I Never Said You Stole Money

Why Misunderstanding the Bible Is Easier Than You Think

Deep Dive Podcast Discussion:

STANDING IN LINE to pay for some copies at a quick print shop, I noticed a sign on the wall behind the cash register:

WHAT IF I TOLD YOU THAT
YOU THIS READ WRONG?

At first glance, my mind supplied something that was not actually there. It took me a moment to see what the sign really said. Most people need that extra beat. The sign is a quiet reminder of how easily we misread even the simplest messages.

Misunderstandings can be small and harmless, or large and consequential. Either way, they distort the facts, and that distortion never leads anywhere good. I have learned that lesson the hard way more than once.

Sometimes we think we see things that simply are not there. This happens far more often than we like to admit. There is even a technical name for it: pareidolia, the mind’s tendency to impose meaning and significance on random or ambiguous patterns.

It explains why people see faces in clouds or figures in tree bark. In recent years, these claims have occasionally made the evening news, with reports of people seeing images of the Virgin Mary in wood grain or the face of Jesus on a piece of toast.

Now, it is true that a cloud or a knot of bark can look surprisingly like a face or a familiar figure. But in nearly every case, what we are seeing is our own mind filling in the blanks. The fact that everyone experiences this at some point is proof enough that we are all capable of assigning meaning where it does not belong.

I have found that this same habit often shows up when people read the Bible. A sincere believer sometimes “sees” in Scripture a doctrine the Bible does not actually teach. Two well-known examples are the Protestant principles of sola scriptura, meaning “by Scripture alone,” and sola fide, meaning justification by faith alone. Neither doctrine appears in the Bible, and both are explicitly denied by it.

There is another kind of misunderstanding that is just as common. Sometimes the words are not random at all, but their meaning is unclear because of ambiguity. Consider this familiar sentence:

Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas.

Linguists classify this as an antanaclasis, a form of amphiboly in which a single word carries two different meanings in the same sentence. Here, “flies” functions both as a verb and as a noun. If no one explained the ambiguity, you might dismiss the sentence as nonsense. In reality, it is a tidy illustration of how easily meaning can be missed.

Some scholars point to “semantic ambiguity” as a frequent cause of misunderstanding in history. If it is possible to misread a sentence that short and simple, it should not surprise us that people misread complex historical texts.

The Bible is no exception.

Some readers impose ideas onto Scripture that are not actually present, a practice known as eisegesis. Others ignore passages that do not fit their own theories or preferences.

I learned this lesson in a particularly vivid way years ago, after finishing a parish apologetics seminar.

During the intermission between the talk and the Q&A session, two men approached me and asked if I would give them a chance to show me from the Bible how wrong my understanding of the Bible was.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it. Once the Q&A session is over, we can sit down and discuss.” They seemed quite pleased about this, and since I enjoy a good apologetics conversation myself, so was I.

Though it was well past 9:00 p.m. and I had to be in the Catholic Answers office bright and early the next morning, I welcomed the opportunity to debate these guys and see where things went.

We headed to a nearby Denny’s and were seated in a booth. They sat on one side with their Bibles open, and I sat on the other. The older man got right into it, launching into a set of objections against Catholic Marian doctrines.

He insisted emphatically that the Catholic Church taught things “that aren’t in the Bible.” The younger man nodded vigorously and added that he was an ex-Catholic who had become a Calvinist a year or so earlier. Although neither said so explicitly, I got the impression that the older man was probably his mentor, perhaps an elder at their church.

So I opened my Bible and, after asking which Marian doctrine they wanted to begin with (it was her perpetual virginity, as I recall), quoted passages relevant to those doctrines. At that point, their argument immediately changed.

Suddenly, their complaint was no longer that Catholics teach and believe things that “are not in the Bible.” Instead, their claim shifted to: “You’re taking those verses out of context.”

Things went downhill from there.

When I refused to budge, the conversation grew a bit tense.

“You’re misunderstanding that verse,” the older guy said emphatically.

“No I’m not,” I replied evenly. “You are.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “No, you are,” he insisted with a slight edge in his voice. “You’re taking it out of context.”

“No I’m not.” I smiled, holding his gaze. “I understand the passage just fine. You are taking it out of context.”

