Big Questions About Jesus Death and Resurrection

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Joe Rogan Asks Big Questions About Jesus Death and Resurrection

Some people are not afraid to ask big questions about Jesus death and resurrection. Throughout history, people have faced lawsuits, imprisonment, and death threats — just for talking about Jesus death and resurrection. Joe Rogan recently interviewed Christian apologist Wesley Huff for his podcast, and it was an amazing episode.

Proverbs 18:17 says: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” Titus 2:7,8 says: “… in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame…”

Background

Joe Rogan interviewed Billy Carson, founder of 4BiddenKnowledge (a false teacher, with over 650,000 followers) – on JRE episode 2160, released on June 4, 2024. After Billy Carson lost a debate with Wes Huff on October 18, 2024, Joe Rogan invited Wesley Huff to appear on JRE episode 2252, released on January 7, 2025.

What follows is a brief summary (an excerpt of a longer conversation), and a transcript of the video clip (below).

Joe and Wesley discuss the historical evidence for Jesus’s resurrection. Rogan questions the validity of resurrection claims, while Huff approaches the topic as a historian. Huff points out that many people saw the resurrected Jesus, according to Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians 15. He emphasizes that the gospels were written during the lifetime of eyewitnesses who could verify or deny these claims.

Huff addresses the possibility of Jesus surviving crucifixion rather than resurrecting. He cites skeptical biblical scholars who consider Jesus’s death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate as one of the most historically certain facts about Jesus. Huff references a JAMA article that analyzed Jesus’s probable cause of death as asphyxiation. He dismisses the survival theory by noting the Romans’ efficiency at crucifixion and the impossibility of someone surviving such trauma appearing completely healed three days later.

Joe Rogan Asks Big Questions About Jesus Death and Resurrection

What follows below is a transcript from a 15 minute excerpt of the 3 hour interview, and begins part way through a longer conversation, which was recorded on December 30, 2024. Background and context: Billy Carson debated Wesley Huff on October 18, 2024 and the debate did not go well for Billy. This is helpful context for Joe Rogan podcast episode 2252; which has had over 5 million views. Then on January 14, 2025 Wesley Huff apologized for a few things he misspoke about during the 3+hour podcast with Rogan. Setting the record straight with more detailed explanations of some complicated historical matters. As one viewer remarked: “Dude hit the bulls eye and then apologized for not hitting the exact center of the bulls eye. A true Canadian!” (See related links below for additional context.)

Wesley Huff: Because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected – like there’s something different that goes on there that they’re like “this is a miracle,” right? Dead people don’t usually rise from the dead.

Big Questions About Jesus Resurrection

Joe Rogan: So what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection? What do you think? Do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message?

Wesley Huff: I think, so as a historian, I do think it is a historical question. You have a guy who objectively lived, he objectively died, and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead. Again.

Joe Rogan: This is a highly unusual activity.

Wesley Huff: Highly unusual.

Joe Rogan: But it’s hard when you’re dealing with illiterate populations, you’re dealing with thousands of years of time, you’re dealing with an oral tradition, and then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024, trying to figure this out literally at the end of 2024, trying to figure this out.

It’s very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who’s secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life.

Wesley Huff: And I get that. But we’ve already talked about the fact that we don’t think that the only thing that exists is matter and motion – we, as in you and I. Like we believe that there’s something else going on in this world that’s a little bit crazy.

Joe Rogan: There’s something else, yeah.

Wesley Huff: And that to, I think, exclude that – I think excludes something that you’re kind of putting blinders on for. And you do have, I mean you’re right in terms of all of these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around, but the gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses and they’re written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact-checked those things.

Joe Rogan: How do you fact check someone coming back from the dead?

Wesley Huff: Well, if you…

Joe Rogan: How many people saw his body?

Wesley Huff: Well Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once. [Editorial note: Wesley made a mistake here as Sean McDowell graciously points out. (Correction: 1 Cor. 15:6 says that Jesus “appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time“.)]

Joe Rogan: 400 people saw the crucifixion?

Wesley Huff: No — saw the resurrected Jesus. 1st Corinthians 15, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the disciples and then he appeared to 400 people all at once. I mean if we read the Gospel of Luke and Acts – so same author wrote these both documents – he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead. And so these are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus’s ministry, who were there say at something like the feeding of the 5,000, who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being said.

And you go from a bunch of scared guys – because Jesus wasn’t the only Messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah. There were a number of individuals both prior to and after Jesus, but they die and the movement dies with them.

