So we'll go ahead and get started. I just want to make sure everybody could hear us coming through. My name is Clark Ray. I'm on the team here at Sattler College for thehistoricfaith.com. It's been an awesome opportunity to work on this project this last year and working with David and the other team members here to launch this this summer. And it's been really cool to see the community come together and an opportunity to engage in the historic faith and with each other. Today, this is the first time for us.
So bear with us as we kind of settle out what this format looks like, what we're going to do with this in the future, and any technical difficulties that we run into. Your patience is appreciated. Yeah, like I said, my name's Clark Ray. I'll be hosting this event today, and David will be responding to some questions that you all submitted. So I want to introduce David Bercot. I think most of you probably know who David Bercot is.
His company, Scroll Publishing, has been publishing books for quite a few years, and he's an author of a couple books that many of you have probably heard of, such as dictionaries of early Christian beliefs, and will the real heretics please stand up. So David, if you want to quickly say hi and kind of what you're hoping to do here today, and then we'll kind of get started with the questions. Okay, well, yeah, this is exciting doing our first webinar like this.
And we'll be talking about what I'm working on right now, which is a commentary on Matthew. And hopefully, the first volume of that, it'll be a two-volume commentary, and hopefully the first one will be out in January. And it'll cover the first 13 chapters of Matthew. Yeah, and then also along with that, we're hoping or planning to develop audio courses that will tie into all of the knowledge that you're putting together there in that commentary that users will be able to go through on thehistoricfaith.com.
So as we're asking questions that have been submitted by all of you, I want you all to be thinking about follow-up questions. We're going to have a little bit of time for some live follow-up questions towards the end. We're going to end the survey questions at about 10:30, and we'll have nine, 10 minutes for follow-up questions. So if you have a question during this event, go ahead and click the chat button at the bottom. And Timothy will be collecting those.
And we'll have some opportunity to ask David some follow-up questions. So participate in that as you're able to. All right, so let's get started. Off the bat, the first thing that I think is a really big question because it's something that you've talked about in the past is biblical commentaries. You've not always had real positive things to say about biblical commentaries. So what now? Why now? What makes this different? What makes yours different? What's your goals here with this commentary?
Well, Clark, I'm blessed that I've got readers who are not passive. They give me feedback if they don't feel like something I'm saying is maybe right on. So that was in the book. Will the theologians please sit down? And I got a lot of feedback from readers that I listened to. And I realized they had a valid point.
Most people are not, if they're going to be giving a sermon or a Sunday school class or whatever, they're not going to be in a position to just pick up the Bible necessarily and feel qualified to speak from it. And so they are going to turn to commentaries. And so my real issue isn't so much commentaries. It was that so many commentaries negate what the scriptures say. I mean, you'll be reading the Bible and then the commentary will tell you, no, it doesn't mean that. It means just the opposite.
Or they will have supposed historic information that is totally bogus. So those are the things that I was having an issue with. So yeah, it occurred to me, all right, a commentary that would truly reflect the historic faith. What did they believe in the beginning?
And to do that, it meant the last three years I've been putting into research on this, rereading the Ante-Nicene Fathers, rereading Josephus, Philo, primary sources like that so that the commentary will reflect real information and will reflect what Christians believed in the beginning.
So really, I think what it sounds like is maybe your goal with this commentary isn't so much what David thinks it's saying, but trying to take already known historical information from the early church and their writings about this book, the Gospel of Matthew, and bringing those together as a commentary from their perspective, almost, to an extent, versus necessarily just from your perspective. Exactly. To be honest, it would have been easier to write a David Bercot commentary series. It'd been a lot easier. Yeah.
Yeah, this is going to be what they thought. Now, I will be taking their quotes, digesting it. The commentary will have lots of quotes, lots of footnotes and citations, but it's not going to be just nothing but quotes. I am going to be bringing it together. So it will be readable. It won't just be overly dry. So you're taking their comments, their input, their teachings on those subjects, and then synthesizing it into something that's digestible to read through. It's practical for us to understand it. Exactly.