“No I am not!” he shot back, eyes blazing. “You are!”

Unruffled, and accustomed to such confrontations with Protestant apologists (who often grow flustered and defensive, even angry, when faced with a confident Catholic who refuses to back down or let himself be put on the defensive) I replied firmly.

“Nope. I’m not taking any of these verses out of context, nor am I misunderstanding them. You are.”

You can see how futile and even silly things were becoming. Back and forth it went for the better part of an hour. Neither I nor they were willing to back down. They were adamant that none of the passages I cited could possibly support Catholic teaching about Mary. The discussion had reached a stalemate.

As I prepared to thank them and leave, an idea occurred to me. Nothing else had worked, so I had nothing to lose.

I grabbed a napkin, wrote six words on it, and slid it across the table:

I NEVER SAID YOU STOLE MONEY.

“Do you understand what I mean by this?” I asked.

“Yes,” the younger guy said, glancing at it. “What’s your point?”

“Well, I just want to be sure that you understand it what it means.”

Clearly irritated, he insisted that he did.

For a third time, knowing I was pressing my luck with these guys, I said, “Are you sure you understand what I mean by this sentence?”

The look on their faces told me they’d had enough and it was time for me to spring my trap. They never saw it coming.

So I walked them through the possibilities, placing the emphasis each time on a different word.

Okay, what if I meant, “I never said you stole money,” implying that someone else said it?

Or, did I mean “I never said you stole money,” meaning I thought it but never spoke it?

Or, did I mean “I never said you stole money,” suggesting someone else did?

Or perhaps I mean, “I never said you stole money,” implying that you stole something else not money?

Or did I mean “I never said you stole money”?

I could see it register immediately, like the proverbial light bulb going on as they finally grasped what I was getting at.

They looked at each other, then back at me.

“Well, alright,” the younger guy admitted sheepishly. “If you put it that way, I guess we can’t be sure exactly what you meant. But what’s your point?” he shot back, his guard up again.

That was my point.

Looking intently at both of them, I said, “For the past half hour, you’ve been insisting that you are somehow guaranteed to know the correct meaning of the verses we’ve been discussing.

You’ve also insisted that the way I understand these passages, and the way the Catholic Church understands them, must be wrong. Based on what, exactly? Your own personal opinion? And now you’ve just admitted that you can’t be certain what I meant by six simple words I wrote in your presence, in our shared language. What if the Catholic Church is right in its understanding of these biblical passages and you are the ones who are wrong?

They said nothing, though their irritation at this unexpected turn of events was unmistakable.

If they could not be certain of the meaning of six simple English words, I challenged them, why were they so confident that they automatically understood every passage of the Bible?

The Bible, I reminded them, is a collection of seventy-three books written by different authors, in different languages, across different centuries, for different audiences, and for different purposes. And yet they were somehow magically guaranteed to know the true meaning? Please.

Not long after that, the conversation came to an end. I could see from their expression that my point had landed bang on the bulls-eye.

As a parting thought, I reminded them of the Bible’s own warning against misinterpreting it. They were not amused and said nothing about that as we said goodbye and left the restaurant.

First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (2 Peter 1:20–21)

There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. (2 Peter 3:16)

Maybe six months went by. I was conducting another apologetics parish speaking event, and I spotted the younger of those two guys, the ex-catholic, in the audience. I recognized him immediately. At the intermission he came up to me with a grin.

He asked if I remembered the “napkin thing” from Denny’s.

Of course I did I told him.

“Well,” I’m happy to tell you,” he grinned even wider, When you did that, it was like unlocking the locked door of my mind, closed firmly against the Catholic Church. And when you did that napkin thing it started me thinking. That started the chain reaction of things that eventually me back to the Catholic Church,” he said.

It did not change his mind overnight, but it unlocked a door that had been shut for a long time. He began reading the Church Fathers and discovered that their understanding of Scripture matched what the Catholic Church teaches. Before long, the conclusion became unavoidable.

The early Christians believed what the Catholic Church believes because they were Catholic.

And it all started with six words on a napkin.

Copyright © 2025 Patrick Madrid. All rights reserved. All text, images, and other original content are the property of the author.

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