FAVORITE EPISODE: #7 HISTORY LESSON: HOW DID JEWS BECOME CHRISTIANS? + Dr. James Sedlacek

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense, so we can get to know God our creator better.

Hello, hello. James, how are you? Good. How are you, Cassian?

I'm doing really well. I am so glad to have you back on the podcast.

I'm excited to be back. Yes, it's good. This topic today is so timely. I wanted.

To say before, I feel like there's a motif going on, and this is mostly a personal one, but on the idea of Jewishness and Christianity and where that overlaps. I think that this is more of a personal thing because I'm Christian.

My friends are Jews. There's a lot of anti-Semitism going on. Not that I don't love my Jewish friends, but where's the religious significance? You know how to love your neighbor in the Bible. I feel like going to church, you're around your Christian friends or your Christian family, but we don't really get taught on how to love your Muslim or your Jewish or your Buddhist or Hindu.

You don't really be told how to really appreciate their faith because I guess in the back of my head, I'm like, well, they're not of my faith, so how's it hard to appreciate their faith? That being said, Jesus was a Jew.

All of this came from Judaism, and then it became Christianity. I think what I'm really missing personally is that link between the two. I'm really excited about the topic today because we're going to be exploring.

Jewishness in the Bible. Yes, and maybe I can speak to a couple of issues that maybe cause that separation for us in the modern world. When we think about New Testament studies and Christian studies, a lot of folks that deal with Christian theology and even a lot of people that are New Testament professors are only marginally aware of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewishness that's involved in the Hebrew Bible and its relationship to the New Testament.

For years, to develop a New Testament professor, a person would take a lot of Greek, a lot of theologies as they relate to the Gospels and Pauline letters, Johannine letters, maybe even Revelation. It depends on the person's preference there probably and maybe their own denominational preferences, but the Gospels, Pauline literature would be big parts of the theological training for a New Testament professor.

The Greek language would be primary, but the typical degree program would not involve Hebrew grammar, Hebrew text. So it would exclude the Jewish faith? Not necessarily, but it excludes a large body of literature being examined at the same level that the New Testament is being examined with.

And because it's excluded, simply because the language isn't learned in the degree program and the texts aren't studied in their original context, that it leaves a gap in the learning process for the average, typical New Testament professor.

Maybe I'm a bit confused, but you're saying the Bible was translated in Greek and Hebrew, and in the Greek versions, you're getting the Johannine, the New Testament, the Pauline, all of the Gospels, but in a certain language that is maybe more understandable.

But when it comes to that version in Hebrew, it's not as well understood, or is that a completely different set.

Of books? It's a different set of books. So the Hebrew Bible is from Genesis to Malachi, and we call it the Old Testament, generally speaking. Oh, okay. And then the Greek begins with the Gospel of Matthew and goes to Revelation.

Oh, why was that separated like that? Was that a timely thing? Big time difference. So when Moses is writing the books of Moses, it's about 1 ,450 years before Christ, give or take a few decades. 1 ,500 years before Christ, Moses was writing the New Testament.

I'm sorry, the Old Testament. Yeah, the Torah, the first books of the Old Testament. So this is a thousand and a half, a millennia and a half before Christ. Moses sits down and writes these books.

I'm sorry, this is confusing, but was the Torah a part of a book of the Bible, or and then now it's become just Jewish faith just reads the Torah?

The Torah is the name for the first five books. The book Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as a set are the Torah. Today, that is still consistent?

That's the Torah, yes. What? Oh my gosh. I had no idea. So the Torah and the first five books of the Old Testament are the same writing? Same thing, yes. What? But it's in Hebrew. Yes. How is our faith different?

It sounds like we're reading the same stuff. We should be more similar than probably how things have turned out. So the Torah or the main text for Judaism as it is, is the same books that we have in our English Bibles as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Why didn't I know this before? This is so cool. It's okay. So Moses is writing that about 1 ,500 years before Jesus comes, right? Yeah. So in between those 1 ,500 years, the Psalms are written. David writes the Psalms.

Different prophets write some of the prophetic books. Isaiah and some of them are earlier. Jeremiah's later and then finally at the tail end is Malachi and Joel and Habakkuk and some of those guys. So all of those are written in a time period of about 1 ,000 years from about 1450 before Christ to about 440 or 450 before.