Yeah, very good. So why did you choose Matthew over the other gospels or anywhere else in the Bible to start with? Is there a particular reason why you decided to start with Matthew? Yes. Originally, I thought this was going to be easier than what it has turned out to be. And so I was optimistically thinking, oh, I will do the entire New Testament, one book at a time. Now, unless the Lord gives me an unusually long life and unusually good health, I don't think I will get through the New Testament.
But the reason for starting with Matthew is just starting with the New Testament. The choice was either starting with Genesis or starting with Matthew. And I felt Matthew, the New Testament would be more of immediate use to my readers. The other thing is, even if I wasn't going that route, if I was just going to pick a book of the Bible, honestly, it would be Matthew. It contains more of Jesus ' teaching than any other book. It was the first gospel written. And so, and it contains more kingdom teaching.
So if we want to see what is the gospel of the kingdom, and that's the term that Matthew uses, then yeah, Matthew is the logical place to start with. We get to see what Jesus's gospel is before we ever get to the epistles or yeah, the general epistles or things like that. That makes a lot of sense. I'm not going to make you commit to anything, but would your hope to be to expand this to more of the New Testament eventually, or you're working with Matthew right now, and that's your main focus?
No, I definitely want to do more. The plan, and we will see how this goes, would be in maybe two years, have the second volume of Matthew done. And then from there, I would either go to John or go to Romans. I'm thinking Romans just because Luther's take on Romans has so dominated non-Catholic theology. I think there's a real need for people to see what was the historic faith. What did Christians believe in the beginning about Romans? How did they understand the Book of Romans?
So that's probably where I will go after I finish Matthew. That makes a lot of sense. And have both the foundation and then those are building on that foundation all from the context of how the early church perceived those teachings and put them into practice. I really, I think that's a great idea. All right, so I think we're going to transition now into what you're doing and an overview of this future project to what really our heart at thehistoricfaith.com is.
And that is that people aren't, and I think this is your heart as well, that people aren't just gaining head knowledge, just gaining information, but it has practical outworkings in their life. And that often is done by taking the teachings of Jesus seriously, the life of Jesus seriously. And so we have readers, listeners, learners that have written in the survey questions asking about very specific teachings of Jesus.
And so this maybe is an opportunity to kind of get a taste of what you've been learning and maybe what will be potentially in the commentaries or in the audio lessons about the teachings of Jesus. So these are questions related directly to the text in Matthew. So we'll go ahead and get started on this.
The first question we have from a reader regarding this, he asked, " When Jesus said, whoever relaxes in other translation breaks, so whoever relaxes or breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. So did the early Christians believe that by these commandments, he meant his own or the Mosaic law? Yeah, let me start off by saying that was a really good question because so much of my life, I wondered the same thing.
Which one is he talking about? And the early Christians make it clear that he is talking about his commandments. And his whole point, this is at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I forget which verse it is, but it's very shortly into it. And the point he is getting across is, I am a legislature, legislator. I am a lawmaker on par with Moses, in fact, beyond Moses. So I'm about to give you my commandments.
And the same kind of respect that you gave to the commandments of Moses, I expect the same from my disciples that, in fact, if you even break the least of these, then it is going to affect your eternal standing. So these are not suggestions. These are not thoughts for the day. These are not ideals that no one can reach. These commandments he expects us to live by. And yeah, if we take even any of them and say, well, we can ignore that one. That's a little bit too hard.
That is going to affect your standing in eternity. So yeah, he's really laying down the playing rules. This is how it is. I want you to listen and pay attention to what I'm saying. Yeah, and so the person asked this question mentions at the end of that that they used to think it meant the mosaic law. So I'm guessing that that's changed for them, but it's something they're still maybe wrestling with.
In your commentary, do you dive into that more, that particular type of question more regarding why it's very clear that the early Christians saw it as Jesus ' teachings specifically? Right. In fact, it's interesting. Every one of these questions, as it turns out, is a subheading in the commentary that I was able to pull out. So it was kind of confirming that, okay, people are wondering this. And now, but you have raised something that I should discuss because I don't want people to have false hopes.