Big Questions About Jesus Death

Joe Rogan: Do you think it’s possible that he didn’t die and do you think it’s possible that they thought he was dead? Because that does happen. There was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs. They thought he was dead and this guy started moving again and came back to life. It’s very very bizarre case because his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs, they were preparing for that, this guy comes back.

Wesley Huff: Yeah, I mean we know a lot about Roman crucifixion and we know that they did their job well. And so in fact if you look at say very skeptical biblical scholars – like non-believing, atheist, agnostic Christian scholars – they will say if we can know anything about Jesus, like they’ll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth, they’ll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

Because we have not just multiple attested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that you have this guy. And it’s mocked within earliest Christianity. So one of our earliest – in fact not one of the earliest – depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexamenos graffito, and it’s probably from the end of the first century. And it depicts an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship worshiping a man with a donkey’s head who’s being crucified, and right beside it it says “Alexamenos worships his God” in Greek.

And it’s mocking, right? Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low. It was for like slaves. In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified.

Joe Rogan: Who wasn’t that got crucified upside down?

Wesley Huff: Peter.

Joe Rogan: Why was it? Because like regular crucifixion wasn’t good enough for him or what was he – what didn’t deserve it because Christ had gone through it?

Wesley Huff: Well, so the story is that they say we’re going to crucify you and he says it’s like too big of an honor to die like my Lord and they say well we can fix that.

Joe Rogan: Jesus – shut your mouth buddy.

Wesley Huff: Listen, the Romans were pretty brutal. But this is why we know – like we have – it’s interesting we know a lot about crucifixion but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting. I believe it was Cicero who said that like the word crucifixion shouldn’t even be on a Roman man’s lips.

The word “excruciating” – right, “ex” is off of in Latin and “cruce” off the cross – so that’s where we get that word, is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be as painful as possible. There was actually a really good article done by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was done by a number of – I think it was in the 70s or early 80s – it was done by a group of biblical scholars and then medical professionals. And so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out okay if we could diagnose how Jesus died, how would he have died?

And so they basically came with this idea that he probably asphyxiated to death. You kind of drown in your own blood. But the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion I think are narrow to none, and the chance of him appearing 3 days later completely fine – I mean, if the first thing you do if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not “peace be with you,” it’s “get me to a hospital.”

Joe Rogan: Did they have them back then?

Wesley Huff: No.

Joe Rogan: Are we entirely certain of their measurement of days?

Wesley Huff: So this is an interesting question because of the differences between when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics, because John appears to be using the Roman Convention of counting time and the other gospels when they describe the timing appear to be using the Jewish ones. And actually if you correlate between the two they match up pretty well.

So the thing is with Jews, any part of a day was considered a day. So “three days and three nights” becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day. So if Jesus – and because they count evening and morning, evening to morning is the day – it’s very possible that it wasn’t like how we would think of 3 24-hour days, especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday.

Joe Rogan: So that would actually make it less time than more time?

Wesley Huff: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: There so it’s not like he had recovery time?

Wesley Huff: Oh no, he didn’t have recovery time.

Joe Rogan: Not like it was three days was actually three months?

Wesley Huff: No, no, no.

Joe Rogan: So then 400 people saw him afterwards? That’s the claim?

Wesley Huff: That’s the claim that Paul makes.

Wesley Huff Defends the Resurrection Account

Joe Rogan: And how many different people have some sort of a recollection or a writing or something that’s attributed to them of being witness to his resurrection?

Wesley Huff: Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The thing with Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Matthew and Luke – or Matthew and John are attributed to direct disciples of Jesus. Luke and Mark are not, so they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community. In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that he – he’s right upfront about this – he’s like “hey I’m not an eyewitness, don’t confuse me with an eyewitness.”

But he actually uses conventional writing – what’s the term I’m looking for – he uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world. So you have a guy named Quintilian who is basically – I mentioned him before – he’s teaching people how to write and he says that if you’re going to write biography you need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can’t be too far away from the event to be able to write these things.

And Quintilian, Lucian, and Josephus, who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history, have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel where he says “I’m interviewing eyewitnesses and I’m writing up an orderly account.” And so he’s saying, you know, I’m going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day. I’m not an eyewitness so I’m going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses and I’m going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates what is being written.

Joe Rogan: So we have an account of the Resurrection. Do we have an account of the denial of the Resurrection? Is there a historical record of him just dying and this like a refal or rebuttal rather to what they’re saying?

