The Genesis creation account is copied word-for-word from the Babylonian Enuma Elish, and core biblical claims (including the crucifixion of Jesus) are historically unreliable.

On October 18, 2024, Carson debated the historical reliability of Christianity with Wesley Huff on Mark Minard's "Elevating Beyond" podcast. Carson asserted that the Genesis creation account is copied "word for word" from the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, and separately claimed Jesus was not crucified and had a wife. When Huff pressed him to name the actual overlapping wording, Carson could offer only a loose paraphrase ("the waters were divided from the waters") and, asked to summarize the Enuma Elish itself, gave an account that reviewers who watched the exchange (including a detailed write-up at mattayars.com and a breakdown circulated by Probe Ministries) described as barely recognizable against the real text.

The relationship between Genesis and the Enuma Elish is a real, long-studied question in biblical scholarship, just not the one Carson described. Mainstream Old Testament scholarship, the position Huff argued from, holds that Genesis 1 shares some vocabulary and structural beats with Mesopotamian cosmogonies (a watery chaos preceding creation, for instance) but reads Genesis as a deliberate polemic against the Enuma Elish's polytheism: where the Babylonian text has the god Marduk build the world from the corpse of a defeated goddess after a divine battle, Genesis presents one transcendent God speaking creation into order with no combat and no corpse. Shared background imagery and word-for-word copying are different claims, and the debate turned on Carson's inability to support the stronger one he had made.

Huff is not a lightweight opposing voice: he is a New Testament PhD candidate in textual criticism at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, holds a Master's in theological studies from Tyndale University, and a BA in sociology from York University. The debate reached well beyond either man's existing audience: Huff gained roughly 250,000 YouTube subscribers in its wake and was invited onto The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss it, giving the exchange far more independent scrutiny than a typical podcast debate receives.

In the aftermath, Huff stated publicly, in a December 2024 post on X and in accompanying videos, that Carson sent him a cease-and-desist letter over his continued use of debate clips and threatened legal action. Carson's representatives, quoted in a report from The US Sun (republished via NewsBreak), denied that any lawsuit was filed, stating "We are not, and never sued Wes Huff." Both sides agree a cease-and-desist letter changed hands over the right to keep posting clips of the debate; they disagree on whether it escalated into an actual suit: a genuine factual dispute this entry cannot resolve further and notes rather than settles.