Christ. And then no writings for those remaining 400 years.

That's the question. What got wrote in between there and what is it and how valuable is it for our study? There's actually quite a few books that were written in between, but those are what we call Second Temple Jewish literature.

So you have in some Bibles, they have a bunch of those books, at least 14 of them, and they might be called Apocrypha. That's another word that's used to talk about those books that are not part of the Hebrew Bible per se and they're not part of the New Testament, but they're in between.

Some of those books are historical. You can get them as a, you can go buy a copy of the Apocrypha. Oh, but they're not in the Torah and they're not in the Bible. They're not in the Torah. They're not in the Tanakh, which is the whole Old Testament.

So they're not in that either. And they're not in the New Testament. And some English Bibles do include them in a little section in between. They'll just call it the Apocrypha if they do. Most English Bibles don't.

They don't include it. One of the first reasons that they were not included, because the first Bibles, they all had it. And then when the printing press was invented, and especially when commoners wanted their own Bible, they took those out because they didn't consider them canonical anyway.

They figured they would save on costs by not including them. Oh, economical. Economical, yes. Okay. After several centuries... Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I'm just trying to like filter this back.

Because this is so much and my brain is moving slow today. So you're saying that there is a whole section that was originally in the original text of the Bible that maybe like a couple hundred, maybe a thousand people have read, but us today are missing a huge chunk of the original couple books of the Bible.

They're just not really talked about. They're not known. They're not part of the faith, but they were in the original formation of the Christian faith. That's the tricky part.

They were around, but who considered them Bible? That was the hard part. Did everyone think... So they could have just been like historical text. Yeah. And so once the Jewish canon was solidified, they did not include those books.

And so canon is like a list of books that are certified as accurate and true, inspired by God and so forth. And so there was a council that took place around the Sea of Galilee by the Pharisees sometime after a lot of the New Testament had come out.

And they made a council to think back all the Jewish books and close the canon, so to speak, on which books are considered for religion and practice. When they did that, they did not pick any of those books.

And it's also when you read them, it's not a hundred percent certain that you want to use them in church anyway, as doctrinal or practice books or books to grow from, because they don't always speak to issues that are relevant for growing one's faith on.

They are often very good historical books. I was just about to say they're.

Probably worth the read. Worth the read. I think, yeah, in my head, and that's just me being in between the millennial and Gen Z, I immediately go to, you know, it's the church wanting to hide something.

So they took out the book. They want to control. You know, I go to the conspiracy theory, but that's interesting. I definitely heard that there are books of the Bible that they're really hard to find.

They're locked away in some vaults in the Vatican, whatever it might be. And that's good to hear that it just, the end game of them not being included was because they were going to be more distracting than they were forming in your faith.

But is this,.

This would be like the book of Enoch? Is that? That's an example. Actually, that one is not usually in some apocrypha lists either, but that was also a piece of literature from that time that's probably relevant for our study.

What I think of about the apocrypha and other Second Temple Jewish literature books is that they were important enough for first century people to be reading and thinking about, that also our New Testament authors were familiar with them and the ideas within them, sometimes quoting from them, sometimes depending on their logic, that they're useful.

Whether we should be using them, let's say to make the Sunday morning sermon from or not, that's a different question, but using them to help us better understand both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, I think is helpful.

So they were contextually useful at the time when people were kind of going from Old Testament to New Testament, the people that were kind of happened, living at the time of the New Testament, were saying, this is good context for us.

This is relevant for us at this time period. Whereas today it's unrelatable. We wouldn't be able to really understand it or see why it was important.

They're easy to dismiss, honestly, because we don't see, for example, sermons arising from them and things like that, but they're useful to understanding two things, at least that I've been able to tell, how Daniel's prophecies actually get fulfilled, because we don't see them get fulfilled inside the chapters of the Hebrew Bible.

And when we open up our New Testament,.

It's already over. I was going to say, prophets are a pretty gray area for me in the Christian view.

I kind of want to go back to one of my earlier statements. No, no, it's fine. Just because it's relevant to your last statement, how New Testament professors and Old Testament professors at your typical seminaries are trained.

They're usually trained in a track that includes the languages for that Testament, the theologies that are coming from that Testament. What I mean by that is theological concepts. And then that's how they built their professorship.