Wesley Huff: No, the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as Gnostics. And they’re not necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were – they’re denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad.

So if Jesus was crucified – if so let me back up – if Jesus is God he cannot have a physical body. So they deny that he actually had a physicality to him. This is sometimes called Docetism because “dokein” in Greek means “to seem.” So these groups that we describe as the Docetics, they are denying that Jesus had a physical body – he only seemed to have a physical body.

And they wrote documents later on, so the Gospel of Peter which comes around in, you know, second, third, fourth centuries, is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he’s not really physical because he’s Divine and physical entities don’t have physical bodies.

What About the Gospel of Barnabas?

So we don’t actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like The Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages, which is actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had as the evidence that Jesus was never crucified.

A photo after the podcast was recorded. Big Questions About Jesus Death and Resurrection. This photo shows Wesley Huff pointing to Joe Rogan. They both have big smiles.
Wesley Huff (left) and Joe Rogan (right) in a photo provided by Wesley after the podcast was recorded on December 30, 2024

Joe Rogan: The Gospel of Barnabas?

Wesley Huff: Well, Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century – it paraphrases Dante’s Inferno, it’s not an ancient document. So but in the ancient world, no, nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. More of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.

Joe Rogan: So they were less surprised that he was resurrected, or that you would – you would worship a crucified like teacher was just seen as silly because it’s so humiliating to be crucified?

Wesley Huff: Yeah, and that like a God would let himself go through this, right? Like what are you talking about? In fact, the ancient world didn’t really have a problem with supernatural events. There is an ancient writer who mocks Christianity, and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that of course Jesus did miracles because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt and he goes “all those Egyptians are magicians anyways so he just learned the magic when he was a child.”

So he actually confirms incidentally two things that the narrative in the gospels where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod – he corroborates that, he actually thinks that happened – and that Jesus did miracles. He just attributes the miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways and you know anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic.

Joe Rogan: That is what’s really fascinating that the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians.

Wesley Huff: Yeah, but everybody believed in supernatural events. Like there’s no such thing as like a secular work in the ancient world. Even Plutarch who’s one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world – he wrote 90 biographies of which 60 still survive today – he was a priest of Apollo. So like he’s already assuming right that the gods exist, that crazy things are going to happen in the world.

So they didn’t have a problem with people doing miracles or crazy things happening.

Joe Rogan: Well that’s also why it’s so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that lived back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about, because they did believe in things that weren’t real. So when they talk about this thing that we’re supposed to believe is real when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren’t true…

Wesley Huff: Yeah, it’s interesting right? Because like you’re now saying “yeah but this one really was true.”

What People Are Saying…

Regarding the Joe Rogan & Wesley Huff Conversation

“This debate/conversation has brought me back around to Jesus. I’ve been an atheist/agnostic for 10 years and because of that video I’ve started praying again and I’ve been watching Wes Huff to learn more. I NEVER, ever, thought this would happen.”

“I have never heard of Billy Carson or Wes Huff. And I never thought much about Jesus or religion…. But here I am on a Friday night, wondering about a greater power and watching Rogan. I suppose God works in mysterious ways.”

Regarding the Billy Carson vs. Wesley Huff Debate / Discussion

“It’s truly astonishing to realize the extent to which Billy Carson has built his platform on a foundation that, when scrutinized, crumbles entirely. The recent debate with Wes Huff and Billy Carson brought this into sharp focus — not through hostility or animosity, but through a respectful and measured discussion. Both sides were given the opportunity to speak, and Carson, to his credit, maintained a respectful demeanor. However, what unfolded was nothing short of staggering.”

“Ultimately, what this debate revealed is that Billy Carson is an entertainer, not a credible scholar or spiritual guide. His charisma and storytelling may captivate an audience, but when the substance of his teachings is examined, it falls apart. His admissions during the debate — while commendable for their honesty — underscore that much of what he preaches is built on fabricated texts and faulty interpretations. It’s a sobering realization for those who may have looked to him for truth. Billy Carson may continue to entertain, but for anyone seeking genuine insights or spiritual guidance, this debate served as a critical reminder to approach his claims with skepticism. The difference between entertainment and truth is vast, and Carson’s own words have made that distinction clear.”

Related Links and Resources

Big Questions About Jesus Death and Resurrection was published on 11-Jan-2025 as part of an ongoing series of articles about big questions. Updated with small corrections to the transcript on 16-Jan-2025, and additional links on 8-Feb-2025.

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