” he said.
Huff pointed out that both traditions agree on the 66 books that Protestants use and said that during the Protestant Reformation, reformers “cut out the noise.” Huff also noted that certain prominent Catholics, such as St. Jerome, did not believe the Deuterocanonical books were Scripture.
When Knowles suggested it was significant that councils prior to the Council of Trent used the Deuterocanonical books, Huff responded that he “would really encourage everybody…to really dig into the matter if they’re…interested in this, in how the early Christians have a conversation about these things.”
Huff said he thought the Christians who were having this debate at the time would have been “uncomfortable with kind of the official pronouncement [about canonicity] because there was even disagreement going on during that day.”
Nevertheless, Huff does think there is more precedent for the Protestant Bible, yet he reiterated, “the historical precedent for both canons I think is there.”