And most people that are New Testament professors, Old Testament professors, don't know what the other one does. You would think you'd be taught on the whole Bible. Well, the problem is it takes too long for a person to train equally well in both.

And let's say, for example, your typical Master's of Divinity degree is, well, it used to be 90 hours. It's now 72 credit hours. Once they lowered the standard to 72, nobody's going to offer a 90 anymore.

But even at the 90-hour one, if you think about credit hours, a typical class is three hours. So with a 90 credit hour program, you're going to take 30 total classes, no more. A language sequence, to do a language well, you're going to take two three credit hours of a language.

So that's six hours. So two classes, if you will, of Hebrew. Then you're going to take what's called advanced Hebrew grammar. That's another term, another semester. And then you're going to take something called exegesis.

So that's 12 credit hours, just getting one basic language sequence down. Then you're also going to want to take some books in the specific class on the book of Jonah, a specific class on the book of Genesis, a specific class on Psalms, just so that you have something from the writings, something from the prophets and something from the Torah.

So you get the three main divisions of the Hebrew Bible in the training. Well, now you're up to seven classes out of 30. And the typical person finishing an MDiv also needs things in church history, practical ministries, how to run a church board, how to understand my own denominational history.

That's important, right? And so once you start stacking all these things into a program, you end up with 12 hours at best on one language and nine hours at best on the books that you need to study in depth.

And so you're sitting at pretty close to most of your degree mapped out for you, and you've only dealt in one of the two. And the same is true for the other one.

Something inside of me told me that going to seminary school is just really understanding the whole book of the Bible and full stop, that's it. But you don't think about the history and the languages and the development and then the significance and that.

It just goes on and on and on. Oh my gosh, that sounds like a lot. So back to Jewishness and kind of the development, how there was the Torah, the Hebrew, and then there was the New Testament and Greek, tying that together and kind of how we separated, how we went from a Jewish Messiah to a Christian.

Faith. Yes, so the Hebrew books are written in a time period when the Jewish people are using Hebrew as their main language. After the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, when they go to Babylon and then Persia and then they return to rebuild, the main language is going to be Aramaic now.

Rather than Hebrew, the main language becomes Aramaic. Now in the region of Jerusalem, Hebrew was still spoken, but most of the land was speaking Aramaic. And then Jerusalem and Judea are still using Hebrew, even as far as Jesus' time.

But Galilee is not, and the rest of what we know of as Israel is using Aramaic. After the Aramaic introduction, so some of the books of the Hebrew Bible are actually written in Aramaic if they're written in that time period.

So we find the last books written in a different language. About 150 years later, we have someone called Alexander the Great.

This is before Jesus. Okay, so now we're like 300 years out from Jesus' birth.

That's right. Right around 330 to 300. Yep. Alexander the Great takes over as the sole ruler in Greece, and Greece has been whipped up on by the Persians a few times. So he decides he's going once and for all and unseat the Persians from power.

Well, that means global domination. He goes around and starts mopping up and crushing, and the next thing you know, Persia's flat. It's done. And so he's crushed Persia in several swift series of battles, and he's conquered Egypt.

What we know of is Israel. What we know of is Iraq, Iran, and most of the Stans, Afghanistan. All of that falls under the Greek empire that's being built.

And this is like a Persian war, right, between Greece and Persia, essentially. But essentially, Jewish faith. So faith was playing a role in this? Or was that kind of.

This is the setting. This is a setting for what happens next. What happens next is your next generation of Jewish persons is growing up in a Greek speaking world. And so the language now changes from Aramaic to Greek.

So Paul, in his hometown where he grew up, Greek was the spoken language by his time. Where Jesus was growing up, Aramaic was the local language, but people still spoke Greek because they needed to trade outside their borders.

And in Jerusalem, Hebrew is the spoken language. So when you went to do the Passover and deal with the priest at the temple, you had to switch from Aramaic to Hebrew. But when you went up north to visit Jews in Turkey, you had to switch to Greek.

So when the time of the New Testament comes around, most of the Jewish speaking world is actually speaking Greek. Only a relatively few are speaking Hebrew. And something took place about 100, 150 years after Alexander the Great's conquest.

