I am vexed and challenged today on how to do what we need to do. For those of you who are just jumping in, what a fascinating time for you to join this podcast. Hi, my name is Matt. This is called the 10 Minute Bible Hour. What we do on this podcast is we pick a book of the Bible and we go right through it. We follow our curiosity, we follow the text, we cover every word of that book of the Bible. It takes as long as it takes, because I mean it's not church. This is the Bible without the sermon, right? We just chip away at it and try to figure out what's going on here historically, what would the original audience have thought about this thing. It's really fun if you're just joining us, because we get into the deep water with it, and you know, 10, 12 minutes a day, you can fit it into your schedule, make it part of your daily rhythm. Well, here we are at the end of season five of this podcast. We've already finished going all the way through the book of Galatians in this season, but we're in this little epilogue where we're trying to figure out whether Galatians worked, whether the people who received the letter truly received and internalized the teaching. And so we're looking at some of the towns that the letter of Galatians was probably written to, and we've looked at two that were pretty easy to work through Derby and Lystra. They were little towns, now they're just hills of dirt with a tiny bit excavated, there's nothing really there anymore. And we have a few hints from archaeology and from historic records and a little bit from within the Bible to say, okay, everything we see looks like Christianity held on there for centuries and centuries after Paul wrote them the letter of Galatians, but we don't know a lot of the specifics. Now we've moved on to the third city on the list, starting yesterday, to investigate what evidence might be there about how they received the book of Galatians, and this is Iconium. This is a different deal, because in Iconium, we don't have much of anything in terms of archaeology. I mean, the ancient city of Iconium is buried under the modern metropolis of Konya in central Turkey. 2.5 million people live in modern day Iconium. So I don't think there are any ruins in downtown. I would assume that it's all just buried. Whatever was down there is underneath maybe like a subway system or something. I don't know if they have a subway system there or not. I know they do have at least one museum in Iconium, and I know that it does famously have some inscription stones from these four cities made famous by Paul's missionary journeys, these Galatian cities of Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch. But in terms of any other archaeological evidence, I'm not really aware of much, because they're just a big giant city there. So now what do we have left to look at? Well, we have a little bit of Bible stuff. We talked about that a while back, but we don't hear a lot more about Iconium after Paul's journeys there. What we do have in just spades, though, and that's why I'm vexed and why this is hard to, I mean, just how do I even break this down? What we do have is tons of records from the early Christian age about stuff related to iconium. So I'm just gonna do my best to, here's a metaphor I've been using a lot the last few days. I'm just gonna do my best to pull on all of these threads and kind of weave and braid them together. But as my daughters can attest, I'm not the best at braiding. You just go over the one and then you pull the other one back. But in the end, yeah, I don't know. We're gonna get as much as we can here, and I think we can get a sense of it from what I have on lockdown and what I've been able to uncover here about Iconium. In order for this to make sense, first we got to talk about geography yet again. We've been talking about this province of Galatia, and I've been likening it to an hourglass that runs north to south with the fat part at the north, and then another fat part at the south, and you know, just runs right through central modern day Turkey, and then there's a skinny part in the middle. All the churches that we're talking about here, Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Pasidian Antioch, they're all in the bottom half, the south half of the hourglass that is Galatia. But if you go and look at your Bibles today and you turn to the map section, all your Bibles are going to look different on this because nobody exactly knows where the boundaries were between these regions at different times. So all of your maps kind of guess. We've got the ancient geographer Strabo. I've tried to draw on some of what he wrote down, but we only kind of know what the actual outline of these provinces and these regions were, which is why maybe some of you have gone and looked at your Bible and you're like, I don't know, my Galatia doesn't really look that hourglass shaped, but probably most of them do. But here's what's important when we talk about really all four of these towns that are in view. They're all border towns, maybe with the exception of Lystra. Derby is right on the boundary between Cilicia, which is where Paul's from in Tarsus, and Cappadocia, which is where some really important theologians a few hundred years after Jesus were from, more on them later. And Derby is also on the boundary of historic Galatia. Lystra is pretty solidly in Galatia, but it's close to a little mountainous region that runs along the Mediterranean to the south