Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and it's going to take restraint today, because I want to go all the way down the history rabbit hole with you here, but we can't, because we're running out of time on Galatians. And at some point here we got to be done. And by at some point I mean 300, episode 300. I'm sure you all figured out at some point that we were going to end it right at 300. And that's true. Maybe some of you are thinking, like, wait, so you just ran it to 300 because you wanted symmetry? Uh-huh. Yep. Yeah, because I thought 300 would be cool forever to be like, we did 300 episodes on Galatians. It just sounds cool, right? But now some of you are like, wait a dang minute. So have you been stalling this whole time with this post-Galatians epilogue thing just to get it to 300? No. As a matter of fact, I have not. Not only have I not been stalling with this post-Galatians epilogue, in my humble opinion, I've been rushing. Cause there's so much more here that I want to go and look at and I want to launch spin-off podcasts that go into church history and all of this other stuff. And maybe someday I'll do that. But the one thing I like more than history and church history is the Bible. So we're going to keep doing books of the Bible on the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. But yeah, I indulged myself a little bit with this Galatians epilogue. I would have liked for it to have been, you know, two, three, four, five times as long as what it's taken. But 300 has been looming out there, and we're going to be done at 300. But back to my original thought, why I have to demonstrate restraint today. Because we're talking about the last town that we are visiting in our little quick survey of the early history of Christianity in the region of Galatia. We're coming upon our last town, that being Ankara, modern-day Ankara, the capital of Turkey. And the post-Galatians history of this town happens to include persecution, horrible persecution. Some of the most well-documented, awful, violent, horrifying, important stories of persecution in the history of the early church. But this isn't a podcast about the history of persecution, so we're going to have to do the quick version of it, which I've already burned two and a half minutes. I better just get to what the quick version of that is now. Anchara is a city in North Galatia. It is sort of the tribal confederacy headquarters where all of the old Gallic tribes who migrated several hundred years before the time of Galatians from the old school France, Gaul, all the way over to central Turkey. This is where all the tribes leaders would mingle and overlap. As a result, it was very cosmopolitan. If you knew what you were looking for to the untrained eye, I guess it just would have looked like a bunch of Gauls who live in Turkey, the pretty much all the same thing, I guess. But if you were Gallic, you would have been like, yeah, this is where the whole diversity of all of us, this is where we come together. So it's really interesting to me that the modern capital of Turkey was also the ancient capital of the Roman province of Galatia, and Ankara, A-N-C-Y-R-A, modern-day Ankara, was made the capital of the ancient Roman province of Galatia, because it had been the capital of ethnic Gaul, even if not in name, in practice, for a really long time. And of course, even though we have zero, none, zilch, absolutely no record of Paul having gone to Ankara in any way, it's still, you know, the town was so influential. It was the capital. You know, you could see, you could imagine that maybe off screen, somewhere in Paul's travels, he might have made an effort to get up this direction. But also, let's just run this equation with you. You've been around the Bible a little bit now, you've been doing this for a while. How often does Anchara come up? Did you know there's an ancient Central Asia minor city called Anchara, A-N-C-Y-R-A? Cause this town has never meant anything to me. And I study this stuff all the time. Maybe you think about Ankara a lot, but for all of my attempt in this conversation to read importance back into this town, uh certainly it hasn't stood the test of time in terms of being like a place that really pops when you think about the Bible and very early Christianity. Now that is not to say that it doesn't eventually become a big deal, because Anchara does become pretty significant by around 300-ish AD, more on that in a minute. The biggest reasons that I think you could make an argument that maybe Paul might have gone here at some point would be that if you look at a map of the ancient Roman roads and you look at the really prominent roads, including two of the very important east-west roads that date all the way back to Persian times and even earlier, if Paul at any point got anywhere up north, the whole road spider web probably would have taken him to Anchara at some point. So even if he hadn't gone to Tavium, and even if he hadn't gone to Gordium, if he went anywhere in North Galatia, I don't know how he would have avoided Anchara. I think the gravitational pull culturally and historically would have been too tempting for Paul to avoid. In the same way that you know your local main highways and interstates, and you're like, yeah, if anybody goes to this part of the world, they're gonna get on I-94. Like you just have to to get anywhere. At some point you're gonna get funneled onto that road, then at some point you're gonna go by this gas station or this exit or whatever. Well, if you carefully look at an ancient Roman road maps, you can see Paul would have been funneled to Anchara if he'd ever gone north as well. As is the case with Gordium and Tavium and everywhere in North Galatia. The biggest reason to believe Paul never did go there and that Galatians was not written to there is that there is no evidence of that. There's just no record of that at all. However, Christianity caught on very early in Anchara. We do have written records that indicate that there were bishops, that there was a community of faith there. In the very early going, we're talking like maybe still in the time frame where the Apostle John, the last of the original apostles, was still alive, like just a bit before 100 AD. So that's a pretty big deal. We also see written records that there was a very substantial Christian community here in the second century and in the third century, and that eventually the Christian community in this Roman provincial capital got to be so large it drew the attention of really more than one emperor, but most notably Diocletian. Diocletian is a very famous emperor. There's maybe a top tier of Roman Emperor fame, three, four, five names that everybody just can't help but have heard at some point or another. But then the second tier of Roman Emperor fame, I think Diocletian goes right into that tier. He's most well known for being a persecutor of Christians, a vile persecutor of Christians, as