Welcome to the Thinking Fellows podcast. I'm Caleb and I'm joined by Dr. Rod Rosenblot, Dr. Scott Keith, and Dr. Adam Francisco.

We're still in our great thinkers of the Christian faith series today, but we don't have a guest with us today because we have a handful of geniuses sitting around the table.

Lord have mercy. You guys don't have to pump your own egos. I'll do it for you.

Jesus. And so today we're going to let Dr. Francisco kind of take over the show and talk about John

of Damascus, who is a character that most people probably haven't heard about. But we're going to do today

because we're recording on Monday, Thursday of 2017, and John John Damascus has some good, he argues for

the crucifixion of Christ. Is that right, Dr. Francisco? Yeah, in a Muslim, that's an important

argument in a Muslim context. You know, he's a church father who lives, whose family lived in Damascus

in the midst of the expansion of Islam

in the 7th and 8th century, where over the course of just a century you have, um, all of a sudden

this new empire created, um, that stretches across three continents and is slowly but surely Islamized,

and parts and parcel of Islamization is the imposition of Islamic rhetoric and ideology in public space,

and part of that would be a denial of the historic crucifixion of Jesus in John and Damascus

gives us the first Christian response to Islam.

And he will focus in his response on making a case for the crucifixion, the resurrection,

and other things.

So that's fantastic.

So, yeah, if you're listening to this episode, it has dropped on Good Friday, 2017.

And so that's kind of what's driven us to do this.

If you remember, just a reminder that we're going out of chronological order.

So the last episode was on Thomas Aquinas, which we got through a good part of him,

but we'll probably revisit as well just because

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