Now, you know, the historic faith series, I talk about subjects like what did the early Christians believed on salvation or the Trinity or things like that? Those kind of topics, there are so many quotes. It is very easy to pull together lots of quotations. They all comment on it, that sort of thing. But when you start getting into going through any book of the Bible verse by verse, there's not always going to be a lot of discussion on a given verse.
So I don't want my readers to think, oh, okay, I'm going to have just maybe 20 quotes on this subject or that. Like on that one, there will be a number of them enough that I think it's clear how they understood that. It will be a little different than if I were going by topic. And that's one reason this has taken so much work. It wasn't right there at my fingertips to grab. Yeah, that makes sense.
And you know the questions that we, I think one thing that's really inspiring about reading early church writings is that it is interesting how much of a parallel of their struggles often parallel our struggles today, but that's not always the case. And so sometimes the things that we struggle with today, they might not have as many writings about, but generally speaking, there might be something.
So I like that you maybe gave us good expectations that not necessarily expect just huge amounts of information on every single topic, but more just walking through it with what's there. Okay, so the next question here is from one of our learners, he asked, or she asked, " Jesus says not to call one brother a fool. " Yet, why did he call the two on the Emmaus Road oh foolish ones? Okay, excellent question. And I have a long discussion on that in the commentary.
Now, this goes back to the wrong explanation that we have all heard that I have taught nearly my whole life. And that is, Jesus, I think, well, I'll just read it here. Let me see. Yeah. He said, " But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother without a cause will be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, Raca will be in danger of the council. " And whoever says, " You fool will be in danger of hellfire. " And so most of us have explained this that there's a tier.
If you're angry, okay, you are going to be in trouble with the judge. And this was usually explained. Okay, this was the local judge there in Israel, a local council, something like that. And then the next level is if you call somebody Raca, well then you're going to be before an appeals court. Maybe the Sanhedrin, some translation say that. And then finally, if you say fool, well, then you're in danger of hellfire. That's the worst thing you can call someone. It goes against our common sense, like fool.
I mean, that's a pretty mild term, we would think. And so then we have to come up with these explanations. And I've given sermons on why fool is the worst thing you can call someone, even though it went against what I would naturally think. So it was very enlightening to me to see that the early Christians weren't reading it that way whatsoever. For one thing, this was not a tier with them. They're understanding Jesus to be talking about two separate sins. He says, in the law, it's forbidden to murder.
What I'm saying, don't even be angry with your brother because if you are, you're liable on judgment day. Not some local judge on judgment day, okay? You know, judgment. And don't insult your brother. And he says the same thing in two different ways. Raca and fool. They have almost exactly the same meaning. One is the Aramaic word, and then he uses the Greek words, which you know basically means fool. And it's saying the same thing.
And so I noticed the early Christians, the quotes don't make a distinction between the two. He's saying the same thing. Council, meaning the council on Judgment Day, that he and his angels in Matthew 25, he says he will sit down with his angels and that's the council he's talking about. So the point he is getting across is not that fool is some kind of horrible word picking the mildest insults you could give somebody.
I mean, you know, when you try to think of what other word can you use, you can't get one that's more mild than that. In fact, there on the road of Emmaus, he actually uses a different Greek word, but they translate it, you know, oh fools or oh foolish ones. Because what else are you going to say? Oh, imbeciles, dumb heads? I mean, in other words, fool is really mildest thing. And that's what the early Christians point out that he's saying or idiot or yeah. Yeah, anything else is worse.
So he's picking the mildest thing you can say and saying don't do it. Yeah. Insult your brother. Now he's not saying it as an insult. He's talking about they really are foolish. He's saying don't use that though as an insult. So in other words, it's wrong to be angry. It's wrong to insult your brother. Either one we will answer for on judgment day. So that is really sobering. But it's nonsense that, oh, the word fool, which would mean oh, you could call somebody an idiot.
