Beards & Bible Podcast

JoshBrooker/GabeRutledge

A podcast about life, theology, friendships, current events, and the journey of authentic discipleship with two pastors who also happen to be lifelong friends, former college roommates, bandmates, and groomsmen in each other‘s weddings.

  1. 12/11/2025

    In the Ring pt. 1: Responding to the KJV Only Movement via Textual Criticism (w/ Seth Knorr)

    Textual criticism is basically the process of comparing all the oldest and best ancient copies of the Bible we’ve discovered, so we can get as close as possible to the original words the biblical authors wrote. Properly understood- it’s not scary, it’s not anti-faith, and it doesn’t deny the inspiration of Scripture — it’s simply good scholarship. And modern Bible translations use this approach to draw from a much larger, older, and more diverse set of manuscripts than translators had access to in the 1600s. The goal is clarity, accuracy, and faithfulness to the earliest text we can reconstruct. But the KJV-Only movement takes a very different path. It leans solely on the Textus Receptus, a smaller collection of later manuscripts that the King James translators used. While those manuscripts are valuable, they represent only a sliver of the evidence we have today— which means the KJV-Only position often struggles to account for the full reality of how Bible translation actually works and how language naturally develops over time. In the first part of a two-part series, we’re going to hear from Seth Knorr from BibleTheologyBlog.com as he explains and defends the textual-criticism approach to Bible translation—unpacking how it works, why it uses a broader and earlier set of manuscripts, and how it differs from the KJV-Only reliance on the Textus Receptus.

    1h 3m
  2. 10/22/2025

    Consumer Christianity and How to Spot it in Ourselves

    The New Testament is full of commands for Christians to gather together regularly for encouragement, discipleship and community. Not only that, we’re told as Christians 59 separate times to honor, care, love and serve one another within the context of the Church. According to the Bible, being involved in a local church and pouring our lives out for other believers in service and love is really a big deal. But in our context, we seem to be missing something. The average American churchgoer only attends church 1.6 times per month, or roughly two out of every five weekends. Only about 21% of regular churchgoers consistently tithe to the work of their local church, and only about 34% of them regularly serve or volunteer. Sticking with just one church seems to be a challenge for us as well, as nearly 2 in 5 churchgoers report regularly attending multiple churches, while never committing to any of them. Not only that, criticizing churches and church leaders has become a favorite pastime and trending topic on most social media platforms. Churches get critiqued in online spaces a lot like restaurants, shops, or theaters and almost anything that doesn’t meet a person’s particular preference gets noticed and called out. Could it that we’re seeing church as a product to consume instead of a family to belong to? How might we notice that mindset in ourselves and change the way we think and interact with the local church?

    1h 5m
4.9
out of 5
77 Ratings

About

A podcast about life, theology, friendships, current events, and the journey of authentic discipleship with two pastors who also happen to be lifelong friends, former college roommates, bandmates, and groomsmen in each other‘s weddings.

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