Christian apologist Wesley Huff addresses plagiarism accusation

Canadian Christian apologist Wesley Huff has admitted to “problematic work” and not properly citing others’ ideas in an academic paper he wrote as a seminary student in 2016.

But he also accused the biblical scholar who called him out for plagiarizing a Florida pastor of having an “agenda.”

The matter has caused a stir online about what defines plagiarism and when it occurs. Some said Huff, vice president of Apologetics Canada, has also plagiarized other authors.

On Nov. 10, Huff told his one million YouTube subscribers that he regrets his early attempts at academic research.

“If you want to cancel Wes Huff from 2016, maybe even 2017 or 2018, I do, too,” he said. “I was not a good academic … I take ownership for such poor and problematic work that has my name attached to it.”

Biblical scholar Dan McClellan publicized the plagiarism accusation on his YouTube channel on Nov. 8, with the thumbnail caption, “This is really bad, dude.”

“The data demonstrates that Wesley Huff plagiarized significant portions of a paper he submitted as part of the coursework for his master’s degree,” McClellan said.

Huff’s paper in question, “Christological Claims: A Textual Consideration of John’s Gospel,” is posted to academia.edu, a social media site for academics to share their work.

Responding on his YouTube channel, Huff calls the paper a “draft” that he never submitted for a class or journal. Nobody, he said, would ever read it. He called academia.edu a type of Dropbox for storing many types of material.

“I even had a professor who would put his class notes on the site,” Huff said. “This is not a peer-reviewed journal. This is basically a social media platform of PDF uploads.”

Huff’s 17-page paper, however, looks complete, with an introduction, body, conclusion and footnotes. It includes a header and logo for Tyndale Seminary, the name of Huff’s class and professor at the time and a date: March 18, 2016.

“I do want to say that I have never even published a formal academic journal article as of yet,” he said.

“I need God’s sustaining grace in my home, in my marriage, in my academic life,” he said. “And I’m going to mess up … I hope, though, that in giving you some context of what has gone on here so you’re able to hear my heart in the midst of my apology and response to all this.”

The plagiarism accusations McClellan’s nearly hour-long video claims that Huff plagiarized arguments, structure, references and even some errors from “Jesus as Theos: A Textual Examination,” written by Florida Pastor Brian Wright in 2010.

McClellan said academia.edu had emailed him, recommending Huff’s 2016 essay on Christology. McClellan was intrigued by the topic and interested in reading research by Huff, a popular apologist on YouTube.

"As I started reading, I noticed that the argumentation was uneven,” McClellan said. “There were parts where it displayed a lot more sensitivity and insight than others.”

Both were a red flag for plagiarism. In a side-by-side examination, McClellan showed how Huff “sometimes word for word,” lifted ideas, phrases, sources and even Wright’s own citation errors from Wright’s paper. But Huff never once cited Wright.

Sometimes Wright’s errors became Huff’s errors. For example, Wright, in a citation, had misspelled German academic Georg Olms’ name as “George” and transposed a related publication date from 1876 to 1867. Huff made the same error in his citation for a similarly worded idea.

As for Wright, he used “very, very, very close paraphrase” and engaged in “appropriating” a different writer’s work, McClellan said.

“While I can’t know Dan’s personal motives, the way his interactions have come across have made me wonder about his agenda,” Huff said on YouTube. “I have no idea why Dan has taken it upon himself to make such a focus on me.”

More allegations Meanwhile, more people have come forward on social media claiming Huff has plagiarized elsewhere as well.

Andy Tan, a Ph.D. candidate at Australian Catholic University, posted on X on Nov. 8 that Huff seemed to have used work by Biola University professor David I. Yoon without citing him.

On Nov. 9, Stephen Carlson, a Bible professor at Australian Catholic University, showed on X how Huff seems to have plagiarized him.

A piece from Huff titled “Who Came First?” appears on Huff’s academia.edu profile page. This piece states it was for a New Testament class at Wycliffe College in Toronto on April 12, 2018. It references Carlson in a bibliography but not in the footnotes.

Roys Report (RR) messaged Huff through Apologetics Canada for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response.

Wright’s response Huff said on YouTube that he reached out to Wright, a pastor at Redeemer Community Church in Pensacola, about the plagiarism allegations. Then Huff invited Wright onto his YouTube channel to respond.

“That says a lot about your integrity,” Wright told Huff. “And it really meant a lot that you want to live above reproach.”

“They can try to discredit somebody for what they’re doing,” Wright said. “The hit job was mostly on you; I got a few stray bullets.”

