Hello and welcome to Freed Indeed Live.

I'm your host, Kevin J.N. Hughes, and I'm joined today by the man, the myth, and the legend, the one who made apologetics funny and made comedy into an apologetic.

Jay Dyer himself. Jay, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I like the introduction there. That's kind of funny.

Yeah. So I wanted to just for my viewers, in case you don't know who Jay Dyer is, he has a really popular YouTube channel.

He does Orthodox Apologetics And Jay, you were a Roman Catholic for 10 years and a Protestant for a number of years. And then you converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. So just kind of start us out. Tell us about that. What made you decide to convert to orthodoxy and kind of give us your story?

Yeah. So, I mean, I was raised Baptist and a lot of that time growing up, we were not super serious about church. We kind of had phases where we would go often and then not go.

My senior year of high school, I started getting a little more serious about religion.

I was reading the Bible all the way through and attending a lot of evangelical Bible study groups and had friends and a lot of different Protestant nominations.

And so it was getting more serious. I wanted to study religion and philosophy at a more academic level.

So I went to college to study that.

We did a little bit of Bible school at Bible College and then switched to secular university.

And I got really into reformed theology, Calvinism, and did that for many

years and started to have questions ultimately about the history of the church and the formation

of the biblical canon. And at that time, back in about 2003, there weren't a whole lot of

internet resources regarding orthodoxy. It was primarily just, if you looked online, you would find a lot of

debates between Roman Catholics and Protestants. So that was about all there was out there.

There was maybe a couple of Orthodox blogs, but I didn't know about those at the time. So I got really

immersed in the Catholic Protestant debate and eventually kind of

just studied my way out of Protestantism as a whole, read a lot of books on the formation of

the canon, read a lot of the church fathers and kind of just took for granted a lot of the

papal claims and the papal argumentations. And I didn't know a lot about people forgeries or any of that kind of stuff.

So I was kind of a I guess you could say duped by some of those things, but I had good intentions.

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