Derek Lambert MythVision Podcast

Hey @JayDyer, can you let this guy know we are basically on the same team at this point. The slave body of Christ works in different areas. You handle TAG. I handle the truth of Christianity. We both want the faith to survive, which is exactly why a formal debate would be so dangerous for team Jesus.

@DerekPodcast @JayDyer With that extreme level of confidence go ahead and tag him so he’ll see it

It finally happened. After years of studying the Bible critically, reading hundreds of scholars, and interviewing the world's leading experts on Christian origins, I have come to one inescapable conclusion... Wes Huff was right about everything. I'm converting. I've already bought the cross. I've lit the candles. I called my old Calvinist pastor and told him I'm coming home. He cried. I cried. We're doing a baptism next Sunday. Trent Horn is my confirmation sponsor. I'm joining Catholic Answers. My first video will be "Why Bart Ehrman Is Wrong About Everything." Pray for me. ... Happy April Fools' you absolute legends. The Wes Huff debunk is still live and he still deleted his video. Go watch it.

@ProphetBartEhrm I must get back to Jesus stuff now, my fellow slave. Have a blessed day, and do not forget to bless your enemies. 😉😙 I look forward to your next passionate meditation on Muhammad and Islam. You do seem remarkably devoted.

@ProphetBartEhrm Brother, we are slaves of Jesus, not interns for Western civilization. Our Lord was executed naked by the state and said his kingdom is not of this world. Yet you talk like his real mission was managing immigration policy. Curious.

Oh absolutely, fellow slave of Christ. That is the mission. We want Islam to conquer the world because this world was never our kingdom to begin with. “My kingdom is not of this world.” I thought you read your Bible. We are just pilgrims here, brother. Why are you so emotionally invested in winning Rome back?

@ProphetBartEhrm @JayDyer You seem confused. Jay is basically on my side now. We attend Sunday sessions together and he knows very well that debating me on the truth of Christianity would be catastrophic for team Jesus. We both care too much about the faith to let that happen.

@DerekPodcast You talking about confidence is absolutely insane LMFAOOOOOO Debate someone like @JayDyer at least

Dear baby brother in Jesus that I've never heard of, so your argument is that I am morally responsible for crimes committed by random Muslims I have never met. By that logic, should we Christians feel responsible for every abuse scandal, lynching, bombing, and genocide done in Christ’s name, or does collective guilt only apply when you are panicking? Sincerely, a better slave in Jesus than you.

@ProphetBartEhrm Yeshua ben Yosef knows every sparrow that falls and apparently every tweet you panic-delete. Very moving to watch someone evangelize with all the confidence of a man who immediately regrets his own material.

@DerekPodcast Can’t wait for the next Wes huff breakdown, Sheikh Mythvision 😍👏👏

Brother, why such hostility. We are both slaves of Christ after all. We are called to love our enemies for now, and then later enjoy their screaming ruin when Jesus comes back. Basic discipleship. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:44 You have skipped straight to the psychotic part without even pretending to do the first part. Let's do better!

@AtheismActually 🤣🤣🤣

I owe Wes Huff an apology. After months of fact-checking, the evidence led me somewhere I wasn't expecting. I sat down and said what I needed to say. Some of you are going to be very happy about this. Others are going to think I've lost my mind. Watch the whole thing. Trust me. (Video in comments)

John, you just conceded my entire point and don't seem to realize it. You admitted that Justin saw the parallels. You admitted they're real. Your only move now is to argue about the motivation behind pointing them out. But motivation doesn't determine whether the parallels exist. They either do or they don't. And you just agreed they do. Also, I'm not "pointing to parallels to discredit Christianity." I'm pointing to parallels because they're part of the historical context in which Christianity emerged. That's what historians do. If a scholar studying emperor worship notes that Roman subjects claimed to witness Augustus ascending to heaven, and then points out that early Christians made the same kind of claim about Jesus, that scholar isn't "doing apologetics against Christianity." They're doing history. You keep treating the comparative method as if it's an attack. It's not. It's the baseline. And you're wrong that Justin and I are doing the same thing. Justin admitted the parallels were real, then argued Jesus was the superior fulfillment. I'm saying the parallels are real and they need to be accounted for in any honest historical reconstruction. Those are different projects. What you're doing is a third thing entirely: pretending the parallels don't matter so you never have to deal with them. Justin was more honest than that. He at least took the comparisons seriously enough to respond to them. You just keep calling them a name and walking away. Here's the trap you're in and I don't think you see it. You don't believe Heracles actually died and came back to life. You don't believe Asclepius really ascended to heaven. You don't believe witnesses actually saw Caesar rise from the funeral pyre. You recognize those as mythological claims that ancient people made about their heroes. But when the earliest Christians make structurally identical claims about their hero, suddenly it's "genuine history" and comparing the two is out of bounds. You're applying radical skepticism to every tradition except your own and calling that objectivity. And honestly, if you were a consistent supernaturalist, you'd have a more interesting position. At least Justin Martyr and the other Church Fathers had the guts to say those pagan miracles really happened, just under demonic inspiration. They took the supernatural claims of other traditions seriously enough to account for them within their worldview. You won't even do that. You just dismiss them as "myth" and then insist your identical claims belong in a completely different category. That's not a historical argument. That's special pleading. You've now spent this entire exchange calling things "parallelomania" and "mere apologetics" without engaging a single specific parallel, a single scholar I cited, or a single argument I actually made. At some point that stops being a rebuttal and starts being an admission that you don't have one.

