A search for the Christianity closest to the apostles
David W. Bercot began his professional career as an attorney, but his public Christian work grew out of a long search for historic Christianity. The life-story material on The Historic Faith describes him as a former Jehovah's Witness who left the Watchtower movement with his wife at age 26. From there, his search moved through Lutheran and Anglican settings as he tried to understand whether any visible church had preserved the faith and practice of the earliest Christians.
From Anglican questions to the early Christian sources
Bercot has told parts of this story in the Q&A life-story episodes and in Anabaptist Perspectives interviews, including why Anglicanism and apostolic succession were compelling to him and why he later left. His own website says that in 1985 he began reading the surviving Christian writings from about A.D. 100 to 325. Those sources pushed his search beyond denominational claims and toward the practical Christianity he saw in the early church: discipleship, obedience to Jesus, nonresistance, simplicity, baptism, and the kingdom of God.
Why Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up mattered
In 1989 Bercot published Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. The book compared the beliefs and practices of the early Christians with modern Christianity and challenged readers from Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, and other backgrounds. It also launched Scroll Publishing and opened the door for many readers to discover the Ante-Nicene fathers, not as museum pieces, but as witnesses to practical Christian discipleship, kingdom obedience, and church life before the Council of Nicaea.
Texas house church years and Anabaptist convictions
The story also runs through Texas. A first-person account by Paul Pavao says he joined Bercot in Tyler, Texas, in 1992 to form the Tyler Early Christian Fellowship, an independent early-Christian-style fellowship. Over time, Bercot's convictions came to be identified with conservative Anabaptist Christianity, especially the gathered church, believer's baptism, nonresistance, and kingdom discipleship. Scroll Publishing says he now lives in Pennsylvania and attends Chambersburg Christian Fellowship; The Historic Faith source material also identifies him as an elder there.
Dictionary, kingdom teaching, and Anabaptist discipleship
Bercot is also widely known for A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, which gathered thousands of quotations from early Christian writers by topic. His later books and talks connected that source work with Jesus' teaching on the kingdom of God, nonresistance, simplicity, baptism, salvation, and obedience. Today his work is often read by people exploring early Christianity, conservative Anabaptism, the kingdom of God, Romans before Augustine and Luther, and the difference between historic Christian discipleship and later theological systems.
Why this page is different
This hub is built from The Historic Faith library, where David Bercot's free audiobooks, courses, Q&A episodes, video teachings, transcripts, and related resources live together. Instead of sending visitors to one book page, one podcast page, or one biography, this page gathers his life story, major works, free audio books, sermons, interviews, Romans material, Anabaptist teaching, early Christian belief resources, and outside source links into one searchable David Bercot starting point.