The whole Jewish world pretty much is using Greek so much that the rabbis get together, and there was some influence from an outside source as well, but they approved a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

And we call that the Septuagint. It's also called the LXX. So this Greek Bible is the one that takes us forward into the first century when Jesus is growing up and the apostles are going around building the church.

Most of their quotations inside the New Testament of the Old Testament passages are actually in the Greek Septuagint. They're quoting the Greek. That's probably 96 anyway. That's the rough number.

And this is inclusive of those books that were taken out of, I forgot the name.

The Apocrypha or the other ones that weren't actually ever called Apocrypha, the Second Temple Jewish literature, some of them were cited. Some of them were just mentioned. Sometimes a detail would be mentioned because it was popularly known stuff.

And so let's say, for example, we had a book years ago written called Moby Dick. We did. We could make a reference to it today and said, oh, that happened just like it did in Moby Dick. Right. So Moby Dick was a big whaler story about in the 1800s, right near the end of the whaling industry.

So it was kind of a story to wake people up and maybe stop the whaling abuses. Right. We wouldn't need a story like that today because people are really doing that. But we still remember that story and we reference it.

Another example could be like saying, oh, that happened just like Gone with the Wind. And we cite a famous movie. Or this happened just like Star Wars, right?

These are great examples.

And so in the New Testament, they're going to reference things from well-known literature. And this literature was well enough known that it got these offhand allusions. And sometimes ideas in them would be even expanded on in the New Testament sometimes.

The other thing that we see with some of the, maybe we just call them extra books. Maybe we call them Second Temple Jewish literature. That's my favorite word for it. Because the Jewish community was who was using them.

And they were after the Second Temple was built, which was Zerubbabel's temple. After the rebuild from when Cyrus tells the Jews to go back and rebuild the wall, the city and the temple, a person named Zerubbabel rebuilds and makes a new temple.

It was said it wasn't as good as Solomon's, but it was still good. And people rejoiced that were younger because they hadn't seen one yet. People that were older wept because they knew Solomon's was way better than that.

And so there were people of different generations having different responses to it. But that temple is the one that's still around when Jesus comes in, right? So Zerubbabel's temple was kind of simpler, plainer, but the guy named Herod the Great restructured it, rebuilt it, made it beautiful again.

So by the time Jesus actually arrives, it's been beautified. So it doesn't look as bad as it did to that first generation that saw it. So that's what we mean by Second Temple. It was built by Zerubbabel, re-beautified by Herod the Great.

And then it was destroyed in AD 70. So that's the Second Temple. So from the time of its being built until AD 70, that period is called Second Temple Judaism. And literature written in that includes these books.

So how do we go from a Hebrew Torah to Greek Gospels has a lot to do with the fact that the Jewish people themselves are speaking different languages in different millennia.

Because of...

Social circumstances. Wars and conquests and who are the rulers now, that sort of thing.

Running my own podcast, I'm always moving too fast. I'm finding guests. I'm editing episodes.

I'm creating reels or guesting on other shows. Not to mention, I just live in a world that moves fast. Notifications, trends, endless to-do lists. You know what feels like a blessing in all that?

Slowing down.

I'd love nothing more than a moment to pause, be present, and choose something timeless. That's exactly what Dwell Label is all about. When I first discovered Dwell Label, it wasn't just about the clothes.

It was about a mindset, thoughtful, intentional fashion that doesn't scream for attention, but instead invites you to slow down. Their pieces are modern takes on classic styles. Made to last, not just for the season, but for years.

I love that I can throw on a Dwell Label outfit for editing in a coffee shop, Bible studies, or looking professional in an interview. It always feels right. Comfortable, effortless, elevated. And here's the best part.

Dwell Label does not just talk about rest. They live it. Their website literally doesn't work on Sundays because they believe in pausing, in dwelling, what matters most. So if you're looking for high-quality, timeless fashion that aligns with a lifestyle of intention and presence, I can't recommend Dwell Label enough.

Shop Dwell Label with the link in the show notes and use my code BIVSPEAK15 B-I-V-S-P-E-A-K -15 for an exclusive discount at checkout. Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things.

Now, back to the show.

Okay, so that explains why there's two separate languages, but I guess what was the bridge between Jewish and Christian then?