@DerekPodcast In a way, Justin’s claim and yours are similar. He pointed to “parallels” to lend credibility to Christianity; you point to them to discredit it. Both are mere apologetics. Neither is history.

Let me tell you a story about what happens when an apologist picks a fight with someone who actually knows how to research the manuscripts. Wes Huff attacked @GnosticInformant. Called him a liar. Threw a manuscript on screen as proof. That manuscript was Codex Alexandrinus. It already had the longer ending of Mark. Wes defeated his own argument and didn't realize it. Neal caught it. Wes deleted the video. Nobody has asked him about it since. Until now. @ShawnRyan762 full video in bio.

@Streetsdisple youtu.be/VnbVcdseKpg

@DerekPodcast Derek, can you plz share a link. I’d like to watch that video.

John, you just called Justin Martyr's own argument parallelomania. Let that sink in. A second-century Church Father looked at Heracles, Asclepius, Bacchus, Perseus, Bellerophon, and the deified Caesars, and said openly that what Christians claim about Jesus is "nothing different" from what pagans believed about their figures. Justin saw the parallels. He admitted them. He just argued Jesus was the superior version. That's not me making the comparison. That's one of the earliest Christian apologists making it for me. And your response is to dismiss it with the same word you've been throwing at me all day. So now we've reached the point where you're accusing a Church Father of parallelomania because his honesty is inconvenient for your position in 2026. You also didn't engage with a single thing Dennis MacDonald wrote. Not one point. You saw a detailed list of parallels from a credentialed scholar published by a university press and your entire response was a one-liner. That's not refutation. That's avoidance. Did you know that serious scholars have made the case for dependence on prior myths with the Gospels... and they have arguments that are just generic. Some don't argue for a direct antecedent, rather that these myths were known in the cultural milleu... which is still influence, just not directly in the same manner. And calling what I do "sceptical apologetics" is just the mirror image of what you're doing. The difference is I'm willing to follow the evidence into uncomfortable territory. You've decided in advance where the evidence is allowed to go. Justin Martyr had more intellectual honesty about the parallels than you're showing right now, and he was writing to defend Christianity. What's your excuse?

@DerekPodcast Oh, so you were engaging in parallelomania, after all. I think I’ll stand by previous post. You’re not doing history but sceptical apologetics—I don’t even like Christian apologetics, let alone this derivative version.

Paul, calling this "internet polemics" is a lazy way to avoid engaging with the actual argument. My channel has over 300,000 subscribers and is built on long-form interviews with credentialed scholars in biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern history, and textual criticism. I sit down with people who do this work professionally and let them make their cases on camera. The fact that it happens on YouTube instead of behind a journal paywall doesn't make the arguments less valid. So let's drop the gatekeeping and deal with what was actually said. Second, you're doing a bait and switch and I don't think you even realize it. The discussion was about Mark. Mark's gospel. The earliest gospel, if we accept Markan priority, which the overwhelming majority of scholars do. And Mark ends at 16:8 with an empty tomb, frightened women, and no appearances. That's not my interpretation. That's the text. Everything after 16:8 was added later, and virtually every textual critic on the planet agrees on that. So when you pivot to "well Paul mentions appearances," you're actually making my point for me. Yes, Paul mentions appearances. Nobody disputed that. But Paul is doing something different from what Mark is doing. The question is why the earliest gospel writer chose to end the story the way he did. That's a legitimate historical question, and you don't answer it by pointing at a different author and saying "but he mentioned appearances so it doesn't matter." And then you said that arguing appearances were "a later development" based on Mark, and letting "a later text swallow up the clear statement of an earlier one," is nonsense. But hold on. If Mark is the earliest gospel, and Mark doesn't narrate post-resurrection appearances, and then Matthew and Luke, writing later and using Mark as a source, do narrate appearances, then what we're looking at in the gospel tradition is appearances being added to later texts. That's not nonsense. That's what the manuscripts show. You've actually got the direction backwards. Mark is the earlier text. Matthew and Luke are the later ones. The later texts are the ones adding material, not the other way around. You also floated doubts about Markan priority by bringing up Papias, which is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the evidence when the evidence is inconvenient. The two-source hypothesis has problems, sure. Every theory does. But the scholarly consensus on Markan priority is about as strong as consensuses get in this field. Casually waving at Papias to destabilize the entire framework when it suits your argument and then relying on mainstream scholarship everywhere else is not serious engagement. Pick a lane.

