{"id":8704,"date":"2026-08-19T10:23:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T17:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8704"},"modified":"2026-08-19T10:23:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T17:23:02","slug":"did-jesus-repent-of-a-slur-a-biblical-rebuttal-of-the-claim-that-christ-was-morally-wrong-in-matthew-1526","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/08\/19\/did-jesus-repent-of-a-slur-a-biblical-rebuttal-of-the-claim-that-christ-was-morally-wrong-in-matthew-1526\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Jesus Repent of a Slur? A Biblical Rebuttal of the Claim That Christ Was Morally Wrong in Matthew 15:26"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-family: Liberation Serif, serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">When exegesis is not your fort\u00e9.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>A sermon circulating in Presbyterian circles argues that Jesus committed an ethnic slur in Matthew 15:26, was corrected by the Canaanite woman, and repented by widening his mission \u2014 all on the premise that being wrong is not the same as being sinful. This essay dismantles that argument on four fronts. First, the premise fails by the preacher\u2019s own moral verdict: demeaning a suffering woman is an ethical fault, not an intellectual one, and Scripture classifies even unintentional moral wrong as sin requiring atonement (Leviticus 4:2; 5:17; Psalm 19:12). Orthodoxy grants real human limitation in Christ \u2014 growth in wisdom, ignorance of the hour \u2014 but Hebrews 4:15 fixes the boundary at sinlessness. Second, the lexical argument reverses itself: the sermon imports the scavenger connotations of kuon into kunarion, while the woman\u2019s own reply places the dogs inside the house being fed, and Mark 7:27 supplies the word first, establishing sequence rather than exclusion. Third, Matthew\u2019s architecture forecloses the reading \u2014 Rahab and Ruth in the genealogy, the magi, Galilee of the Gentiles, and above all the centurion of Matthew 8, healed remotely and praised above Israel seven chapters earlier. Fourth, the woman took no offense, addressed Christ as Lord, Son of David, and received not an apology but a commendation of great faith. The essay concludes by identifying the method\u2019s real cost: an external moral standard seated above Christ cannot be confined to a single verse.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em>&#8220;I know it&#8217;s uncomfortable to think Jesus was wrong, but I want to assure you Jesus can be wrong&#8230;He&#8217;s wrong, absolutely wrong- you don&#8217;t call people a &#8216;dog.&#8217;<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>Trans Presbyterian preacher &#8216;vicar Jenny&#8217; (PCUSA) blasts Jesus for his treatment of the Canaanite woman in Matt 15.<\/p>\n<p>One may rightly observe and note that the presentation is presented \u201cbarefooted.\u201d<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 480px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-8704-1\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"video\/mp4\" src=\"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/apostate-speech.mp4?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/apostate-speech.mp4\">https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/apostate-speech.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>I. The Claim Under Examination<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The sermon states its thesis without hedging. Jesus, confronted by a Canaanite woman begging deliverance for her demonized daughter, called her a dog to her face; this was, in the preacher\u2019s phrase, absolutely wrong; and Jesus, unlike the Pharisees, learned from the encounter and changed. The moral of the sermon is that mistakes are not sins, that even Jesus made one, and that what matters is how a person responds when the error is exposed.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>I know it is uncomfortable to think Jesus was wrong, but I want to assure you Jesus can be wrong because being wrong is not the same thing as being sinful. \u2026 He\u2019s wrong, absolutely wrong. You don\u2019t call people a dog.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>The sermon under review<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The argument is not a single assertion but a structure with four load-bearing supports: a Christological premise, a lexical claim, a psychological reading of the scene, and a reconstruction of Matthew\u2019s narrative purpose. Each will be examined in turn. Each fails \u2014 several of them on evidence the sermon itself supplies.<\/p>\n<p>One preliminary concession is due. The preacher is right that the exchange sounds harsh to modern ears, right that dog language was genuinely current as an ethnic pejorative in first-century Judaism, and right that the passage should not be smoothed over with pious evasion. The problem is not that he takes the difficulty seriously. The problem is what he does with it.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>II. The Premise Collapses Under the Sermon\u2019s Own Words<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Everything depends on the distinction between error and sin. If that distinction holds here, the sermon stands; if it fails here, nothing else in the argument can rescue it.<\/p>\n<p>The preacher supplies his own refutation in a single sentence:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>He\u2019s wrong, absolutely wrong. You don\u2019t call people a dog.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>The sermon under review<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That is not a factual correction of the sort one makes about a miscalculated distance or a misremembered date. It is a moral judgment governing how one human being may address another. The preacher does not say Jesus was mistaken about Gentile inclusion as a matter of information; he says Jesus spoke to a suffering woman in a way that demeaned her. Demeaning the vulnerable is not an intellectual lapse. It violates the second great commandment (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39) and everything Christ himself taught about speech as the overflow of the heart.