This is as much an excuse to plug one of my favorite satirical websites, the Babylon Bee, as anything else. They’ve got a mock-historical article claiming that the apostles Paul and Barnabas parted ways over the pronunciation of GIF.
It’s hard to tell reality from satire these days, so I should say again that the Babylon Bee is strictly satirical. I think it’s funnier than the Onion.
To me it’s clear that the Shakers got it right when they went with the hard G. You know the song: “‘Tis a GIF to be simple, ’tis a GIF to be free…”