Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. When I was a kid, my parents and my grandparents took me to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in, hang on a second, I got it here, West Branch, Iowa. I didn't remember that was a town, but apparently I have been there once. And I remember it being a really nice visit. It was sort of a normal-looking little library. I feel like there might have been a living history farm or like old-timey town there, maybe. I mean, these memories are from when I'm nine or ten years old. It's all pretty vague to me. I've only been to one other presidential library since, and that was the Truman Library in uh somewhere north of Kansas City. I don't remember exactly what town. Independence, maybe? Something like that. But in our country, presidents, when they retire, they make these uh these libraries, and I don't think they're normal libraries, like with Hardy Boy's books and stuff. I think they have memoirs and documents and important fancy things they signed. I don't know. Like I said, I haven't been to a lot of these. But I do remember going to the Hoover Library and just thinking it was the neatest thing. It was near where we lived when I was a little kid. And we didn't have money, so we didn't go to anything ever, but I think this must have been free, or maybe my grandparents paid for it. And it was fun. I learned a lot. I didn't know who Herbert Hoover was, but as we went through the thing, I'm pretty sure that's the day I learned that he was president when the Great Depression started and the horrible stock market crash at the end of the 1920s. That was all the Herbert Hoover era. And as we went through the museum, I distinctly remember that my granddad, who's very mild-mannered, he was a wonderful man, he was pretty fussy in there because Herbert Hoover, some guy from West Branch, Iowa, who, based on how excited everybody was about Herbert Hoover at his library, apparently had a very good reputation in West Branch, Iowa. It turns out he didn't have such a great reputation with my granddad, who was from Wyoming. Because you see, back in the day, when my granddad was a teenager, he and my great-granddad worked the family ranch that apparently my family had near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. And when the stock market crashed and everything imploded economically, I don't exactly know how we got here, but it's like the government or feed prices or a combination of both forced my granddad and my great-granddad to shoot the herd. So like the thing that was that provided for our family, they had to they had to put down the herd and move away and give up the ranch. And in my granddad's mind, decades later, when we went to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum in West Branch, Iowa, he wasn't picturing how beloved Herbert Hoover was in this little town in Iowa. He was picturing another reputation of Herbert Hoover, another legacy, a larger legacy that was different from place to place. And so I was pretty conflicted on Herbert Hoover for a while. My granddad doesn't like him, but the nice people at West Branch, Iowa seem to like him. But then I went to Las Vegas one time and I drove across this big, beautiful dam looking out at Lake Meade, and it was called the Hoover Dam. That was named for Herbert Hoover. That thing is pretty cool. The point is, when you talk about anybody or anything from history that had a broad effect, you might expect for there to be a certain local legacy, but maybe a little different, larger legacy across all of the places that were affected by that event or that person. Likewise, when we talk about the book of Galatians and we try to make sense of what the legacy of Galatians is, the first and most obvious place to look is the equivalent of West Branch, Iowa. In this case, Galatia. And we've spent the last several weeks going to Galatia and dusting things off and trying to figure out what we could find that would give us any indication of what the legacy of the Book of Galatians is to the part of the world to whom it was written. And I'm pretty satisfied with the work that we did. I think we can say with confidence that the letter of Galatians worked in Galatia because Christianity lasted there. We looked at six different towns in depth in the south, Lystra, Derby, Iconium, Pisidian Antioch, in the north, which maybe the letters were to these two towns. We looked at Gordium and Ankara. And in all of these places, there's an indication that Christianity ranged from doing really well for a long time to doing great all the way up to this very day, even though Turkey isn't exactly considered a hotbed of modern Christianity. There were councils, there were bishops, there were leaders, there are ancient inscriptions and records that give us hints that the early crisis that these Christians faced was resolved at least in part by Paul and the letter of Galatians that he wrote to them. So cool, Galatians worked in the metaphorical equivalent of West Branch, Iowa. It's homestomping grounds. Galatians seemed to have done the job. But if you're studying Herbert Hoover, you would hope that if you go to his hometown, there'd be like a plaque, or maybe better yet, a museum, or maybe better yet, a presidential library. And sure enough, when you go to West Branch, Iowa, there is, and it's very satisfying and it's very fun. I was hoping that we would find some kind of glaring smoking gun monument in one of these six towns in Galatia that would be like, we are the Galatians. We received the letter of Galatians and we built this plaque to remember the important effect that Paul's letter to Galatia had on us here in Galatia. That isn't there. Also, it's been a really long time. So maybe it was there and then it just went away. I mean, they got conquered there in Turkey quite a bit. A lot of things have happened. Stuff breaks over a couple of thousand years. So, you know, it's not also not shocking that there's nothing there, but I was hoping. So, in terms of our jaunt through all of these Galatian towns, I'm very satisfied with what we came up with. There's a whole bunch of stuff I left on the table just for the sake of time that we didn't go and look at more closely. There was a church council in Ankara that yeah roughly corresponds in some of the stuff they dealt with to kind of some things in the book of Galatians. I could have made a strained case from the minutes of the Synod of Anchara in the early 300s to be like, look, that kind of sounds like Galatians a little bit. Ultimately, I didn't think it corresponded closely enough to do it. We could have spent more time going around in Google Maps and just searching churches in these various towns. I could have spent a whole episode on the churches that I found in modern-day Ankara. Pretty fascinating. There's just a ton of different Christian denominations there. I found a couple of very modern-looking Catholic churches. I found some evangelical churches that have like Hobby Lobby art and shiplap up on the stage and everything like you would see in the United States. I found a Church of Christ. I even looked at some pictures. There were no instruments on the stage. So that checks out. I found some reformed Christianity there, just in general. I mean, it looks like there's a decent Christian population in the middle of what we consider to be a pretty Muslim country, that being Turkey. So there were a few more threads that we could have pulled on and that would be fun, but not that Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum smoking gun. We are the caretakers of this legacy and we are proud of it, kind of thing. Well, this whole quest that we just did and the results that I just told you about took my brain to one more question that we're going to tackle here in our last couple days of conversation on Galatians, and that is what about the larger legacy of Galatians from all around the ancient world? I mean, is it the same? Is it different? I mean, Hoover seems to have a different legacy in West Branch, Iowa than he does in Washington, DC, or in western Nebraska, or near Las Vegas, Nevada on Lake Mead. So tomorrow we're going to do a lightning run through the first hundred and fifty years of Galatians' legacy outside of Galatia in the larger church. And I've found some interesting stuff that I think's gonna feel good because it feels like Galatians is our friend now, right? I'm rooting for this book of the Bible. It's like the home team because we're just finishing up all this time that we spent with it. I want it to have done well. And every single thing that I've been able to find, where some big name from church history was like, and it reminds me of Galatians. I get excited. Like when national sports media mentions my team, and I'm like, hey, that's the team I root for. You've heard of them. Cool. That's how I'm feeling with each of these mentions. And I've probably got about five or six of them that we'll run through tomorrow, and maybe you'll feel some of that elation as well. I'm just gonna spoil it a little bit for you. The reputation of Galatians, the legacy of Galatians around the ancient Christian world is much, much better than Herbert Hoover's reputation around the United States. It's Galatians, it seems to have played really well. People seem to have really, really liked it. But you know, don't take my word for it. I'll prove it to you tomorrow. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.