Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I had a kid one time in youth group, because I used to do youth group. I was a youth pastor when I was a kid. And I had a kid one time in youth group who went fishing at this little pond. Like it's it's like an artificial pond in Grand Island, Nebraska, right? I think they called it Pier Park back then. And in this little pond, which is just, you know, murky, duck, green, filthy pond. I mean, you could, if you put your hand in there, you couldn't see your hand down to the knuckles. It's so Midwesty, murky, filthy. This is a cute, safe little place for a neighborhood kid to go fishing. And this youth group kid, he went fishing there looking for bass or bluegill, which is a fun thing to go on a quest for as a kid. And instead, he gets a bite on the line, and rather than a bass or a bluegill, he pulls out an Amazonian paku. Huh? It's a paku. It's like a big fat piranha, and it's got teeth. It's crazy, by the way. A paku. If you pull back their lips, which is a totally natural and normal thing to do with fish, they've got teeth. It looks like a person. It looks like they just borrowed some little baby teeth or something there and put them in. It is a goofy, weird looking fish. And he caught a paku in Pier Park. What are you doing, man? I mean, high five. Then sometimes, you know, you go out looking for one thing, and it would be a lot of fun if you found that thing, but instead, you don't find the thing you went looking for, and you accidentally find something weird you weren't looking for. And in those situations, sometimes you can call it a win anyway. Likewise, you and I are going up north to North Galatia here to try to figure out if we can see if the book of Galatians maybe had any early impact up there, if there's any evidence we can unearth at all suggesting that Paul might have gone up to North Galatia or that they might have responded to and internalized the message of Galatians. Yesterday we went and looked at a town called Tavium, and I think it's pretty safe to say that there's no real evidence there pointing things back to Galatians. But today we're gonna go and look at a town called Gordium or Gordian. You hear it different ways from time to time. And I hmm. You know, we might find something here that answers the question that we have about the whole Galatians connection in Gordian. You know what? I got to pick a name because it's Gordion, Gordian, and Gordium. You'll see all of these. I'm going with Gordium, because that's what I've always called it. I'm not gonna say for sure yet, one way or another, where that we're gonna find any Galatians connections, but I am gonna say for sure that we are gonna catch a Paku up here because there's a bunch of interesting things about this little town that are worth exploring one way or another. Okay, Gordium is not like the other towns we've been talking about, where, you know, they're old, but not like old. They're just old. And a lot of the towns we've looked at are even not that significant until the Romans come along and build a little uh colony there, uh a place for their veterans or whatever. But Gordium is like the dawn of time, old. It's in this little region of Turkey where the oldest stuff gets excavated. And I don't know if they still say for sure that the oldest human settlement ever excavated is in this part of Turkey. What do they call that? Katel uh Hayuk, is that the name of that? I don't have it in front of me, whatever. Uh maybe there's something on the Indus River that is older than that now. In in India, I can't keep up with all of this stuff. But I know this region is ultra old. We're talking all the layers of history that we know. And from the excavations that have been going on in Gordium for a long time, we know that this thing goes back to as old as anything, into the 3000s BC, maybe more. And somewhere way, way, way, way, way back in time, the Gordiomites. I didn't really think about how that would work. We're gonna go with Gordiomites. They became mound builders. Like you know, in southern England, how they got all those burial barrows and things like that, these big mounds, huge piles of dirt with one little tomb stuffed there in the middle. They did that kind of stuff. So a lot of their history is preserved in there, and we actually know a fair amount about Gordium and the people who lived there. We know that it thrived and was continually occupied for thousands of years before it became the capital of the ancient civilization of Phrygia, maybe about the same time that Solomon and David and Saul were a big deal in the United Kingdom of Israel. And somewhere during that time, the not so legendary, but you know, legendary, like famous king Midas had a palace in Gordium. If he's not their most prominent king or their most successful king, he's second only to the guy who put his name on the city of Gordium. Midas probably didn't do the thing where he could touch things and it turned to gold. I don't I don't think we know how to do that. I I think that was probably a fun story somebody made up. But he was king probably in the eighth century BC, so like right around the time that the southern kingdom of Israel was getting wiped out by the Assyrians. Gordium was also trying to navigate things with the Assyrians, and King Midas is a contemporary of like 2nd Kings or 2nd Chronicles. He's in play, he's actually a significant figure, even though his name doesn't appear in the Old Testament. He's doing stuff that is affecting Assyrian politics, it's affecting what the Assyrians do with their troops, it's affecting when the Assyrians can find time. I'm looking at my imaginary wristwatch right now, to get down south, to siege places like Lakish in the northern kingdom of Israel toward the end of its time as an independent kingdom. So I think that's pretty cool that there's that connection to Bible stuff as well. There's a mound built for King Midas. It's huge, it's awesome. I think it's super excavated, and that's part of how we know things about him. But eventually, Gordium gets conquered by the Achaemenids. Cyrus the Great shows up, and Gordium kind of represents close to the far end of Persian influence, but they're still kind