consensus

It continues to be fall, I continue to be sick - or perhaps am sick again, I can't tell at this point - and so while my body temperature is high, my spirits are low. There are only two ways to raise them at this point - one is a marathon of Law and Order: Criminal Intent which just ended, and the other one is a nice venti cup of academic drama, preferrably with a shot of plagiarism. And boy, did the internet deliver.

The latest episode of this neverending series involves a gentleman by the name of Wes Huff. Huff is a PhD student at Wycliffe College, Toronto who claims to be a scholar trained in historiography who studies ancient biblical manuscripts. In reality, he is a social media figure who engages in Christian apologetics, or rather apologetics for a particular version of Christianity. What version, you ask? The kind that sees no problem in going on Joe Rogan and Mikhaila Peterson, I answer, and I hope the disdain in my hoarse voice you can't actually hear accurately conveys my opinion of all involved. With this and his YouTube channel with some 1 million subscribers, he can be described as a pretty big deal online.

The drama started when Dan McClellan, an LDS biblical scholar who also has a decent online presence - and, unlike Huff, a PhD - and had engaged with Huff's material before, received an email from academia.edu. Those of you on the platform just groaned in sympathy, seeing as academia.edu has undergone significant enshittification in the past few months and is now basically just another source of spam. McClellan's response to the email might have initially been the same, but then curiosity took over, since the email contained a link to a paper by Huff. This paper, written as a part of his course work in 2016 during Huff's master's program at the Tyndale University, is titled "Christological Claims: A Textual Consideration of John's Gospel". It also is, as McClellan made abundantly clear in a detailed YouTube video, largely plagiarized. To paraphrase McClellan's summary from a follow-up video, what is not stolen amounts to barely more than a high-school book report. For details, see both videos. As for consequences, you know the drill: Huff published - then deleted - an apology video, scrubbed - or attempted to scrub - his social media, and published a half-assed apology. In the middle of all of that, his family dealt with a medical emergency which, by all accounts, seems to have ended well. Best wishes to him and his family, RIP to his academic career. Considering the circles he moves in, he will most likely be fine.

My spirits so lifted, I added more of McClellan's videos to my YouTube queue and this is how I ended up watching one where he responds to Huff's claims about the historicity of Luke's account of the census (Luke 2:1-4). This event is the ultimate reason for the familiar Christmas motifs - no room at the inn, baby in a manger etc. - and it is, not to put a too fine point on it, ahistorical. There are many reasons for it - Judea was a vasal kingdom, so not subject to this sort of thing, Quirinius as a governor of Syria (2:2) is not attested until much later, the whole going back to the city your descendants were from just does not make sense for the purpose of a census - and of course Huff ignores all of them and the entire scholarly consensus around them. McClellan does a pretty good job of countering Huff's shoddy arguments for the first 30 minutes. That is, until we get to the part where Huff is arguing that - I'm paraphrasing here - at the time of the composition of the Gospel according to Luke, there were still people alive who remembered the reign of Herod and Quirinus and so if Luke were - again, paraphrasing here - talking out of his ass, there would have been negative feedback. McClellan rightly responds with "This is simply false" and notes that the Gospel according to Luke is dated to late 1st century CE or early 2nd century CE. This is certainly a fair summary of the current scholarship and, needless to say, completely contradicts Huff's claims: while there were people in antiquity who lived to ~75, even such fortunate souls would have been dead for at least a decade by the time Luke, MD sat down in his scriptorium to make sure Theophilus had an accuratee picture of what that Jesus fella was up to. So far so good.

But then McClellan proceeds to make another claim and that one had me raise all my eyebrows. At almost exactly 30 minutes in, McClellan says:

In fact, there is a growing consensus among scholars that the Gospel [capitalization mine] of Luke relied on the writings of Josephus, specifically the Antiquities of the Jews which was probably written around 93 CE.

Now I am no expert on the subject, but I am somewhat well versed in the literature and am aware of no consensus that Luke relied on Josephus. Luckily, McClellan provided not one, but three references to fill the gaps in my knowledge:

1. Mason, Steve. "Was Josephus a Source for Luke-Acts?" Pages 199-244 in On Using Sources in Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Early Christian Literature, edited by Joseph Verheyden, John S. Kloppenborg, Geert Roskam, and Stefan Schorn. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, CCCXXVII. Peeters, 2022.
2. Kochenash, Michael. "The Census in Luke 2: Using Josephus to Make Sense of Luke’s Irreconcilable Chronology." Journal of Biblical Literature 143, no. 3 (2024): 503–22. https://doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1433.2024.7.
3. Novenson, Matthew V. “Josephus and the New Testament.” In The Oxford Handbook of Josephus, 1st ed., edited by Kenneth Atkinson. Oxford University Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197539101.003.0038.

As a side note, in the info box for the video, McClellan has all the usual YouTube stuff - other social media, books, lectures, merch etc. - but not the references, so I had to go and type the titles into ... let's go with Google, yeah which took a bit. Buddy could provide the DOIs as links, is all I'm saying. But no bother, I got the PDFs and ... Well, my brows remain raised.

The claim, if you recall, is that there is a scholarly consensus that Luke relied on Josephus. So what do the three sources provided to support this claim say? First, Mason's paper. Well, actually, I didn't even have to scroll all the way down to p. 199, since the answer to my question can already be found in the introduction written by the editors (p. XIII, italics in the original, emphasis - bold - mine):

The third essay in this part is by Steve Mason and deals with the in se not unattractive but highly disputed question of whether Josephus may have been a (subsidiary) source for the author of Luke-Acts. 

So much for "growing consensus". In fact, Mason's - detailed and well-argued paper - assigns the status of "prevailing hypothesis" (Mason 2022: 203) on the topic to Heinz Schreckenberg's 1992 conclusion that Josephus and Luke were composed independently, but used the same sources (Mason 2022: 202).

What about the second source then? Maybe McClellan just got it wrong with Mason and... Well, no. Kochenash - who also cites Mason's paper - focuses on the question of why Luke dates the census to the rule of Quirinius. In this context, he discusses the target audience - "reading community" - of Luke's writings and ask the excellent question of who - to use Umberto Eco's term - Luke's ideal reader was (Kochenash 2024: 507-510). And here is also where Kochenash comments on McClellan's claim (Kochenash 509-510, emphasis mine):

... the resulting picture of the earliest audiences of Luke is one in which they are inherently likely to have shared the author’s interests, values, and literary influences. Insofar as it is credible to claim that the author of Luke is interacting with Josephus ...  it is credible to conclude that the Lukan reading community must have been familiar with—even sympathetic to—Josephus’s construction of Jewish history. 

I don't know about you, but "insofar as it is credible to claim X" does not sound like someone is referring to "growing consensus on X".

So far we're 0 for 2 and ... Well, I think you can see where this is going, so here is Novenson in a work published earlier this year - so as recent as can be in academic publishing - that summarizes the actual scholarly consensus (Novenson 2026: 422, emphasis mine):

Because this is still a relative minority view, there remains ample room for exploration of the possible ways in which Luke may have used and been influenced by Josephus’ Antiquities and Life.

I have no idea what McClellan was thinking here, but this sort of fundamental inability to read sources is just staggering. Once again, I feel personally insulted, but hey, at least McClellan doesn't have a professorship anywhere. He is, after all, just another social media talking head who... 

Who also, as it turns out, went on Rogan. So fuck him.