Yeah, that one is more difficult to explain, but going into the earlier what I was saying about the two tracks, Old Testament professors have their track and New Testament professors have their track, this kind of thing has been happening for several hundred years inside Christian circles.

And because of that, New Testament professors are usually unaware of what Old Testament professors are dealing with and the text they are reading, and Old Testament professors are often unaware of what the New Testament is doing because that's not part of their program of study, that wasn't something they developed expertise in.

So what happens over time is that if you're ignorant about something, you tend to say things about that other thing that aren't quite accurate. And these things don't really get tested or proved or adjusted because nobody's checking.

Yeah.

And then very few people have the expertise to critique these things because who's going to do a double MDiv? One in Old Testament, one in New Testament, it doesn't happen. When I went and did my MDiv, I did a double major, which is similar, but what it meant is I had to substitute things out of my degree program in order to do both Hebrew and Greek, do both Greek exegesis and Hebrew exegesis, study intensely Greek, New Testament, and Hebrew Old Testament books at a pretty high level of depth, and study the critical issues that scholars have raised for both the New Testament and the Old Testament.

That's a massive thing in and of itself. But by doing that, I had to cut out courses that were maybe, I don't know, practical ministry-related or church history-related. I did study history, I love history, so I always was going to anchor myself in the historical things as they develop.

I never needed a degree in history to want to learn history, but I felt like there's some things I can learn on my own. There's some things I need pushed to learn. And if I'm going to get a grasp of how the New Testament and Old Testament relate to each other, I need to study both carefully.

And I think in my whole seminary experience, there was only one other person I knew of that did that. So there's, and he's my friend, we go to conferences together and we live not too far from each other as it happens.

But it's rare because you have to give up something in the degree program if you want to get both of these tracks. Or else you have to do two degrees and convince somebody that you need to do two degrees of the same apparent level.

That's hard to do. And a typical person who's deciding to be a pastor of a church also would go get an MDiv, but they're going to concentrate more on practical ministries because of the social issues that face the church.

They need to study some things that a scholar wouldn't find helpful. And so I was pretty much on the track that was for scholars rather than pastors, but I was a pastor and I was pastoring. But where I was in my ministry context, I felt that I was well-equipped in the pastoral role and I didn't need to do an MDiv in practical ministries to do that.

Yes, I will have limitations in that area, but I also find that my main role as a pastor isn't being the lead pastor generally. I could be if I need to be, but that's not my main role. My main role is in discipleship, discipleship and equipping ministries.

I've also been trained to be a chaplain as well, and sometimes a church needs a chaplain. And if a church is a rather large church with many people in hospital or nursing home, sometimes having a chaplain on staff is the best way to go.

So that would be a Catholic faith?

No, chaplains can be of any denomination and any group. But what a chaplain is, is a person who can go into a healthcare facility who's been certified to be in a healthcare environment and provide religious services to people who need it and advice and counseling to anyone who asks for it.

So I've done that a large number of my years.

Wow.

I feel like I'm talking to the most educated people in the Bible.

Well, I don't know that necessarily, but one of the things that I see is where we have our typical degree program set up and what our typical seminary shoots for. Don't create a person who's capable of moving between both Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament and connecting the dots.

So that is a bit of a lacking in the connection for understanding the Bible as a whole, especially on a simple level for someone like me who wants to know the highest level. I just want to know the cream skimmed off the top.

That requires so much depth and knowledge and understanding. That is a very big undertaking for somebody. So maybe us as Christians, when we have questions, maybe we're asking a legitimate question, but to fully answer it correctly takes a level of schooling that not everybody has.

And probably not one that most pastors have. And I don't know what the number would be, but if I look at my own band of pastors that I'm part of, there's probably three of us out of a hundred that know our biblical Greek and maybe two of us out of a hundred that know our biblical Hebrew.

And only one of us that knows both. And that would be me. But that's typical, actually. That's not unusual.

Right, right. No, that's just news to me.

I've heard a lot of pastors say, well, they put me through Greek in seminary. But that statement belies a simple problem. They didn't learn their Greek in seminary. They learned it quickly and forgot it quickly.

And so they aren't using it and they can't use it to ferret out things.

Right.

They will have to ask somebody.

Misunderstanding and misinterpretation issues that they're then feeding to their congregation.

It probably shouldn't happen to that extreme level.

It can.