“Everything I write and everything I publish and I do, I literally want it to be used by the church,” Wright said. “If it can be used by the church or if it can help somebody with a way in which they make an argument, or it brings glory to Christ, that’s my goal.”

Social media discussion Some took to social media to support Huff, saying they appreciated his apology.

“I think Wes does a tremendous job in this video of providing the context that was missing from the original accusations,” wrote Josh Barzon, a Christian graphic designer from Iowa, on X. “What was initially presented as a serious scandal looks very different when you actually hear his explanation … This is what Christian maturity looks like.”

An X poster named J.J. Harper wrote: “If he didn’t submit the seminar paper, then there’s no plagiarism. You can either accept Huff’s explanation or (baselessly) call him a liar. Unfortunately, McClellan has chosen the latter option.”

McClellan disagreed. “This is false & his claim is implausible, but in addition to the fact that he put his own name on several plagiarized papers & then made them publicly available, one of the plagiarized papers is currently highlighted on the ‘Resources’ tab of his website,” he wrote on X.

Jared Wilson, pastor of Kansas City’s Liberty Baptist Church, weighed in on what it takes to plagiarize.

“People act like plagiarism is some kind of necessary evil or thing that just ‘happens,’” Wilson wrote on X. “But it’s neither. It takes effort to pass somebody else’s work off as your own, and it takes none not to.”

Critics included podcaster Mike Winger who advised readers on X to “stop defending” Huff. Numerous respondents criticized Winger, saying now was not the time to criticize, due to Huff’s 3-year-old daughter being hospitalized Tuesday. Huff has since posted that his daughter is “safe currently.”

Dan McClellan is an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS / Mormon Church.

But in any case, remember that these are just allegations and even then Wes says these are for an unsubmitted paper.

None of that negates or detracts from the work he has done since.

Prayers for him and his family

A non-issue. It cannot be plagiarism if it isn’t submitted for a grade or publishing. At best it’s a working paper.

Lastly, if a brother is at fault, then you go to him instead of putting him on blast. But since LDS is a cult, Mr. McClellan didn’t think to do that. He has bigger issues to deal with and he doesn’t realize it.

I haven’t noticed academia.edu to be like dropbox. Maybe there are some class notes, working papers, etc. on there but I get e-mails from them inviting me to download papers.
Maybe there is an option to not allow download without author consent — I don’t remember.

Most of what is on academia.edu has been published elsewhere, yes.

I haven’t read any of his papers. i did look closely at what he was saying about the Gospel of Thomas as I was looking to use it in a debate with Mohammedans but Huff and Erhman were referring to the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas” (2nd century) not the Infancy Gospel of thomas (5th century) that the Quran refers to - which was a good point to raise against M’s thinking that was the “Injil”

I found his analysis of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas to be in agreement with what I’ve read elsewhere and differing from Erhman’s view of it as “competing”.

On other points of his, I found he badly misrepresented things on his podcast, but Wes generally was thoughtful and sincere, not a ‘rah rah - youse bad’.

I did look at McClellan’s video and the part where the errors in the 2010 paper that Wes repeated in his 2016 paper were quite convincing that the paper borrowed heavily. But it was a draft, not a submitted formal academic article. The fact that something is a draft does not automatically make unattributed borrowing acceptable of course, but due to it not being a published work, AND from his student days, with no defined proof from later, I would say that McClellan is attacking the messenger.

his papers are free to download for anyone who wants to review themselves - https://utoronto.academia.edu/WesleyHuff?utm_source=chatgpt.com

As an aside, imho the LDS started as a cult formed by Joseph Smith, just as Scientology was started by L.Ron Hubbard, but both moved to a “religion” status after the founders left.

As Elsie knows, i don’t think it even worth looking at spiritual or theological aspects of the LDS, when their historical claims are demonstrably false:
1. the book of Abraham - taking the Book of the Dead and putting J Smith’s own words in it was sneaky - but the Rosetta stone debunked this just a decade later. Why the LDS still persisted is strange.
2. Lamanites etc. - the Mormon says Israelites came to north America and became ancestors of many Native Americans - this is proven false by genetics, linguistics (no trace of Semitic influence), archaeology (no cities, no reference to Levant architecture), and history (not even a slight ‘ancestral myth’). It also refers to horses - which became extinct thousands of years before Moses, and it refers to iron and steel — both of which the MesoAmericans did not have.

So, the solitary interaction I had with a Mormon (in Podgorica of all places), the poor early 20s lad had no answer at all and just blinked and said he didn’t know.

Why delve into theological questions at all if their foundations are false?

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