Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, where slight sales pitch, slight tagline inbound right now, we pick a book of the Bible and then we work our way through it for as long as it takes in 10-ish minute chunks every day. And right now, we are working on the book of Philemon, but we haven't been working on it very long. This is just the beginning of the fourth episode in this new season on this little tiny book from the end of the Bible that's only 25 verses long called Philemon. And it occurs to me as we start this fourth episode that I haven't actually read you any of Philemon yet. That's a bush league. This podcast has Bible in the name. I don't think I don't think I've read you a word of Bible in the first three days. Those are rookie numbers. Come on, Whitman. This is embarrassing. That's my last name. If you didn't know my last name's Whitman. Alright, here we go. I'm gonna read you Philemon one one through three, which is kind of the intro to the letter and which kind of gets us to what we're talking about in our setup here, which goes thusly. Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, our brother, to Philemon, that's that's the name of the book, our dear friend and fellow worker, to Affia, our sister, to Archipus, our fellow soldier, and to the church that meets in your home, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Isn't that a lovely beginning? We're obviously not into the meat of the letter yet there, but also, dang, there's a lot of questions raised just in that little introductory set of verses there. I mean, pretend you got dropped in from space, or heck, just pretend you've never read any of the Bible stuff and you don't know when this is set or what's going on. There's a lot of questions here, like who is Paul? Who is Christ Jesus? He seems important. Who is Timothy? Is it literally Paul's brother or is like a fake brother, like we're just good friends, brother? Who is Philemon, our dear friend and fellow worker? Also, what are you working on? Who is Affia, our sister? Who is Archipus? And why are you calling him a fellow soldier? Are you fighting someone? And what is a church? What does it do? And it apparently it meets in people's homes? How big an organization is this? How big were your homes back then? Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, it seems like whatever it is, it's a nice organization because I like grace and peace, and you know, God seems good. So there's a ton of stuff to wonder about here, and we'll get to all of it. But for me right now, I'm fixated on the second and third word of this letter. A prisoner. Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus. Prisoner? A lot of times prisoners are supposed to be in jail because they are bad or did something bad. Then I guess occasionally prisoners are the good guys. This Paul fellow kind of seems like he's the good guy. He's acting so far, like he's on the side of things that are right, but apparently he's a prisoner. And if I'm to take that literally, that raises a lot of questions. Maybe first and foremost being who put him in prison? Who operates the jail? Whose legal code did he violate that put him in this situation? And that, my friends, is indeed the setup question that I've elected to start with on this season, which is who are the people that made the jail and put him in jail? Well, Rome. All of this is happening against the backdrop of probably the biggest, most famous, most influentialist empire in the history of history. I would argue that from the ancient world, the three things that most affect your life on a daily basis today are number one, Jesus of Nazareth, the Bible, and Christianity. Number two, the Roman Empire. Number three, Greek thought and you know, philosophy, natural science, stuff like that. Rome is a huge deal with a very long history, and yesterday we started with the deep background of that history. The ancient world is made up of a series of giant empires that hand the baton of control of culture and law and everything, one to the next. Egypt is kind of always there, but then you get the Hittites, and you get the Assyrians, and then you get the Babylonians, and then you get the Persians, and then you very briefly get Alexander the Great of Macedon, he's basically Greek, and then you get the era of what fancy people call the Diadochi, or the generals of Alexander, who go and make all of their little Greekish empires, the Hellenistic empires is what those get called, all around the world. But from around the time of the height of Assyrian power, we're talking like the seven hundreds BC, way, way, way out west, on the boot-shaped Italian peninsula, right on the place where still you can go see the city of Rome, this little tribe of the Romans is starting to consolidate power. They defeat their enemies who live on neighboring hills, and gradually they've got control of what might be likened to a little county, and then gradually they gain control of most of the Italian peninsula, and then eventually they start to exert influence on the central and western Mediterranean, and eventually they have kings, and their kings have laws, and they are somewhat powerful. And in this era of kings, Rome expands. There's seven kings in particular that history remembers and probably romanticizes a bit. You gotta remember, the era of the seven kings in Rome is a really long time ago, so long ago that in a lot of Roman and Greek culture myth and history are still sort of intermingled back then. But the Roman monarchy goes into collapse as the story goes, when one king Tarkinus Superbus and his punk kid who's spoiled and a rat does some really ratty stuff to particularly a noble, well-regarded woman in the community, and the king doesn't really enforce the law because that's just my special little