Part One

Huff, O’Connor, and Rogan

Popular agnostic or atheist Alex O’Connor, not as popular as Joe Rogan but more than everyone else in this story, has caught onto an error made by evangelical apologist Wes Huff on Rogan’s show.  O’Connor sees this as very important in a greater scheme of things.  He also targets the cover-up of the error by Huff and many others who defend him.  They won’t admit wrong or concede the error.  These also talk like experts, yet saying with great confidence false things as though they were true.

Wes Huff and those who defend him are not know nothings.  They show a wealth of Bible knowledge, but Huff and many of his defenders get their attention mainly from their presentation and production value.  They know how to connect with a modern audience on youtube and podcasts.  However, when they get their content wrong, it devastates their credibility in front of the world.  And then it only gets worse when they then spin their mistakes.  All this makes an Alex O’Connor seem more credible than they are.

What raises the level of this clash between Huff and O’Connor is the tangible perception of Joe Rogan.  Rogan has said twice that a miracle occurred with the finding of the Isaiah scroll and its identicality (according to Huff) to the Hebrew Masoretic Text.  A thousand year gap exists between the Great Isaiah Scroll, 1Qlsaa, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran on the West side of the Dead Sea in 1947, and the Hebrew Masoretic Text, also called the Leningrad Codex.  The latter is often called The Received Text of the Old Testament.

Miracle Claim

Even though 1Qlsaa is very close to the same as the Hebrew Masoretic Text of Isaiah, and the estimates are one to seven percent word difference, there are hundreds of variations.  It is not close to word-for-word identical.  Alex O’Connor focused on this because Joe Rogan called it a miracle.  Rogan saw this kind of preservation of Isaiah as supernatural.  He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

O’Connor appeared on the show of another popular youtuber and asked the host what was significant to the miracle claim of Rogan.  O’Connor then answered his own question, saying that it implied the work of God and in particular the work of the Holy Spirit in this identicality of the Isaiah scroll and the Hebrew Masoretic Text.  It is saying that God did something, so God is real and actively intervening.  O’ Connor speaks of divine preservation of scripture.  That’s Rogan’s thinking.   If scripture is divine, people expect perfect preservation by God.

The Promise of God and Preservation of Scripture

Neither Huff nor any evangelical host then says, “Yes, God preserved it with perfection like God promised.”  None of them say that.  O’Connor asked an evangelical podcaster, “At what percentage of difference would it become a concern to you?”  The podcaster pauses and says, Not fifty percent, but I would say, seventy-five percent (I’m paraphrasing).  I contend that evangelicals like this man are conditioned to a degree of difference.  They adjust their expectations for what God can and will do.

Sure, God can save.  He saves.  The most frequent thought is that God could have kept His Words.  He just didn’t.  He didn’t do it, and so He didn’t promise it either.

Does this sliding scale kind of approach to preservation of scripture do anything to the faith of professing saints?  Of course it does.  Rather than embrace a presuppositional approach that believes what God said He would do, they follow what they think is the so-called science.  What I’m saying is real and evangelicals should stop acting like it isn’t.  Alex O’Connor gets it, which is why he was hot on the trail of this Joe Rogan story.  Everyone gets it, it seems, except these evangelical leaders.  People in the pews of churches get it.  The low percentage of confidence is intolerable to the normal Christian.

Great Isaiah Scroll Related to Hebrew Masoretic Text

Let me return to the Isaiah scroll and the Hebrew Masoretic.  The actual physical manuscript, the Hebrew Masoretic, the Leningrad Codex, is one thousand years old.  The Isaiah scroll is physically older, predating Christ’s physical appearance on earth.  But the Hebrew Masoretic is the original between the two.  Even the textual critics say this.  Leading textual scientists say they know the Hebrew Masoretic Text (not the physical copy) was the master for the Isaiah scroll.

The scribes of the Isaiah scroll took a free or liberal approach to the text, which contains editing, morphological smoothing and updating, and a modernization of terms for an audience of second temple Judaism that no longer understood classical Hebrew forms.  The scroll represents the language of Palestine in the time period of its copying.  Textual scholars see the variations as that of a nonofficial, vulgar text.  The Isaiah scroll is apparently closer to the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, both of which represent a free rendering of the text.

The Hebrew Masoretic is not the Great Isaiah scroll.  The former is original.  It represents the text from which the scribes of the Isaiah scroll produced their rendering, which differs.  Nonetheless, the two are amazingly similar and point to a dovetail moment in time.  According to textual criticism, the two Hebrew texts are the same, but not word-for-word identical.  Historically, however, the Isaiah scroll says that the text of Isaiah existed at that time.  In fact, the copy of the Isaiah scroll in the Jerusalem museum was a copy of an even earlier copy of Isaiah, modernizing it to a small degree.

True Apologetics

Joe Rogan, thinking that Wes Huff said, “word-for-word identical,” says, “That’s a miracle!”  It would take the providence of God, divine intervention, to get perfect preservation like that.  Yet, what Rogan thought Huff was saying, he wasn’t saying.  As O’Connor said:  the Holy Spirit would be involved.  Where did O’Connor get this idea?  He studied the Bible at Oxford.  O’Connor perhaps knows about this historic doctrine of preservation or at least the expectation of the supernatural related to the Word of God.

Moslems would seize gladly the imperfection of the text of the Bible, the non-miraculous nature of it.  Apologetics proceed from giving scriptural answers and stand for the faith.  Textual scientists dealing in percentages and incomplete assurance, that is not apologetics.  Without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6).  Genuine Christians should not capitulate to such squishiness.

What God Did

The Great Isaiah Scroll was gone for over two thousand years, lost in the Qumran Caves in Israel.  It was not available to God’s people, unlike the Hebrew Masoretic Text.  That text continued before, after, and still today.  Israel and then the church received the Hebrew Masoretic Text and translated it to many different other languages.  Wes Huff could have told this story and explained why the Isaiah scroll was lost until 1947.

On the other hand, what a gracious discovery, the Great Isaiah Scroll.   The book of Isaiah, a prophetic book, predates the fulfillment of many, many of its prophecies.  Those were prophecies!  We believe that, but here came a document that afforded evidence of that reality.  But finding those copies in that cave, that isn’t a miracle.  Any Christian already assumes, based on God’s promises that God preserved every Old Testament Word in the Hebrew Masoretic Text.