All right, I think we're gonna have some fun today. I'm Matt, by the way. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. We're on the third episode of our brand new season on this tiny little micro book at the end of the Bible, at the end of the New Testament, called Philemon. And as we've discussed for the last two days, Philemon is about a sticky situation that involves a very controversial issue that is very difficult to navigate morally, ethically, relationally, legally, spiritually. This is a letter written by a guy named the Apostle Paul, who is going to lean on Jesus' stuff to sort out this impossible situation for all of the reasons that I just mentioned. And in order to get ourselves oriented to this book and make sense of it, I want to start today with an imagination exercise. So whatever posture you assume when you imagine things, please assume that unless it's a weird posture and you're driving, in which case, just drive like you normally would with safety as a top priority, and maybe just do the whole imagination exercise in your brain without any change to your physical position. Okay, here we go. Let's imagine that we are future podcasters living 2,000 years from now in the 4020s AD. It's probably going to be a space podcast at that point, because I assume we'll all live in space. And imagine that for whatever reason, as a future space podcaster living 2,000 years from right now, that you have decided to make a podcast on an incredibly controversial, complex, sticky, problematic, hard-to-solve issue from the 2020s A.D. in Europe and the United States. And that issue is immigration. Now, some of you are listening to this and you're like, I am taking off my imagination hat right now. I'm throwing it down in disgust, and I am reaching for my phone to change to something else where we won't talk about political things because I don't wanna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait, put your imagination hat back on. It's gonna be cool. I don't want to try to solve the immigration debate right now either, but I picked it specifically because of how sticky and complicated it is. Whatever you think, living right now in the 2020s, whatever you think about the debates surrounding immigration, illegal immigration, mass migration, all of this stuff, you gotta admit, it, I mean, it's hard. It involves people's lives and where they live, and it involves culture and economics and the sustainability of the West and helping out people maybe from the non-West. And it's really, really difficult. And it's very understandable why everybody who talks about the issue is going to feel very strongly about it because again, it's not just some abstract policy issue, it really affects real people in the real world. That's why I picked this example. Okay, imagination hats back on. 4,002 something AD. You live on a spaceship and you broadcast to the galaxy, and you are gonna help people understand this pivotal moment in history and this particular debate from it 2,000 years in the past. Well, how would you do it? Where would you start? What would you need to do to get yourself and everybody up to speed so that they could really appreciate how difficult that issue was and why people 2000 years in the past behaved the way they did? What would you do? Well, here's what I think. I think you gotta start by getting the groundwork in place. You see, there's like two sides to this coin here, right? When you're talking about something in the very distant past, as I am right now about the book of Philemon, 2,000 years before me, or as hypothetical space podcaster version of you would be 2,000 years from now, talking about right now, there's two sides to a coin. One side is all of the passions have settled down because all of the people involved are long dead. All of the slights and insults, they're gone. Part of the reason it's easier is because the outcomes are all decided. I mean, everything worked out the way it worked out, and now we're just kind of sifting through it all. But then the other side of the coin is that it becomes really difficult to understand things from 2,000 years ago because you don't feel it the way you feel your own moment. Everybody you know is either directly or secondarily affected by that debate. You know all the slang, you know all the art and the subtext of everything that's going on in culture. You know the kind of people who think one thing, and you know the kind of people who think another thing, and you know all of the other issues attached to that, and like, well, people who think this that I don't like typically also think this about immigration. You just feel all of that. Nobody needs to teach it to you, you know, because you're living in the moment. So when we want to talk about the past and really get it, whether we're imagining talking about right now, 2,000 years in the future, or whether we're imagining talking about 2,000 years ago right now, one of the real challenges, if we want to understand it deeply, is to put ourselves in the shoes of the moment, to position ourselves the best we can to get it. So, knowing what you know now, if you could communicate across time, you would probably tell a podcaster 2,000 years in the future that if you want people to understand America, they're gonna have to understand the last five or six presidents. They're gonna need to know a couple things about the last few elections. If you want to understand European politics, you're gonna have to understand Muslim migration to Europe and which political parties really liked that and how that integration went and didn't go in the 90s and 2000s. You'd think to yourself, well, we probably get to get people up to speed on the fertility crisis in the West, and oh, they're gonna need to know this character and that character, oh, and this musician and this movie. You would just know