You could call them, I mean, all kinds of vile terms. And that'd be okay. As long as it's not fool, yeah. You know, which was always, you know, kind of silly, but I didn't know what to explain. Now, once you understand the historic understanding, then you realize how utterly stupid what we've all been saying. Because to begin with, no, you're not going to be called before a court because you're angry with your brother, an earthly. Just think about it.
I go in before a judge and say, I want to file a complaint against Clark Ray. He's angry with me. OK. I say, well, no, he hasn't done anything, but he's mad at me. I mean, they would like throw you out of court. Or Barbara, Chrysostom explains that it was a common term. He lived in Antioch where they spoke Aramaic. And he said, where we would say in Greek, hey, you, when you're talking to a slave or something like that, or at least the world would say that, they would say Raca.
You know Like a derogatory statement about lowering someone else's value. Right. It's derogatory, but it's pretty mild. Hey, hey, you. I mean, we'd like to be called by our name. Imagine you go before the Sanhedrin, you know? And I say, Hey, Timothy Miller, I want a report on him. He said, I was at McDonald's and he said, Hey, you, give me a napkin. And, you know, they say, okay, and what happened next? Oh, nothing. I gave him a napkin. So what's your complaint? Well, he said, hey, you.
I mean, see, it's just ridiculous. But the historic understanding makes total sense that we don't regard our brother, no matter who he is, as somebody beneath us that we can assault and, you know, talk like that to him. Yeah, in the same way that Jesus was aligning, you know, murder starts with anger. Everything associated with just discounting another person ends up in a greater problem. And so it's really just attacking the root of our anger, of our language.
When it's our heart towards someone, he's addressing that core issue, not necessarily this tiered approach of like, you get to this word and then you're suddenly like in the ditch. Yeah, you've crossed the line, yeah. Yeah, you crossed the line now, it's all over. But instead, he's really just wanting us to reflect on everything we say. Is it true? Is it beneficial? Does it build people up? Does it admonish people? That type of type of thinking.
And so what you're equating that to is that when he's then on the road there and he calls them foolish, he's not saying it out of anger, or at least unjust anger. He's saying it out of like, you guys need to get us together. You know Right. And Paul uses that several times. He says to the Galatians, oh foolish ones and all that. But he's not insulting them. He's talking about, hey, they are doing something very foolish going back to the law. And so it's not the word, it's the insulting. And yeah. What's behind it?
Yeah. Honors Jesus are just insulting someone. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate that. All right, so the next question, see how much time. So we have about five minutes or so until we get to open questions. Timothy, do we have some questions coming in at all? Okay. So I just wanted to encourage anybody, if you have any follow-up questions, we'll just keep moving through questions. If you do, we'll stop and address those.
So feel free to use the chat button at the bottom to submit any questions that you might have. All right, so the next question is, how did the early Christians interpret the passage about the eye being the lamp of the body, and if your eye is healthy, et cetera? How did they interpret that passage? That was one that always, I mean, it just made no sense. And it seemed to pop up out of nowhere because he's talking about materialism and serving mammon. And he just says this.
And then he goes on about putting the kingdom first. And I thought it made no sense until, yeah, I'm reading the early Christians and to them it's making total sense. He's giving some very hard teachings about wealth, about our possessions. And so he stops for a moment and he says, and he's using a metaphor here. We all know our literal eye, if it's bad, then everything is darkness to us. In other words, you're blind. Those two little organs, you know, there's all this light around us.
But if your eyes have been put out or, you know, they're defective, yeah, everything is dark. Metaphor is our mind or our heart. If it's evil, if it's bad, we are going to find a way around his teachings. And he's telling us, okay, I'm fixing to give you some hard teachings. And if your eye is bad, if your heart is, yeah, you're not going to receive these. But if your eye is good, then you're going to see the light. And we need to recognize that with the sermon on the mount.
Most people do find a way around them because they don't want to see the light. They would prefer the darkness. Make it for someone else or for a different time or whatever way to reason our way out of those teachings. And Jesus really just wants us to, yeah, that's really interesting. Start with where our mindset is on who Jesus is and what he's coming to us with is what he seems to be addressing. That's interesting. All right, so next question is, what did Jesus mean by don't throw your pearls before swine?
