Pulling The Thread Podcast: Tracing Jesus Before Christianity Emerged, Jesus the Jew within Judaism! · Jeramiah Giehl

From Jehovah's Witness to Assemblies of God Bible College - A Journey of Questioning, Surviving Manipulation, and Spiritual Discovery - Part 1: Episode 16

·54 min·3 clips

His father moved from Catholic upbringing to fringe beliefs, then told him to commit suicide 'make a point with it.'

David LeBlanc takes the interview chair here, while the host does the telling. The setup is straightforward: this is a long conversation split into two parts, and David mentions that he had a podcast of his own before, though it is deactivated now. He also notes that the two of them share a lot in their backgrounds, which gives the exchange an easy, familiar tone. The conversation starts with the host's early unease with the New Testament, and that unease reaches back to Matthew. The issue, as he tells it, was that the material did not line up with the Tanakh. He says the term Tanakh came later, after the questions had already started. A second source of friction was the arguments with elders, centered on how they were interpreting the New Testament. Salvation is part of that dispute. The host says he did not agree with what was being taught, though he also lived with some of it on faith for a long time. The talk then turns to an old Hebrew-English translation with transliteration underneath, the sort of material he says he simply did not know what to do with. He also notices that the New Testament is not treated with the same critical eye. The exchange then drifts into an Old Testament survey class. That class seems to have been an early point of contact with critical scholarship. When David asks whether that was the first time the host had seen that approach, the answer is that he may already have been doing something similar incidentally. The part ends by setting up the second half for next week.

As heard by us

A steady interview that follows early doctrinal friction from Matthew into later arguments over interpretation and faith.

This part-one interview stays centered on the host's early friction with his Jehovah's Witness background. He talks through first objections to the New Testament around Matthew, where what he read did not line up with the Tanakh, and then moves into arguments with elders over…

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Why you'd press play

If you like questions about Matthew, proof, and a patient back-and-forth over where the New Testament lines up with the Tanakh, start here.

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