boy. Sometimes, you know, boys will just be boys. He got a little bit carried away. And the Romans are like, no, enough of this dumb crap. You're fired, we're done with kings, and they depose the monarchy, and they create for themselves the Roman Republic, which has elements of Greek-looking democracy. It's not like, you know, everybody gets to vote no matter where you are in society. It's a sort of representative democracy where the super elites have influence and kind of check each other, but they create kind of like a bicameral legislature. I mean, that's a very American way to put it, but they sort of end up with an upper house of elected officials and a lower house of elected officials. They put together a table of laws called the Twelve Tables. A lot of the laws, if you live in the West, like Western civilization, the West, a lot of those laws you would recognize in your own constitution, the founding laws of your country, wherever you live. Even a lot of the Latin terminology from these very ancient laws you probably still use in your country. Certainly that is the case in my country, the United States. Well, by the time you get into the 200s BC, a couple hundred years before Jesus, Rome is really powerful, and they've got a rival power. It's a people group who used to live north of the Jews, north of the old kingdom of Israel, in a realm that we call Phoenicia. And those Phoenicians, under all kinds of pressure, I mean, I mentioned all those empires who came and went. You can see how somebody who lives right in the middle of it might get sick of it. They migrated to modern day Tunisia and created a place that in their language they called the New City, but that we call Carthage or Carthage. And Carthage was the rival people group of Rome. Carthage famously produced the great general Hannibal, who was a rival with Rome, but eventually the sheer force and magnitude and size of Rome wins out and they defeat their rivals, the Carthaginians, in a series of wars called the Punic Wars, and then it's on. Once Rome has solidified its hold on the western part of the known world, they start looking east. As they go into expansion mode in the two centuries leading up to the birth of Christ, their republic, you know, it struggles a little bit. You know, certain people come along and they treat the rules and the equivalent of the Roman Constitution, they didn't really have one, but the equivalent of that, they treat that with a little bit of flexibility. And as all of these very ancient Roman norms of how you do governance and how you operate the military and how you tax and how long you can serve in office, as all of these old norms become taxed, the stability of the Roman Republic is shaken. The Roman Republic frays a little bit around the edges. And as you get up into the hundred years before Jesus, the Republic is kind of a joke. It's kind of a republic in name only. It's starting to behave more like an empire with a lot of central authority, like an oligarchy with a handful of very wealthy people making all of the decisions. The military has just gone berserk under the leadership of great generals like Julius Caesar. The Roman military is expanding like crazy up as far as Scotland. What are they even doing up there? As far out as Spain and what we now call Portugal. Why are you over there? They're all over North Africa. Rome basically owns Egypt. Rome is clear up pushing through Germany and toward the part of the world that we would associate with Russian culture. And around the time of the ascendancy of Julius Caesar in the mid-first century BC, about 60-ish years before Jesus is born, a Roman general named Pompeii, or some people say Pompey, gets invited by the Jewish ruling family. They've got a little miniature kingdom going on called the Hasmonean kingdom or the Hasmonean dynasty. But it's a mess, it's corrupt, they can't keep it together. So they invite Rome to please come in. Would you please send us your general, Pompey, to fix all of our problems over here? And so Pompey or Pompeii is like, yeah, I'll come fix it for the low, low price of we own you now. And so he comes and he just basically takes over, and Rome never really gives Israel back to Israel from there on out. And it's about this same time that Julius Caesar is asserting his authority over everything. There's a bit of a Roman civil war that goes on. Caesar comes out looking pretty good there. He forgives his enemies, he rules for a while, but then everything in the Roman Republic is destabilized when on the Ides of March 44 BC, Julius Caesar gets shanked to death by a bunch of his legislative buddies in plain view of everybody. And now that Caesar is dead, people have to pick sides. Are you gonna join with Team Assassin? Or are you gonna join with Team We Were Friends of Caesar and we will defend his name? And now Rome and Roman politics really turns chaotic. It is a political earthquake, and those aftershocks and those fissures are gonna run through the entire ancient world, including the world that we have in view. This fight from about a hundred years before the time the letter of Philemon was written absolutely, I mean, massively shapes the world in which this book of the Bible, the letter to Philemon, was written. Even though Rome does not get mentioned technically in this little letter, it does get mentioned all over the New Testament, and even unacknowledged, it is a major player in this pickle, this conundrum, this unsolvable situation, this kobayashi maru that Paul is trying to solve in his letter to Philemon. And tomorrow or the next day, we should be able to wrap up our little crash course on Roman history, and then we'll get into trying to answer some of the other questions that these initial three verses of Philemon raise. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.