Well, today's a little bit of a different podcast recording for us. I have the honor of interviewing someone who just meeting today, but have already been just really profoundly impacted by his work and such an honor to have you with us. David Bercot, author of a dictionary of early Christian beliefs and some other writings too. David, thank you so much for being with us today. Sure, Dan. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. So I'd love just to kind of start with hearing your story.
I mean, to write a book like that, that you don't wake up one morning and decide to write a book like that. There's gotta be a journey that gets you there. And so tell us a little bit about your story. Yeah, so it's probably a bit unusual in most people's journey. I started off, both my wife and I as Jehovah's Witnesses. We were raised as Jehovah's Witnesses. We left when we were both 26 years old. And then, yeah, I started a journey to find out what is the historic faith? Where is the true church?
Where are God's people? And that's been a long journey. So from there, we were attending an evangelical church. In the background, I was going to college because Jehovah's Witnesses, don't encourage you to go to college. They discourage it strongly. So yeah, I started college and then went on to law school. So instead of pursuing theology, which is my great love, yeah, I went into law for a living, but yeah, it freed me to do the kind of research I've been doing.
So the big step from there, the evangelical church, we were greatly blessed. I mean, wonderful people, wonderful pastor was just a giant leap into Orthodox Christianity. Yeah. But there were, I don't know, some nagging questions. You know, after the experience of growing up as a Jehovah's Witness and being taught, " Okay, this is what the faith is, this is you know the truth, " et cetera, I had made the resolve.
I was never again going to just accept somebody's word, you know, some pastor, some writer, whoever it was, that, " Okay, this is it, and you have to accept it. " So as much as I was blessed by the church I was going to, there were some questions in my mind. And yeah, if this steps on any toes, I apologize. I'm not, you know, that's not my intention. But probably the biggest question on my mind was eternal security, once saved, always saved. And maybe that's something you embrace, Dan. I don't even know.
So I should have asked you before. No, it's okay. We don't have to agree to have a great conversation, so I'm excited to hear your perspective. Yeah. So, you know, the Bible seemed to say one thing to me, you know, and well, by that time, we had a different pastor than the one that had initially been there. And he was much more by the book, you know, Dallas Theological Seminary. And, you know, he said, " No, you know, this is, you know, the historic faith.
You know, Christians always believed you know one saved, always saved. " And I thought, well, if that's the truth, then, yeah, I need to embrace that. I saw the great error that Charles Russell, who started Jehovah's Witnesses, this idea of this was in the 1870s, in his case, of imagining that, oh, I've just discovered Christianity. Everyone has been wrong for 1,800 years, and now I've really discovered the truth. And of course, he's only one of many. Hundreds or thousands who have done the same thing.
And I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. I want to know and I want to embrace the historic faith. And yeah, if that's once saved, always saved, great, you know, or whatever. You know, there were other questions I had. But like I said, I didn't want to take somebody's word. I wanted to really know. And so I had been aware, I think, from the time I was a teenager that we had writings from early Christians who were not that long after the apostles. I mean, I was always seeing them quoted.
I mean, Jehovah's Witnesses quote them sometimes. Evangelicals you know quoted them. I noticed you know a lot of people quote them. Do you remember some of the ones that at that time you had at least a little bit of context from some of those names? Yeah, a little bit, but not a lot. I just was familiar with the names like Ter Tertullian, Justin Martyr. I had heard of them, Origen, you know a few like that, but you know I'd never read them. I'd just seen these proof texts. Yeah, their name in a little.
Yeah, and they're easy to prove. I mean, if the scriptures are easy to proof text, the early Christians, because they're much more voluminous, you know? Yeah. So you're seeing bits and pieces of some of these early church writers. They're little statements, but what's the greater context? You hadn't had yet a chance to kind of read the wholeness of what they're writing, just seeing these little clips and things from that point.
Right, so I had, I guess from both college and my law studies, I saw the great need to go to primary sources. You know, depending on secondary sources, you would never do it as a lawyer. You would not depend on a legal encyclopedia, even though they're written by attorneys. You go to the actual cases from the appellate courts, you read the actual cases. I mean, boy, that was pounded in our heads in law school. You don't depend on a secondary source.
And so I thought, you know, I need to bite the bullet and just read these guys for myself. So I ordered a set of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Back then, it was $100, so it wasn't too expensive. It's 10 volumes. I spent a year. I still was working, but I took them to the law office. If I didn't have a client, if I had a spare moment, I would just read. I would come home at lunch and read. My wife would bring me a sandwich. I'd come home at night, maybe spend an hour with the children.
