David W. Bercot (pronounced as David Berçot; born April 13, 1950) is an Anabaptist Christian church historian, attorney, author, and international speaker from the United States. He has written various books and magazine articles about early Christianity and Christian discipleship. His two best-known works are Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up?, and the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. Bercot completed his theological education at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently ordained as an Anglican priest before joining fellowship with Conservative Anabaptists, whom he believed to best embody the practices of early Christianity. Academic career David Bercot was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. After leaving Jehovah's Witnesses in 1976, he began his university education. He graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University summa cum laude, and he obtained his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree cum laude from Baylor University School of Law. In 1985, Bercot began an in-depth study of the early Christians who lived before the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. His studies started him on a spiritual pilgrimage. In 1989, he wrote the book, Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, which sets forth some of the teachings and lifestyle of the early Christians. That same year, he joined with an Assembly of God pastor to establish Scroll Publishing Company for the purpose of publishing various writings of the pre-Nicene Christians, as well as to publish other Christian books. Bercot's studies of the early Christians brought him into contact and dialogue with three different branches of Christianity: the Anabaptists (Mennonites, Amish, Brethren), the Anglican Church, and the churches of the Restoration Movement (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, International Church of Christ). In 1985, after completing his religious studies through Cambridge University, Bercot was ordained as an Anglican priest. However, he eventually left the Anglican Church and began fellowshipping with various Conservative Anabaptist churches, as Bercot understood Anabaptist Christianity to best embody the beliefs and practices of the early Church. Today Bercot is a lecturer and author who emphasizes the simplicity of Biblical doctrine and early (ante-Nicene) Christian teaching over against what he would call the heavy and complex body of theological understandings that have built up over the centuries in churches and in academia and that have come to be thought of as orthodoxy. He is particularly notable for his deeply nonresistant understanding of Jesus's and New Testament teaching. Writings Bercot's most widely read work is