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Direct Answer Based on David Bercot’s teaching, “reading the apostles through” Augustine means letting one later thinker become the lens that controls how Scripture is understood, so the church ends up following Augustine’s categories more than the apostles’ own. To read the apostles more directly would mean refusing to treat any later authority as untouchable and comparing their conclusions back to the New Testament and earliest Christian teaching.

Support from Transcript:

• Bercot says Augustine “has ultimately had more influence on the Western Church than even the apostles themselves, because the Western Church has read the apostles through his eyes.”
• He calls Augustine “almost universally recognized as the father of Western theology,” and says he became the authority “on practically every question of doctrine and morality.”
• He notes Augustine’s persuasive power: “Nobody in the Western Church could successfully resist his argumentation.”
• He warns that Augustine “departed from early Christianity in so many areas… and… took the entire Western Church with him.”
• He highlights a concrete example: Augustine’s reaction to Pelagianism “obliterated the original early Christian teachings of free will… [replacing them with] absolute predestination.”