we will discuss. He's not as well remembered for the fact that he was very competent. He ruled from 284 to 305 AD, so just a little bit before the Edict of Milan, where Christianity was declared a tolerated religion in Rome, not the official religion, that's a misnomer, a tolerated religion in Rome, and not very long before the reign of Constantine, who was a Christian emperor, and not very long before the Council of Nicaea, which happened very near to Anchara, very to Galatia, the area that we're talking about in this whole season. Diocletian was a pagan religious conservative who wanted to reconnect with the cult of Jupiter, and you know, the Roman pagans were polytheists, so he didn't want to snuff out the worship of any of the Roman gods, but he liked Jupiter the best. And he viewed the Christians as being a relatively recent and dangerous sect. They had decoupled from Judaism so that the Christians couldn't really hide under the like, we're Jewish, we were here before Rome thing anymore. They were just kind of out there and exposed in the late 200s, early 300s. And Diocletian at one point, he had a dust up with some forces from way out east, and he ends up in Ankara there. He's like, I need the the soothsayers to cut up some birds or some crap like that. I gotta look in the guts, I gotta see what the what do the bones say, sooth say for me. But it didn't work. The soothsayers were like, stupid thing. It's like busted, or I don't it's busted. And Diocletian, a little bit of paraphrasing here, he's like, What the heck? Like, I need this sooth saying, I have to know what is sooth to do it, make it work. And they're like, it won't work. We're doing all the keep stabbing the birds, it won't work. And Diocletian's like, find out what's wrong. And they're like, Okay, we found out what's wrong. There are some Christians standing there when we're gutting these birds and stuff, and they do the sign of the cross when we talked, when we consult the oracle, and it's wrecking it. Their thing wrecks our things. And then Diocletian, rather than being like, Oh, well, so their God is more real? Okay, then how could I worship that God? How might I be saved? Tell me the four spiritual laws. Instead of him saying that, he's like, What? Their God is more powerful, and just this little weird gesture they do defeats our ancient practice of sooth saying Killem! And so he starts to inflict these persecutions, and this isn't the only round of persecutions that happen in Anchara. We know a whole bunch of the people who got killed there by name men, women, a bishop or two, their family members got killed. Also, Diocletian put pressure on the armies that were there with him, and he's like, All right, we're doing a purge here. Either you pay homage to Jupiter and acknowledge the Roman gods, or you are going to lose rank and be stripped of your money, which, I mean, that's a pretty big deal. And then people outside the army eventually they start getting killed, and kind of a lot of them end up getting killed. You know, some people will say, like, uh, for the first 300 years of Christianity, the Christians were just getting killed left and right, and the church took off anyway. That's not really true. A better way to describe it is intermittent persecution. Sometimes it was annoying persecution, sometimes it was horrible persecution, and under Diocletian, it was bad. Diocletian thought that his empire had gone soft, that Christianity and these other foreign religions were making it soft, and that a recommitment to the old Roman ways going all the way back to the Republican era, like we're talking pre-Jesus, pre-Julius Caesar, that would be the way to get back to the heart of things and do things right. So he wanted emblem, he wanted gestures, he wanted public gestures to demonstrate that you're down with the plan. And, you know, hey, I can think of some times in recent history where there's been enormous pressure from the government or a powerful leader to do a thing, to take an action and to make sure everyone is aware of that action, whether the action actually makes sense or not, just to show you're down with the cause. You're a part of the thing. So this isn't some ancient Roman psychosis. It's one that affects the heart of men through all of time. Boy, did it get the best of things here. There's this sort of this weird era of panic and persecution, and for whatever reason, of all the towns, this Galatian, North Galatian city of Ankara takes a beating. The church there takes a beating. Well, there's a saying from Church Fathers, one in particular, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. That you can't kill Christianity away is the idea. Because our theology, our belief is such that what happens next is somehow even better, that here is very meaningful. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. To live is Christ, to die is gain, we rejoice in the face of persecution. I mean, the guy whose name is on the religion literally went to the cross and died a horrible death there. Literally, he was the first Christian, if you will, to be resurrected and given life. Physical proof of it all. That really informed the way Christians thought about life and death and suffering and punishment and all of this kind of stuff. Diocletian ran into a brick wall. He thought he could kill this away. All he did was further strengthen the church, and it's only just a few years after he's gone that everything flips, and that Christianity just absolutely explodes in the best sense of the word. But we know that in Anchara, the church had taken root deeply enough that it was worth being a target. It was worth being made an example of by Diocletian. So, I mean, you heard that thing I just said about the life I live in the body. That's Galatians 2.20. The you know, whether they were the recipients of Galatians in the first place or not, how they lived and what they did and how they faced death was clearly informed by this. So in the end, the verdict on Anchara isn't really that tough. We just don't have enough information to say that Paul was certainly there. What we do have is a whole bunch of Christians who came before us who died bravely in the face of horrible persecution. Their lives are not in vain. I mean, it was a gift to future generations of the world, future generations of the church. These were clearly people who'd read Galatians, even if it wasn't written to them in the first place. So I'm prepared to say that Galatians worked up there. I just think they received it kind of like we did after the fact as a secondary audience. And may we have the courage to internalize it the way the Christians in Ankara did. All right, we got a little bit of wrap-up left to do on this whole Galatians thing, and then on to Philemon. Hope you'll come with me for that one. That's good for now. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute five hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.