called Pamphylia. So sometimes Lystra gets lumped in with Pamphylia. Depending on what map you're looking at or when you're asking, Iconium Iconium sits solidly in Galatia, but it's also inching right up to the frontier and the border of Pisidia or Phrygia to the west. Now that is relevant because in the regions of Asia, Phrygia and Pisidia, which are all just barely west of Iconium, there was an unusual movement in Christianity that happened about a hundred years after the writing of Galatians. There was a prophet who came along, and he identified himself as a Christian prophet in every way. He just identified himself as sort of the next stage in the evolution of Christianity, my language, not his. His name was Montanus, which is an awesome name, by the way. It's just Mont and then Anus. Well, let me do right there. It's like Montan and then instead of uh, like the state, it's Montana Us. Very cool name. Then he had uh a couple of gals who he palled around with named uh Prisca, or sometimes I think she went by Priscilla and Maximilla, and they did ecstatic prophecies, very dramatic prophecies, flamboyant prophecies, and they weren't prophecies like how it's described in the New Testament where God would reveal something to a prophet and the prophet would relay it. Like, for example, there's a guy named Agabus who was from this neck of the woods as well, and a couple times he shows up and he prophesies something that turns out to be true in the book of Acts. But every time he does it, he's still Agabus. You know what I mean? Like he's he's still the same guy. It's not like he's possessed or anything, he's just him, but he's received a message from God, and then well, you can just wait and see whether it happens or not. And if it turns out to be true, dang, I mean you listen to Agabus. But uh Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla, they believed that they were possessed by the Holy Spirit, or the Paraclete, as they called it. They were the mouthpiece of God, and so they would go into like this this ecstatic trance was the suggestion. And I mean, I don't know, I've never talked to a Montanist, and pretty much everything we know about them is from their critics. So maybe that some of you were like, I've heard of these people and I actually really like them. They're kind of like my group a little bit. Hey, I'm not trying to pick a fight, I'm just doing my best to tell you what I know about this group that really caught on in the second century, very near Iconium. Well, initially people were like, I I guess that's kind of cool, but it seems kind of weird that you're like possessed by God when you do these prophecies. And there was some confusion early on from the various bishops in the region. Oh, by the way, um Iconium, if you don't remember from yesterday, they had a bishop, and the bishop of Iconium was the leader of that church, but also a bunch of smaller towns around Iconium, their little mini-bishops answered to the big bishop at Iconium. Iconium was a big enough town and a big enough deal that eventually it it is what's called a metropolitan see or a seat of Christian authority. So you know, the leader of the Iconium Church, he's gonna be a really big deal, and his opinion about an upstart pseudo-Christian movement in his backyard is gonna really, really matter. Well, eventually Montanus declares that there is a new Jerusalem. I mean, the first of many people to declare such a thing. I mean, there are people even today who claim that Jerusalem is actually in North America. I mean, all kinds of cults and groups on the fringes of Orthodox historic biblical Christianity have made claims about like, you know, we're the heirs apparent to Jerusalem and so forth. Maybe Montanus is one of the very first to do so, but he declares that the new Jerusalem, the true spiritual Jerusalem, is in Phrygia, in modern day Turkey between Iconium and Ephesus, a town there. And he declares that people who believe his prophecies are the spiritual, and the people who don't believe his prophecies are the carnal. So he's really picking a fight. It's not the kind of thing where you can just be like, oh, I'm indifferent to Montanus. Everybody in Christianity kind of had to choose, and it really is a pretty significant test. It's a significant crisis for early Christianity in the late second century. Well, again, the Christian church, who I think were the recipients of the letter Paul wrote to the Galatians a hundred plus years earlier, the Christians in Iconium, they have to answer this. It's in their backyard. The claims are a dividing line. I mean, it's coming in with a sword here, metaphorically. I mean, really, in a lot of ways, maybe this is the first big interloping test that has happened since the Judaizers. And time out, time out, time out. I can feel it. It's happening again. I'm getting all amped up about history things and theology, Bible, church history stuff. And I'm like the kooky guy in the basement who has the red thumbtacks all over his walls, and I got yarn connecting things, and I'm all excited about connections. And I'm gonna go too long here. This is gonna have to be two days worth of conversation on what I think is a really important detail about the legacy of the book of Galatians in this area and how that fits with this whole montanism crisis. So we're just gonna pause right there and pick up where we left off tomorrow. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll do this again soon.