Tim Wildsmith is most known for his unboxing reviews of various editions of the Bible. It is a niche genre of Christian content, but he has successfully grown a YouTube channel, amassing 332K subscribers. He also does “How to” guides on studying the Bible and reviews of various translations, with his most popular video being a tiering of the translations. Wildsmith wrote Bible Translations for Everyone. From 2025 to May of 2026, Wildsmith served as interim pastor of Crievewood Baptist Church in Nashville.
Amongst the other content he produces, Wildsmith and his wife Becca do Bible study videos, which are not typically their bread and butter from a content perspective. Wildsmith is not known for bold theology. He is a defender of the NIV and is in favor of “more inclusive” gender language in Bible translations, which is a degradation and general dumbing-down of the biblical text to appease women. The Greek adelphoi need only be translated to brothers, not “brothers and sisters.” The NIV also altered 1 Corinthians 11 on the subject of head coverings to completely change the meaning of the text.
Recently, he made comments on Romans 9-11 and the subject of replacement theology.
Historically, many people have used Romans 9 through 11 to claim that Christians have replaced Jews, the people of Israel, as God’s chosen people. This is often referred to as replacement theology. The big theological term for it is supersessionism. And I do feel comfortable saying that I don’t think that’s accurate.
If you get into chapter 11, he says, does that mean God has cut people off? By no means. He’s simultaneously saying things like, Jesus is the answer to all of this. And there is a remnant and there’s a small number, but there’s going to be like, this is why it’s so confusing. Because in many ways, it seems like he says some contradictory things. Or you have to wrestle with how it figures out.
His reasoning is in part more based on experience rather than an in-depth study of the text.
I was in Israel a few years ago meeting with Jewish leaders. And I was with college students and this one student was like, he kind of said it very bluntly, but it was like, it was really honest. He’s like, let’s just jump forward to eternity. We believe that we’re gonna be there with God in the kingdom of God because of our faith in Jesus. And we believe that you’re not gonna be there because you don’t have faith in Jesus. I watched this college student like defending his faith and a Jewish rabbi who was explaining to this college student, well, we have this covenant that we don’t believe God is revoked.
He presents this scenario of a Rabbi and a Christian in Israel speaking to their theological claims. The Christian rightly contends that Christ is the only way while the Rabbi appeals to a covenant which he claims has not been revoked. There is a problem of Christians deriving their theological understandings of the Scriptures from Jewish Rabbi’s, past or present, since that is using unbelievers to ascertain the meaning of Scriptures. What the rabbi thinks is irrelevant to the meaning of the text since he ultimately rejects the Prophets by rejecting Christ.
I’m reading this week thinking about that going, man, they both have a point. I would encourage you, if 9 through 11 this week made your head spin a little bit, this is definitely something you can find good books out there, thoughtful work being done about this. And I think the answer is probably that we’re not really gonna have this all figured out until eternity. But I don’t want that to be a cop out because I want us to be able to say, that we’re wrestling with something deep and beautiful here. But clearly Paul is trying to, throughout this whole thing, reconcile the historic faith of the Jews with opening this up to the Gentiles. And he even says to the Gentiles, one of the reasons why you’re allowed to be a part of this is because they haven’t believed. And I did write down chapter 10, verse 4. He says, Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. I do not believe that Christ has eradicated the Jewish faith or made it go away. He has fulfilled it. He has fulfilled the law, but that is a stumbling block to the people of Israel.
The people of Israel is and has always been the church. In the broader context of the clip, Wildsmith contends that this issue in Romans 9-11 has had more ink devoted to it than any other subject, but the surrounding debate within these passages is historically untied to who the true people of God are, but the other issues of election, predestination, and justification—not supersessionism until dispensationalism arose in the 1800’s. So the issue of the “true Israel” is not the primary debate surrounding these passages from a historical scope.
Wildsmith is not the most knowledgeable on the subject or even the historical understandings despite being a bible study expert. Even his rejection of “replacement theology” is not very well composed or passionate, like one might find from Jack Hibbs. From this clip, it is unsurprising why he tends to stay away from theological issues.