of Greekish as well. But also, like we talked about a couple days ago, they're Phrygian, they got their little hats, little smurf hats. They're just their own very unique people group with their own mysteries and mythology and prophecies. And one of those prophecies very famously comes into play in 333 BC. When a guy you might have heard of, uh, he's sort of famous. Maybe he's come up before on your radar, Alexander the Great shows up in Gordium. And there are lots of these little stories about Alexander arriving in towns and how he was greeted, and the historians seem to really revel in Alexander meeting with this new philosophy or theology or these new gods or these new prophecies. And one of the juiciest stories in that motif, in that style, is when Alexander goes to Gordium, and the priests and prophets there are like, oh, Alexander the Great, let me tell you of an ancient prophecy. There is a knot. It is called the Gordian knot. And it is a knot that ties together like a wagon or something that we have up here in the high part of our community in our Acropolis. And it is said by somebody from a long time ago that whoever could loosen this impossible knot is destined to become the ruler of all. And Alexander the Great's like, gimme the knot. He walks over and he like does some stuff or something. He undoes the knot that was really hard. Or some versions of the legend say that he's like, you know, King Joffrey style. I don't care about your stupid knot. Give me a chopping sword. And he just chopped it. And it's like, I cut your knot. I cut your dumb prophecy. I'm Alexander. I'm in charge now. It's whatever the case. It's kind of feels a little bit like the sword and the stone mythology or something like that. Really one of the cool stories from history. And that's from Gordium. So that's pretty cool. You're probably wondering, yeah, but what about Galatians and Christianity? I know, I told you. We're trying to find the bass that is connections to Galatians, but also we're going to catch a Paku today. So after Alexander goes away and after his generals go away and the Romans show up, it looks like they did a giant building project there all at once, a really organized building project. I don't really know what that means. I mean, clearly they had some kind of designs or plans here. I've never read or heard what those plans were or how the Romans really used Gordian. This North Galatia stuff is a little bit of a black hole in the early Roman Empire times. But the archaeological evidence and the lack of written evidence make it seem like Gordium was a town whose best days were behind it, but it still had a lot of reputation. Like Acapulco, which was the place that everybody wanted to travel. That was like the sassy Mexican vacation destination over there on the west coast of Mexico in the mid-20th century, but then it just became a place that nobody really went anymore. Casa Benita is designed after Acapulco. It was so famous. But then the place to go in Mexico became, you know, like Cancun and the Yucatan and things like that. Maybe that's not the best example. You can just insert your own town that still has a reputation, but the town is massively in decline here. Maybe Vegas, if trends continue. I don't know. You get the idea. So Gordium still had a big reputation when Paul was around, but practically speaking, it was totally eclipsed by Tavium and more so Anchara in the international mindset and also in the minds of the ethnic Gauls who still lived there. So did Paul go there and was Galatians written to them and did Galatians stick, if it was. Well, on the positive side of the ledger for this not very well documented theory, Paul, if he were to go to Gordium, he would have gone because it does kind of line up in terms of the roads. I can chart one route that would make sense somewhere in the second missionary journey where maybe he might have gone through there. Maybe it's not the most likely route, I think he would have taken, but maybe. Additionally, you've got the legend of Midas and all of those barrows. That's kind of interesting. Paul seemed to like to go to places that had a big, super old pagan statement landmark and walk right up to it and be like, let me tell you about the true thing. So maybe there would have been an opportunity to do that. And another reason he might have gone there was just because of the legacy reputation that Gordium had. But Paul probably, I mean, he was really well connected. He probably would have known that the reputation far outstripped the reality in that town by the time of the missionary journeys. The other possible pro for a connection between Gordium and early Christianity and Galatians would be that we see some church ruins, but they're like 500 years after Galatians. The cons against the connection between Gordium and Galatians is that there's no record of it at all. The biggest thing that paints a picture of a connection between Gordium and the book of Galatians is really just some scholarly speculation among a certain brand of scholar of Bible scholars in the 19th century and early 20th century that it looks like kind of nobody really revisited or thought about for a long time after that. So it just kind of held the day, but nobody really knows why. I don't think probably Galatians was written to Gordium, but if it was, and Paul pulled some kind of ninja move that we don't know about, where he cashed in on the reputation of Midas and the burial mounds that were larger than life still are in this area, and the legend of the Gordian knot and the reputation of Alexander. Well, if he did that, that would be so Paul, and it would be so cool. Unfortunately, I don't think he did that. So hey, we went looking for a bass. I didn't find any bass, but if you're not going to find bass when you're fishing for bass, it'd be pretty cool to pull out a giant, puffy, vegetarian, overgrown Amazonian piranha from a little pond in Grand Island, Nebraska. Boy, I beat that metaphor to death. Go Google a paku. It's a pretty cool fish. Go Google Gordium. Those mounds are pretty cool looking. Alright, we got one more on this quest, and then we're done. Manana. Alright, I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.