I think most pastors ground themselves in the theological traditions of their denomination. And somebody within their structure would know enough to steer them away from really big pitfalls.

Yeah.

And usually people who have stumbled into a pitfall and wrote a book about it, usually their book gets critiqued at their conferences. So they know some of the things that are out there and how to avoid them.

So I think most pastors avoid the extremes of that by being connected to other people who are looking out for problems. But it is potentially possible for a pastor to mislead people. But the place where I think it happens unavoidably is not any serious misleading.

But when we depend too much on a tradition to interpret the Bible for us, then we're eventually become blind to counter evidence.

I want to take a moment to highlight the platform that's revolutionizing the way that people learn about the Word of God. School. When I first started this podcast, my goal was very simple. I wanted to equip people with clear, accessible, biblical understanding through scholars.

But I quickly realized that podcasting alone wasn't enough. I wanted to create a space where people could actually connect and learn and dive deeper beyond just listening.

That's when I found School.

School is the most user-friendly platform I've ever come across. It's built by Sam Ovens with insights from business minds like Alex Hermosi. School combines the best of online education, coaching, and community in one place.

It's intuitive, powerful, and it connects you to a global network of learners and teachers. That's why I launched Biblically Heard, a place where you can chat with scholars, take courses from beginner to expert level, and even connect with me directly.

So if you're looking to build a coaching business, or launch an online course, or create an engaged community, School beats out every other tool. It combines the best of Patreon-style tiered services and Telegram-style community feeds.

It's a seamless scheduling tool with integrations with Zapier, Zoom, and even Google Calendar. If this sounds like the right platform for you, please use my affiliate link in the show notes below to get started.

It won't cost you anything extra, and it keeps this channel going.

Now, back to the show.

So sometimes there's a little fact that's just there that's bothering you, but you don't know how to deal with it. So it's like, it seems like it could unravel one of my points that I might want to make.

But if no one in my circle of folks that I'm bouncing ideas off of develops this thing, eventually it gets explained.

You're gonna have to use an example. You're kind of losing me.

Yeah, I'm not thinking of an example while I'm saying that. I'm just aware of the problem. So I apologize for that.

Would you say like a tradition, I immediately thought of a Jewish tradition, kind of, you know, the bathing tradition or what?

Sure, I can explain a little better. When I'm referring to a tradition of Christian practice, I'm referring to things like what a major denomination would be. That would be a particular tradition to think about the Bible from.

So a couple of examples.

Like Catholic examples?

Well, yeah, so we could say, well, according to the Catholic tradition, we think about the Bible this way. According to the Calvinist tradition, we think about the Bible this way.

I know what that is.

So John Calvin was one of the reformers in the early modern period who was trying to reform some of the Catholic things in his day to something different. And so he was one of the reformers. Martin Luther was another reformer.

And so they both knew each other. They both were around at the same time, but they're in two different countries. And so there's a system of thought that's called Calvinist that develops from John Calvin's thought.

And so there's a Calvinist way of thinking about scripture.

Yeah, I'm back on track.

Then there's a Wesleyan way of thinking about scripture. And that was based on another later person who comes along to kind of counter some of the rough edges of the reformers as well as keep reforming the church.

And that man's name was John Wesley. He was an Anglican priest, never left the Anglican church, never went out and started his own group, so to speak. But it wasn't long after his death till his followers did.

And so then they founded what we later know of as Methodism. So that's the way of thinking. So within different, maybe we can think of it this way. There's different schools of thought on how to read and interpret the Bible.

Absolutely.

And if a person belongs to one of these schools of thought, they tend to think about scripture the same way.

Absolutely.

So that's where I'm coming from. And if, let's say, a pastor belongs to one of these schools of thought, maybe that's a better word than tradition. So they're going to tend to think about scripture that same way.

But you said that there was an issue, maybe if they tie themselves to a fact that goes on notice and goes uncorrected. So are you saying, I mean, are you saying that maybe in the past there's been something in a certain faith that that school of thought tied themselves to that ended up being either untrue or problematic or not actually adhering to the core of the Christian faith?

Well, I don't know if it goes to those extremes, but what would happen is that sometimes you've got, I don't know, 200 items that are facts. And so what your job is as a theologian is to weave all of these facts together into like a tapestry where they make sense together.