Actually, this is something that's interesting. I really appreciate this question because it's something I've wrestled with as well when engaging with people. I don't know what the context of this question is, and maybe I shouldn't read into it too much, but how do we engage with people in a loving, caring way when it just doesn't feel like there's any interest in it? I'm curious what your thoughts are on what Jesus meant by that. Yeah, there's no surprise here.
I mean, the early church, I think, understood it the way most of us apply it on the gospel that you're not going to prejudge somebody and say you're not worthy that I'm going to share the gospel. But at the point when it's obvious this person is just going to hold it in contempt, that it's okay. We should feel okay to realize I'm throwing pearls before swine. This is getting nowhere and I can move on. And we shouldn't feel guilty about that.
I'll give you a real life illustration when this was a number of years ago. My wife and I were in York, England on a visit. And there was an evangelical street preacher. And he was walking the middle of the street denouncing what was going to happen to England because of its laws on homosexuality. And people were just laughing at him. And this college student was just walking right by him and shouting in his face and mocking him and all of that.
And I felt really bad for my brother out there, but I also thought you're throwing your pearls before swine. These people are not interested in the message. He had, you know, he didn't understand the two kingdoms, so his message was a little off anyway. But yeah, it was a total waste of time. He should have realized I'm actually lowering the gospel, talking to these people who are just mocking my every word. Yeah, that's really good. He says, don't give what is holy to dogs. They apply that mainly to communion.
Don't communion something holy to unbaptized people or to Christians who are living an ungodly life. That's interesting. I really appreciated what you said upfront there as far as we don't discount people or assume someone's not worth the time. We give people opportunities. We do pour our heart into people. But at some point, we can leave that situation with a heavy heart if it doesn't go anywhere or it's just obviously not going anywhere.
But we don't necessarily have to feel guilty about not pushing into that anymore. We can actually go somewhere where people have the heart to hear, the eyes to see, kind of like the, you know, have the eye that's healthy and willing to see the truth or willing to become healthy. So I really appreciate that. We are out of time there. It looks like we have a few questions coming in. So let me look at this here and see what we have. We have about eight and a half minutes until we're going to wrap up.
So I'll just read this here. I really appreciate one of our users, and maybe Timothy, oh, from Charles Hood. From Charles Hood, he wrote, " I really appreciate what I'm hearing. It sounds like this commentary will be focused on clarifying the teachings of Jesus and exhorting us to practice the teachings of Jesus as He meant them. " Is that an accurate understanding? I'm sorry, Clark. Can you repeat that? I got a message on my screen saying it's been changed to unlimited minutes. I was reading that. Oh. Sorry.
No problem. It sounds like this commentary, he said he really appreciates what he's hearing. It sounds like this commentary will be focused on clarifying the teachings of Jesus and exhorting us to practice the teachings of Jesus as He meant them. Is that an accurate understanding? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because that is the historic faith. That's what Christians always come back to. And yes, that will be the theme, I think, of the commentary. Amen. Thank you, Charles Hood, for that.
Next question from Stan Cornelson. In the question about the evil eye and the good eye, did the early Christians say anything about having a good eye, meaning being a generous person, and vice versa? Referring to the verses like Proverbs 23:6 and 28:22. Have you come across anything about the good eye meaning being a generous person? I don't know that I directly do. Now, they talk a lot about giving to the poor.
So there might be one in there, but like I say, on that, they're just understanding him to say you have an eye that is good. And evil is not the best translation. It should say bad or defective or something like that. I mean, in another setting, evil can be the right way to translate the Greek there. But he's talking about our physical eye. And so he's not talking about the evil eye like you hear in certain things. He's talking about an eye that is defective that doesn't see. Okay.
