by Tutu Akinlabi

A pastor who specialized in snake handling has died after being bitten by a poisonous snake and refusing treatment.

Pastor Jamie Coots seemed to have taken the biblical verses about snakes a little too literally as he constantly put himself and others in danger through exposure to the reptiles.

The star of “Snake Salvation,” was bitten by the venomous snake on the right hand at his church in Kentucky.

NY Daily reports:

The Pentecostal holy man refused to go to the hospital or accept any medical treatment, police said.

Coots, whose show appeared on National Geographic’s television channel, believed snake handling was a commandment from God and a viper’s bite was God’s will.

“When I first started church I said if I ever went to a hospital or a doctor over a snake bite I would quit church,” Coots said in one episode.

He had previously survived a bite that cost him most of the middle finger on his right hand. Instead seeking medical attention for the gruesome injury, he let it rot to black, exposing a quarter inch of bone before it broke off.

He kept the stub of finger in a glass jar for his wife.

“To me it’s as much of a commandment from God when he said, ‘they shall take up serpents’ as it was when he ‘thou shall not commit adultery,” Coots said on the show of snake handling.

Coots was just as resolute on Saturday, according to police.

Cops and medical crews were called about 8:30 p.m. to a church for reports of a snakebite victim, but Coots had already left, police said. They later found Coots at home and tried to talk him into medical treatment, but he wouldn’t accept it. The crews finally left about 9:10 p.m.

They returned about an hour later with the Bell county deputy coroner and found Coots dead. Snake handling has been outlawed in most snakes, and Coots had made it his mission to carry on the tradition.

He was sentenced in February 2013 to a year of probation for crossing into Tennessee with venomous snakes, and he was also arrested in 2008 for keeping 74 snakes in his home, National Geographic reported.