all of that stuff intuitively. Well, our goal over the next few days is to try to know a little bit of that stuff more intuitively about the world and the moment in which the situation that the Book of Philemon is about happened. And to do that, we gotta start with Rome. And we just need to know a few things about some of these leaders and where Rome came from, because the Roman Empire was the dominant culture and political and legal defining thing of the first century A.D. The Book of Philemon was probably written in the 60s A.D., that's my best guess. We'll get into the timeline more a bit later. And that would have occurred during the early years of the Roman Empire, and specifically during the reign of kind of a goofball emperor named Nero. But to understand how we get to that moment in Roman history, we got to back up a little bit. Up to the time that we're looking at here, 2000 years ago, first century AD, time of Fein Lemon, up to this time, the world has been largely defined by mega empires that come and go and dominate the particularly the eastern Mediterranean world. When I say the Eastern Mediterranean world, I mean Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Syria, that neck of the woods, Egypt, and then even a little bit further east, some people call this Mesopotamia, that's probably a better name for it, in places it would be like modern day Iraq and Iran. This is sort of your ancient world circle for the West and the Middle East. Now there's stuff going on in India and China, but just because of technology in the day and where the world was and its evolution, those two very complex societies, they stay pretty much separate from the Bible and ancient history conversation of the West that we are tracking to get up to Rome. So these mega empires in Old Testament times, before the times of Christ, you've always got Egypt in the background. Egypt is just far enough removed geographically that they are sort of always there and they always matter. They're very rarely conquered, they're very rarely a subject state, and they come up a lot in ancient history and the Old Testament. But there's some other mega empires that come and go over the years, including the Hittites from modern day Turkey, including the Assyrians, who are just the worst. They're also from north of Jerusalem and what we think of as Israel, in sort of that Turkey modern-day Syria kind of area. The Assyrians eventually get beat by a coalition of mega empires, including the Babylonians. The Babylonians produce a famous king by the name of Nebuchadnezzar in the 500s BC, and he has quite the reign, but only a few decades after him, the Babylonians fall apart being conquered by the Medes and the Persians under the leadership of Cyrus the Great, who I really like. I'm a big fan of the Persian Empire, they're my favorite ancient empire. And the Persians are the last great mega empire on screen in the Old Testament, the first half historically of the Bible. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther are all set against the backdrop of Persia. The Old Testament leaves off with Persia in charge in the 400s BC, and then you get a 400 year in change break where you have religious writings from the Jewish tradition, then stuff is happening, history is happening, but not Bible. The Bible resumes with the New Testament, basically right at the birth of Jesus, or just a tiny bit before. So during that 400 years in change chunk, Persia gets defeated by a Macedonian kid named Alexander the Great. He's from Macedonia, but culturally, for all intents and purposes, he's Greek and he spreads Greek culture everywhere. He defeats Persia. He's basically the last Persian emperor, and then he dies at a young age in the late 300s BC. And his Greek or Greek-ish generals take over the world and they rule in four or five Greek-ish style kingdoms that are also really huge and really influential. But eventually there is this little people group way out west on the Italian peninsula who are slowly defeating their little tribal rivals out there and consolidating power. And these are the Romans. They don't come up in the Old Testament because they geographically they're too far west to be really on the map for the concerns of the Old Testament, but they are brewing during Old Testament times. And so when we leave off from the Old Testament, Rome isn't even on the radar. Persia seems firmly in charge. But when we rejoin the Bible, and I mean it's only like one page when you're actually reading the Bible, all of a sudden Persia is gone, forgotten, and there's this totally new people group called the Romans who are on the scene and they define everything. Their culture is a juggernaut. Their legal system is a juggernaut. Their military is a juggernaut. Their infrastructure building is a juggernaut. And it transforms the world technologically, economically, socially, very much so legally. It redraws the lines of the map. And next time around, we're going to talk about how that happened and how we get to the Roman Empire and the Emperor Nero, who is in charge during the time of Philemon. If you were making a podcast 2,000 years from now about a very controversial issue in our day and age, it would take a little bit of setup to help everybody know who the players were, the characters, the culture, the legal situation, in order for them to understand the spicy controversial situation. Likewise, if you and I want to understand a book like Philemon that deals with a very controversial subject, I mean it deals with the subject of slavery and freeing a slave, then it's going to take a little bit of effort for us to dip back into history 2,000 years and understand the ins and outs of that debate in that situation so we can understand this little book that we're looking at better. More Rome Magnana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.