So they see it more about someone that's willing to hear and listen or see versus necessarily a specific attribute of obedience. Yes. Yeah, okay. Thank you, Stan, for that question. Appreciate that. All right, next one is from Charles Hood again. How much space will be given in the commentary for textual issues, Old Testament texts and New Testament texts, such as a discussion of the prophecy regarding a virgin shall bear a son from Isaiah chapter 7, quoted in Matthew chapter 1.
All right, that is probably the only textual one I will get into. In the first draft, right now I'm working on the second draft of it. I got into a lot of things like that. And the commentary got so big, I just realized I just can't go down to every one of these trails. Now, some of that we'll put online. And so people can actually go online and read some of the material that got left out of the printed edition. But one on the Virgin, I do plan on talking about that because it is such a key one. Sounds good.
Thanks, Charles, for that question. And another one from Samuel Lopez. Anything said by the early church on Matthew 5:17 through 18? Maybe we could read that. Is it Matthew? Yeah, Matthew. " Do not think that I come to destroy the law or the prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For assuredly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law until all is fulfilled. Will you have anything that talks about that? They say an enormous amount.
In fact, they see that you might say as a theme of the Sermon on the Mount, that he is fulfilling the law in the sense of, see, the English word fulfill originally meant to fill up. So they're understanding Jesus to be saying he is filling up, completing, amplifying even, in many instances, the law. So whereas the law said, don't murder, he says, don't be angry and don't insult your brother. He's filling it out, getting into the inner emotions and into the things that lead to murder.
The law said don't commit adultery. He fills it out by saying, don't look at a woman with lust. So yeah, they're seeing all through the Sermon on the Mount and through his life's teachings, he fills out the law, makes it complete, where it only dealt with external things and things like that. So yes, there will be a lot on that. So you'll have writings regarding those verses. Yes. All right, thank you, Samuel, for that question. Next one, we're just about out of time.
We'll maybe take one or two more, read one or two more here, and then we will wrap up. So when do you expect the commentary to be available to the public? And in what formats from Kevin Worthy? Good question. Okay. Our target date is January. Now we'll see. Like I say, I'm in the second, you know, working through it and I'm having to, like I say, make some hard decisions of what to take out. And then start working on getting in more quotes. Some of the early reviewers wanted more quotes than what I had.
And so I'm working on that. It'll be in a hardback edition and no doubt Kindle as well. Those are the two things we plan right now. Sounds good. And then I'll add to that a little bit that the next audio content that David is working on will be related to this commentary as well for thehistoricfaith.com. We plan on over time building out a course for the first half of Matthew that will be released periodically until it's complete. And then it'll be a full course on thehistoricfaith.com.
But you'll be able to get each section as those get created. And that's still the details are being ironed out on all that, but you can look forward to something in that arena as well. And we also, along with the commentary, we'll probably have notes and other little resources that can go along with those audio courses out of the work that David's been doing on this commentary. I think we have about a minute and a half. Let's see here. It's a good question. We'll end with this one.
David Sinabra, thank you for sending this in. Has there been a teaching or interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew that has surprised you since reading through the Ante-Nicene Fathers set again? There have been a lot of things. In fact, it's ironic that I you know had originally said, yeah, we don't need commentaries. Well, just the questions people submitted, I would say at least 80% of those, I would have given the wrong answer five years ago. So learning enormous things as I'm going through.
I never understood, for example, on fulfilling the law, what he meant by that. You know, I didn't come to destroy it. I came to fulfill it. I mean, I had an explanation, but it was not the correct one. And so, yes, I am learning probably more than any of my readers will as I go through. Okay. Well, that's exciting. We have about 30 seconds left, so this is going to get wrapped up. I really appreciate your time, David. And a special thanks to everybody that was able to join us this morning.
I know 10 o'clock, or depending on where you're at, 7 o'clock on a Thursday morning isn't always convenient, but I appreciate you taking the time to join us. And just, I guess, God bless the rest of your day, and we look forward to doing some more of these in the future. And we'll probably have a survey to kind of get people's feedback in the future about how you would like these to be formatted, and maybe who you would like to listen to going forward. So blessings to everybody, and we will see you on the platform.
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