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Matthew 12:34, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If the words demeaned her, the heart behind them was not clean. The sermon cannot have both the moral force of its indictment and the moral innocence of its verdict.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><b>Scripture Does Not Recognize the Category<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Even granting for argument\u2019s sake that the offense was inadvertent \u2014 that Jesus had absorbed a cultural prejudice without examining it \u2014 the biblical category for unintentional moral wrong is still sin. The Levitical system devoted an entire class of offering to it.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>If anyone sins unintentionally in any of the LORD\u2019s commandments about things not to be done, and does any one of them \u2026 he is guilty and shall bear his iniquity.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Leviticus 4:2; 5:17, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The same principle governs Numbers 15:22\u201329 and animates David\u2019s plea to be cleansed from hidden faults in Psalm 19:12. Ignorance mitigates culpability; it does not reclassify the act. A theology that needs a category of morally wrong but not sinful must import it from somewhere other than Scripture.<\/p>\n<h3><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><b>What Orthodoxy Does and Does Not Concede<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Historic Christology has never claimed that the incarnate Christ was omniscient in his human nature. He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52). He confessed ignorance of the day and hour of his own return (Mark 13:32). He asked questions and received information. These are genuine human limitations, and denying them drifts toward Docetism \u2014 a Christ only apparently human.<\/p>\n<p>But every one of those limitations is non-moral. Scripture draws the line with precision at exactly the point the sermon needs to cross:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Hebrews 4:15, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The testimony is uniform and comes from multiple independent witnesses. Paul: God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). Peter, who lived beside him for three years: he committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth (1 Peter 2:22). John: in him there is no sin (1 John 3:5). And Christ himself issued a challenge to hostile witnesses that no one took up:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>John 8:46, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The stakes are not academic. The atonement requires a spotless lamb (1 Peter 1:19; Hebrews 9:14). A Savior who himself needed repentance stands inside the problem rather than outside it, and has nothing to offer sinners but company.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>III. The Lexical Argument Runs Backward<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The sermon\u2019s handling of the Greek is its most confident move and its weakest. It correctly identifies kunarion as a diminutive derived from kuon, then argues that the diminutive makes the insult worse rather than better \u2014 that a slur is a slur, and calling someone a little dog only adds condescension to contempt.<\/p>\n<p>To support the harshness, the preacher reaches for the scavenger imagery: dogs that lick blood, dogs that return to their vomit, dogs that violate every category of ritual cleanness. But observe what has happened. Those images attach to the wild street cur \u2014 the animal of 1 Kings 21:19 and Proverbs 26:11. The word in Matthew\u2019s mouth is the other one. The connotations of the harsher term have been imported into the milder term, and the substitution has been presented as exegesis.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><b>Two Contextual Controls<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>The suffix alone would not settle the question, and honesty requires saying so; diminutives can indeed carry contempt. But two features of the context are decisive, and neither depends on the morphology.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li value=\"1\">The setting is a dining room, not a street. The woman\u2019s own reply places these dogs under the master\u2019s table, in the household, among the children, being fed. Whatever social distance the metaphor concedes, these animals are inside the house and provided for. Scavengers are not fed from tables. The imagery the sermon needs and the imagery the text supplies are two different pictures.<\/li>\n<li>Mark\u2019s parallel supplies the timeline. Where Matthew records the saying alone, Mark preserves the qualifying adverb: Let the children be fed first (Mark 7:27). The Greek proton establishes sequence, not exclusion \u2014 and sequence is precisely what the sermon must deny, since its whole reconstruction requires that Jesus was refusing Gentiles in principle until he was argued out of it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p><i>And he said to her, \u201cLet the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children\u2019s bread and throw it to the dogs.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Mark 7:27, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A man who says first is a man announcing an order of operations. He is not a man who has to be taught that a second course exists.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>IV. Matthew\u2019s Arrangement Makes the Reading Incoherent<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The sermon notices the link between this episode and the one before it \u2014 and then draws the wrong conclusion from it precisely. In Matthew 15:1\u201320, Jesus has just finished dismantling the Pharisaic clean-and-unclean apparatus, teaching that defilement proceeds from the heart and not from ceremonial category. He then deliberately walks into Gentile territory.