It wasn't a great time for the best time for family time, but I didn't let the family go. But I would read every night until midnight or beyond. Wow. And I kept doing this day after day. Now, it was difficult getting in them because, oh, I see a lot of things that went against stuff that I believed. I mean, stepped on my toes all over the place. And at first, well, it happened several times. I thought, no, this is just too different. Something's wrong.
I just, you know, put it back on the shelf and it's like, " Okay, that's it. I'm not going to read any further. " But then I got to thinking, you know, I don't have to believe what these guys believed. Right. And I owe it to myself to at least know what they believed back then. So I kept reading and, you know, I started, you know, at first, a lot of things seemed strange, but as I kept reading, I did see a continuity between the writers. They were saying very similar things.
And so one night, instead of reading them, I just took the New Testament and read the whole thing. I read Matthew and John. I didn't read Luke and Mark. But other than that, I read all the way to the end of Revelation. I don't know what time I went to bed, but yeah, I read it all in one sitting. And it was amazing to me. All these things that are right there in the New Testament, I'd never noticed. They had always been explained away. And these were things the early Christians were taking seriously, literally.
And it's like, I realized everything they were saying was the most literal, obvious interpretation of the New Testament. Yeah So that gave me a really renewed interest you know to continue on. And it got so exciting. I mean, it was like reading a long mystery novel that I just couldn't wait to get back into it, you know? And then when I finished them, I went on because I was thinking, well, what happened? If this is what they believed before the Council of Nicaea, what happened?
And so I got the next set of the Nicene and post-Nicene writers, and I didn't read them completely like I did the Ante-Nicene Fathers, but I read quite a lot of those writings of people, you know John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Augustine, a lot of those people in that century and a little beyond. And then I skipped through most of the Middle Ages and then read Luther, Calvin. I read their own writings. Menno Simons, who was with the Anabaptists, just trying to figure out, okay, did anyone pick this strain up?
You know, where did all this disappear? And so, yeah. So then after a year plus of reading, yeah, I told the family, I mean, it convicted me. I mean, that was one of the major change points in my life. It was like, before I started reading them, I mean, I was a, you know, Sunday school teacher in our church. I was respected as, you know, somebody who was a decent, you know, maybe not model, but, you know, whatever, Christian. I mean, I think highly respected.
And I realized if I lived back in the second century, I would be viewed as a backslidden, weak, you know, watered-down Christian. And the conviction for me was this is not acceptable to God. I have got to change my life. And not that I had anything overtly wicked going on, it was just lots of things. I definitely loved the world a lot more than Christians back then. I saw my profession. I had to think, you know, fortunately, I was not a trial lawyer, but I did file a lot of lawsuits against people.
I was an oil and gas attorney and sometimes there would be issues about royalties and all of that. And I saw the early Christians, they took the sermon on the mount so literally that, yeah, they wouldn't take someone to court. You know, not just their brother, they wouldn't take to court. They wouldn't take their neighbor to court, you know? And I thought, wow. Wow. Yeah, would Christ do what I'm doing? I'm not saying it condemning other attorneys or anything. I'm just saying what convicted me in my life.
So I decided, yeah, that was going to have to end. And like I say, fortunately, it was not a big part of my practice. It was one of the more financially lucrative, I would say, but I could turn to title work, which is boring. Most attorneys don't like doing it, but I could do it with a completely clear conscience. You know Title work is very similar to what I was doing with the early church. You're trying to find out the truth. Who owns a tract of land?
And you don't care as a title attorney, and you don't even start off with an assumption. You start off. I was in Texas at the time, so I'd start off with the state of Texas when they owned the land, or even when Mexico owned it, and then just trace it forward, will by will, deed by deed, up to the present day, and then, oh, this is who owns it, you know? And then I could do with a clear conscience.
And so that was, I turned to just doing title work, which I had done you know a good bit as an oil and gas attorney, and I just started doing that exclusively. It wasn't as exciting as the suing people. But like I say, I just felt like, yeah, I want to live like they did. And not that I've achieved that, but I was just amazed, as I said, the sermon on the Mount to them was not an ideal, an unreachable ideal.
This was like, these are Christ's instructions of how we are supposed to live, and they did their best to live that. And so, yeah, I made that my goal in life to serve my Lord by taking his teachings literally. And so yeah, we made a lot of changes in our life and the family.
