Okay, we're live. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates. On today's show, I have a very special guest. His name is Phil Baker, and he's just published a book, really fascinating book covering the early church, early Christian church, titled Faithful Witness, the early church's Theology of Martyrdom published October 26, 2021.

And this is not Phil Baker's first book.

He also published new, Wineskins and the Simple Words of Christ in 2016.

And Phil lives in Houston, Texas with his wife, two children, and dog.

He's the host of the podcast, Reclaiming the Faith.

And also the book I early mentioned, he's the son of a Christian counselor and holds a BA in Christianity and Psychology from

Houston Baptist University and received an MRA from the West Coast Bible College and Seminary.

And his website is www.

Phil S.baker.com.

So you can follow up with some of the stuff.

He's a producer and singer of several

albums too, so you can look into his music. But we're going to talk about this fascinating book today.

Faithful Witness, the early church's theology of martyrdom. And so Phil Baker, are you there?

Yes, sir. Man, it's so great to be on with you, William. And like I told you earlier, man, I've just been so blessed by your show. And, man, yeah, just keep up the great work.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Well, it's great to have you on. And I really enjoyed reading your book. I really kind of think that Christian and Christianity in general don't focus on the early church enough. So you really have a biblically based analysis of this kind of theology of

martyrdom.

Can you talk about your background and what led you to write faithful witness?

Yeah.

You know, I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and I'm very thankful for that.

But as I went to my undergrad at HBO, like you said, that was very good for me as well.

I began to kind of challenge my own spiritual worldview when I got into the early Christian writings,

the anti-Nicine Christian writings, which are the writings

...