<\/p>\n<p>The preacher reads this as Jesus doing to the woman the very thing he had just condemned the Pharisees for doing to his disciples. But an author does not construct that sequence to expose his protagonist\u2019s hypocrisy twenty verses after vindicating him. Matthew is staging a contrast: ritually scrupulous religious professionals with hard hearts on one side, a ceremonially unclean foreign woman with great faith on the other. The juxtaposition is the point, and it only works if Jesus is the one who understands it.<\/p>\n<p>Matthew 8 is by itself decisive. Jesus had already healed a Gentile remotely, already praised a Gentile\u2019s faith above Israel\u2019s, and already announced that Gentiles would be seated at the patriarchal table \u2014 all of it seven chapters before the Canaanite woman appears. For the sermon\u2019s reconstruction to work, Jesus must have forgotten his own prior miracle and his own prior sermon, and then relearned both from a stranger.<\/p>\n<p>One further detail of Matthew\u2019s design deserves notice. The evangelist uses the phrase great faith exactly twice. Both recipients are Gentiles \u2014 the centurion and this woman. That is authorial architecture, not coincidence, and it tells the reader what the scene is for.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>V. \u201cThe Lost Sheep of Israel\u201d Is Priority, Not Worth<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The sermon treats the statement I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel as an exclusionary policy that the woman successfully overturned. But this is the same redemptive-historical ordering that Paul later states as settled apostolic doctrine.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Romans 1:16, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Paul explains the reason: Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God\u2019s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy (Romans 15:8\u20139). The covenant promises had a sequence built into them, and the sequence honored God\u2019s faithfulness rather than any people\u2019s superiority. Paul and Barnabas apply the same order in Antioch (Acts 13:46).<\/p>\n<p>The identical restriction governs the disciples\u2019 training mission in Matthew 10:5\u20136, where they are sent to Israel and told to avoid Gentile and Samaritan towns. No one proposes that Jesus later repented of that instruction. It was a phase, and the phase had a stated end. Isaiah had announced both halves generations earlier:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Isaiah 49:6, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There is nothing here to repent of, because nothing here excludes anyone permanently. A queue is not a wall.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>VI. The Strongest Witness Is the Woman Herself<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The sermon asks the reader to be offended on behalf of someone who was not offended. That asymmetry deserves attention, because the one person present with standing to name the exchange as a slur declined to do so.<\/p>\n<p>Consider what she actually does. Before Jesus says a word about children or dogs, she addresses him as Lord, Son of David \u2014 a Messianic title that concedes Israel\u2019s covenantal priority on her own initiative. She kneels. She does not protest the metaphor, withdraw in humiliation, or rebuke him. She reasons inside the frame and finds mercy there.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>She said, \u201cYes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters\u2019 table.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Matthew 15:27, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Her logic is theologically deft. She does not ask that the children be deprived of their portion; she takes her place among the dogs and claims the master anyway. As Matthew Henry observed, the very crumbs of the Bread of Life are precious to a believer. Ellicott noted the same posture: contentedly among the dogs, she could still call him Master and ask for the crumbs of his mercy.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><b>And Then Note the Reply<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>This is the pivot on which the whole dispute turns. If the sermon\u2019s reading is correct, we should expect some form of concession \u2014 an acknowledgment, an apology, a revised statement of policy. What the text records is none of these.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Then Jesus answered her, \u201cO woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.\u201d And her daughter was healed instantly.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Matthew 15:28, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>One does not commend the faith of a person who has just delivered a moral correction. Praise of that kind is what a teacher offers when a student has produced exactly what the lesson was designed to elicit. The response fits a Jesus who was drawing faith out; it does not fit a Jesus who was being caught out.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><b>The Pattern Is Recognizable<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Apparent resistance that elicits and displays faith is a signature of Christ\u2019s ministry, not an anomaly requiring a theory of repentance. He delays two days while Lazarus dies, and states plainly that the delay is for the disciples\u2019 believing (John 11:6, 15). He acts as though he will walk on past Emmaus until the travelers press him to stay (Luke 24:28). He tests Philip with a question about bread, though John notes that he already knew what he would do (John 6:5\u20136). The Canaanite encounter belongs to this pattern.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><b>An Invented Detail<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>It is worth flagging one small addition, because it carries disproportionate weight in the sermon\u2019s persuasion. The preacher says Jesus gets grumpy. No Gospel records irritation, exasperation, or tone of any kind in this scene. That interiority is supplied by the interpreter and then used as evidence for the interpretation \u2014 a circle small enough to be easy to miss. Strip it out, and the emotional case thins considerably.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>VII. What the Method Costs<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The deepest problem with the sermon is not any single exegetical decision. It is the authority structure the argument requires.