Can I ask you, is there maybe two or three things that you would say you know through that, some practices, some perspectives, I mean, clearly your honor for the Word, your honor for God in His way is for someone to change what they're doing at their job and their practice is a big deal. So I honor you for that. I would love just to hear a little bit deeper of a dive into that. So give me a couple of the things that you saw.
I mean, you used the analogy of you were a well-respected Sunday school teacher where in comparison at that time, you would've been seen as a backslidden heathen. So what are some of those, you know whatever you're comfortable sharing? Yeah, so I realized I was, yeah, I was wanting to you know get comfortable materially, you know be wealthy. I mean, that's why I went into law. It's a high-paying profession. I wanted to be well respected in the community as an attorney. You know, people look up.
Theoretically, they probably behind your back, say more derogatory things. But yeah, I realized I cared too much about those things. Instead of, you know, Jesus said, " Seek first the kingdom. " And it's like, I don't have to work all these hours. Some people do. I mean, you know a person needs to support their family. But as an attorney, I didn't need to work 40 hours for us to be able to have our needs met. So one of the things I did, and this happened over a period of a number of years.
I didn't just rush into, I'm going to just change everything. And I worked very closely with my wife and our two teenage children because I didn't want to lose them on the journey. I wanted to make sure we were in it together. That's great. But yeah, so I cut back my work considerably. Eventually, I just started working part-time. Wow And I could do that as an attorney and support us. So that was, yeah, it's a major change that way. We started homeschooling our children. We were in a rural area.
I mean, a small town in Texas in the Bible belt. So thankfully, what was being taught in school wasn't too bad. It wasn't like today. Yeah. But the children actually requested, if they could homeschool, they had made a number of friends. And again, I'm not condemning someone whose children go to public school. But yeah, we just felt like we would rather control what they're learning, have more input into that. So started homeschooling them. We made a lot of changes as far as entertainment. We got rid of television.
I mean, we still kept our television set where we could watch select videos. But I thought, why do I need the world just coming into my home all the time? I mean, the early Christians were trying to get away from the world, not by becoming monks out in the desert. They certainly engaged the world. But yeah, they didn't care for the world's entertainment. And that was one reason the pagans didn't like them, is they wouldn't go to the Colosseum and, you know, watch that.
The entertainment that everyone else was enjoying that they weren't a part of and that really put a target on them. Yeah. So, you know, I talked to the children about it and we all agreed, yeah, we can live without network television. And the interesting thing, I forget who asked my daughter, my teenage daughter. So, yeah, how do you feel about all these changes, you know, your family's doing? You know, you've given up this and that and all that. And she said, " Oh, well, that's when life started getting fun.
" you know And one of the decisions I made was anything that I was going to ask the family to sacrifice, I would bring in something just as good or better to replace it. So if we got rid of television, they remember me after supper, often going back to the office and working late at night. So all of that ended. I was suddenly spending lots more time with the family. We were doing family outings every weekend. And so, yeah, for them, it was great. You know, dad was home now all the time.
In fact, I eventually moved my office to my home and was able to work out of home. And so I was able to do most of the homeschooling of our son. And I did a lot of our daughters as well. And so that was a real joy being able to you know teach my children to have the time to do that and then you know to be with them all the time you know throughout the day.
So like I said, there were blessings and we didn't really miss the things we gave up, but we wanted a much more Christ-centered life, not just giving part of our life to Christ, but really all of it. And again, anyone listening to this, I'm not saying that my journey has to be somebody else's. You know But I would just say, I would encourage someone, yeah, read some of these writings for yourself. Some of the ones I can mention that are pretty easy reading, none of them are real lied, but some of the easier ones.
If you have the Ante-Nicene Fathers and they're online, yeah of course, the Didache is very short and readable. There's a work called Letter to Diognetus. Again, very short, very readable. Tertullian's apology is just classic. It's quite readable. And then there's one by a man named Minucius Felix, not a well-known writer, but he has a debate between a pagan and a Christian. And it's just fascinating.
It was written as an apologetic work, but it's probably the most you know engaging work of all the early Christians. Again, it's not real long, but in those, you just see what it meant to be a Christian back in those days. It wasn't a lot of theology. They were not focused on theology. There were some basics that could not be compromised. But yeah, beyond that, it was a focus on how you lived your life. Right. And that's what impressed me. I saw all the theological issues, and I certainly took note of them.
But the lifestyle is what impacted me the most. Thanks for listening to part one of our conversation with David Bercot.
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