Also, internet polemics never rise to the level of say Martin Hengel’s analysis. As well, mainstream scholars like Ed Sanders and Hengel are convinced of appearances, however we understand them, recounted in the earliest texts (St. Paul’s epistles) and in the Synoptics from source material other than Mark (and at least 2 sources independent of Mark and of each other in the Synoptics). And of course all these books are in Alexandrinus. The shorter ending seems to imply appearances—or arguably does; certainly doesn’t rule them out. But even if not, so what? St. Paul’s earlier source material includes them. Matthew’s and Luke’s independent from Paul and each other include them. But serious discussion of the point would engage Hengel on Mark, among other things. And Bauckham. Between Hengel, Bauckham, Ed Sanders, Tom Wright, Jamie Dunn and internet punditry to the contrary…but folks who try to argue based on Mark that appearances were a later development, thereby allowing an interpretation of a later text to swallow up the clear statement of an earlier one, from the standpoint of inference to the best explanation (a form of argument I’ve helped develop in my own area) is nonsense. Also, some serious scholars raise pretty good questions about Markan priority. It’s never been clear to me that Papias, so much closer to the writers of the Synoptics, is clearly wrong. Some of the way people argue this sounds like when Josephus is invoked as obviously invalidating Luke (in a speech he attributed to Gamaliel and never says is his own position on chronology)—when we know (okay, scholars who study Josephus and don’t just pick and choose reject texts) Josephus reordered chronologies of events. Probably for rhetorical purpose. And just comparing different chronologies for the same events in different works of Josephus. Assumptions inessential to the texts but rather of people today often are what really drives the conclusion.

UPDATE: Neal just called me. He said I left out an important part of his testimony. Apparently it wasn't just Jay Dyer. He said it actually started months ago when Wes Huff made that video calling him a liar. Neal said getting publicly destroyed by a man who didn't even know which manuscript he was showing his own audience was "so humbling that it opened my heart to the possibility of divine mystery." He said watching Wes accidentally debunk himself on camera was "like watching God work through human weakness" and it planted a seed. Then apparently Wes put out a Christmas video and Neal said he watched it alone in the dark and just started sobbing. He said the production value was "anointed" and the message "bypassed his intellect and went straight to his spirit." He's now watching it every morning as part of his devotional routine. He also wanted me to clarify that he doesn't blame Wes for deleting the original video. He said "Wes was just too humble to leave his greatest evangelistic tool on the internet. That's the kind of Christ-like humility I want to embody." I have no further questions. I am simply asking for prayers at this time. @Gnosisinformant

I need to tell you all what just happened because I'm still processing it. I texted my buddy Neal Sendlak from @GnosticInformant and asked if he wanted to grab lunch. He said "yeah meet me at this address." I didn't think anything of it. I pulled up. It was a church. An Orthodox church. I thought maybe he was filming something inside, doing research for a video, whatever. I walked in and this man greeted me at the door in FULL Orthodox priestly vestments. Gold embroidery. The hat. The cross. The whole thing. He was weeping. Not like a single tear. I'm talking full body shaking, snot running, hands trembling, ugly crying. I said "Neal what the hell is going on?" He grabbed both my shoulders, looked me dead in the eyes and said "Derek. Jay Dyer was right. About everything. I watched the debate again last night and I couldn't resist the truth anymore. The Orthodox Church is the one true faith and I've given my life to Christ. I'm being ordained next month." I stood there in silence for about ten seconds. Then he told me he's already reached out to Alex Jones about appearing on Infowars to share his testimony. He said and I quote "the Ortho bros saw something I was blind to, Derek. The icons aren't idols. They're windows to heaven. I see it now." He then tried to bless me with some kind of oil and I had to physically back away because I'm Catholic and he's not a real Christian on the same level as me. He's also changing his channel name to "Gnostic Repentant" and his first video will be "Why I Was Wrong About Everything: My Journey to Holy Orthodoxy." APRIL FOOLS YOU LEGENDS!