<\/p>\n<p>Once Christ can be morally \u2014 not merely factually \u2014 wrong, some standard outside of Christ must adjudicate when he is wrong and when he is right. In this sermon, that standard is a contemporary moral intuition about slurs and marginalization. The intuition is seated above Jesus, and Jesus is graded against it. Whatever passes is affirmed; whatever fails is diagnosed as culturally conditioned error he had not yet outgrown.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble is that the method cannot be confined to one verse. If present moral sensibility may overturn Jesus on ethnicity, no principle prevents it from overturning him on divorce, on judgment, on wealth, on hell, or on his own exclusive claim to be the way to the Father. The interpretive move proves vastly more than its author intends, and it terminates in a Christ who functions as a mirror rather than a Lord.<\/p>\n<p>There is also a pastoral cost. A Jesus who had to be taught compassion by the woman he wounded cannot be prayed to with confidence. The sufferer needs to know that the one she approaches is good all the way down \u2014 not improving, not still working through his inherited assumptions, but the unchanging Son in whom the Father is well pleased.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u25c6 \u25c6 \u25c6<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><span style=\"color: #262f93;\"><b>VIII. What the Passage Actually Delivers<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Read as Matthew wrote it, the episode gives us everything the sermon reaches for, and gives it without dismantling the Savior in the process.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Jesus went to Gentile country on purpose. The withdrawal to Tyre and Sidon was not an accident of travel; it was a deliberate move into unclean territory immediately after teaching that uncleanness is a matter of the heart.<\/li>\n<li>He drew out a faith that shamed Israel\u2019s teachers. The Pharisees of verses 1\u201320 had the Scriptures, the traditions, and the pedigree. The woman of verses 21\u201328 had none of these, and she alone is called great in faith.<\/li>\n<li>He healed the girl instantly, at a distance, on her mother\u2019s word. Nothing in that act suggests reluctance overcome. It suggests power exercised the moment its occasion had been displayed.<\/li>\n<li>The crumbs foreshadowed a seat at the table. What she received in fragments, the church received in full \u2014 in Cornelius\u2019s house (Acts 10) and in the settled doctrine of Ephesians 2:12\u201313, where those once far off are brought near by the blood of Christ.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p><i>But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 <b>Ephesians 2:13, ESV<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The preacher wants a Jesus who models growth. Matthew offers something better: a Jesus who knew the end from the beginning, who walked into a foreign district to find a faith he intended to honor, and who never needed to be told that the woman kneeling in front of him was worth saving. A Christ who had to be corrected is a smaller Savior than the one the text actually gives us \u2014 and a considerably less useful one to anyone who has genuinely sinned and needs somewhere to bring it.<\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>Summary: Matthew 15:27 and Jesus&#8217; Use of &#8220;Dogs&#8221; (GotQuestions.org)<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gotquestions.org\/even-the-dogs-eat-the-crumbs.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">What does it mean that even the dogs eat the crumbs<\/a> (Matthew 15:27)?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The article addresses the charge\u2014raised by progressive voices such as Brandon Robertson\u2014that Jesus displayed racism when He told the Canaanite woman it was improper to give the children&#8217;s bread to dogs. The article identifies this reading as eisegesis, imposing twenty-first-century assumptions onto a first-century text.<\/p>\n<p>Properly understood, the saying is a metaphor invoking a familiar Jewish distinction: the children picture Israel, the dogs picture the Gentiles. The article notes that Jews regarded Gentiles as unclean on religious rather than ethnic grounds. Two textual details soften the exchange decisively. First, the word Jesus chose is <em>kunarion<\/em>, a household pet rather than a scavenging street cur\u2014a deliberate departure from the harsher term customarily used. Second, the woman herself takes no offense; she recognizes the categories being described and evidently understands the Messiah&#8217;s mission to Israel.<\/p>\n<p>Her reply models humility joined to faith. Without disputing Israel&#8217;s priority, she reasons that even crumbs from the master&#8217;s table suffice for those beneath it. Significantly, she addresses Him as Lord rather than the more familiar &#8220;Rabbi.&#8221; Jesus responds not with correction but commendation of her great faith.<\/p>\n<p>The article concludes that the encounter was intentional and instructive: Jesus deliberately entered Gentile territory to teach His disciples that uncleanness is a matter of sin, not ethnicity or tradition. Rahab and Ruth prove Gentile inclusion was never an afterthought, and Acts 10 shows the crumbs becoming a full share at the table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When exegesis is not your fort\u00e9. A sermon circulating in Presbyterian circles argues that Jesus committed an ethnic slur in Matthew 15:26, was corrected by the Canaanite woman, and repented by widening his mission \u2014 all on the premise that being wrong is not the same as being sinful. This essay dismantles that argument on&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46,138,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christianity","category-heretics","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/It-is-heresy.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8704"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8708,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8704\/revisions\/8708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}