Hello, my name is Matt Whitman. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are at the end of season five, a season we did on the Book of Galatians. But this fun little epilogue that we're doing right now is a bit of history mysterying. We're digging around together to see if we can figure out whether or not the Book of Galatians worked. That is, whether or not it made sense and clicked and stuck for the original audience to whom it was written. So in my estimation, that means there are six towns that we got to look at to see if Christianity worked out there. The first two are Derby and Lystra. We dug deep into those two, and what we discovered is, well, they haven't been dug up real well yet, but there's some historical indication, a few little records here and there that indicate the Christianity stuck in those two small towns that probably really did go into decline pretty quickly after the New Testament for reasons unrelated to Christianity. There's maybe a little bit of ruins in the town of Lystra that point to a very early church there. So this is encouraging. That gives me the impression that maybe it worked. But now we're about to head up the road from the site of ancient Lystra to the site of another town where Paul visited and where the there's an early reception to the message of Christianity, probably a town that the book of Galatians was directed to, and that is the modern day city of Konya, Turkey, K-O-N-Y-A. Back in the day they called it Iconium, and Paul visited here on multiple occasions, and it looks like, even though it was a little rocky, that eventually a church presence stuck here. Probably Judaizers showed up and there was some confusion about what the actual message of Jesus was. And my suspicion is that what we're going to find today is that Paul got them back on track with the letter to the Galatians and back on track with a couple of in-person visits that he made, and that it really, really stuck after that. It looks like Christianity did awfully well in Iconium, and here is why. First, let's start with the Bible side. There are a couple of teeny tiny little hints, a couple of references to a pair of characters who are historically associated with Iconium, because we got some extra biblical lists of bishops that go way back with Iconium. Like it could be argued that we have records that say there were bishops from shortly after the time of Paul, like still late first century into the early second century. That is to say, that this church in Iconium it seems to claim to have had leaders in that that the first leaders or bishops of that local church are names that appear in the Bible. So the first one we gotta look up is in Acts twenty and verse four. We get a passing reference to this dude right here. Okay, yeah. When the uproar had ended, Paul sent for the disciples and after encouraging them, said goodbye and set out for Macedonia. He traveled through that area, speaking many words of encouragement to the people, and finally arrived in Greece, where he stayed three months because the Jews made a plot against him just as he was about to sail for Syria. He decided to go back through Macedonia, so he was accompanied by Sopater, son of Pyrus, from Berea, Aristarchus and Secundus from Thessalonica, Gaius from Derby, Timothy from Lystra, also Antichicus and Trophimus from the province of Asia. This is a really important little easy to forget list here in Acts chapter twenty, because we always skim over name lists when we're reading the Bible, right? But wow, what a collection of dudes Paul had put together who were all Christians and were all super connected to these sites that come up in the missionary journeys. And one of these in particular, this Sopater son of Pyrus, is historically connected in the old bishop list to the church in Iconium. Possibly, probably one of the recipients of the letter of Galatians. Now pr it looks like this Sopater fellow comes up again at the end of Romans. I'm going to Romans 16, verse 21. It says Timothy, my fellow worker, sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius, Jason, and Sosopater, my relatives. Now is this some sort of adopted relative thing? We've talked in the past about theories about Paul becoming so connected with people you know who were brothers in Christ that they they were so close that maybe he used an expression like we are kinsmen, like he talked about them literally as family. Or are these actually his relatives? Opinions differ, but Sosopater of Romans 16 and Sopater of Acts 20 are usually associated with each other. And the old, most ancient bishop lists of the leaders of the church in Iconium dating all the way back to the beginning, list this Sopater fellow as being the first or the first recorded bishop in that town, which I think is just incredible. I mean, what an amazing badge of honor for the church in Iconium. Another guy connected with that. Why did I turn the page? It's a rookie mistake. It's just embarrassing. Romans 16, the very next verse is a really interesting one because I've read it before, and when we were talking about Paul grabbing the pen and the habits that people use for having somebody else write their letters for them back in Bible times. Well, right here, the guy who is actually physically putting pen to paper in the book of Romans, he acknowledges himself. He says, I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord. That's Romans 16 22. What that means is in the most technical sense, Tertius is a New Testament author. And not in the same way that you could say, well, technically, some this guy wrote down the thing, or there must have been a guy who wrote it because Paul grabbed the pen. So technically that's the writer. That's a little pedantic. No, I mean literally, that is a verse of the Bible. I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord. That is a Bible verse that you could memorize at Bible camp. I mean, you probably wouldn't want to. He wrote all of Romans as well. Tertius is often referred to as Tertius of Iconium and is regarded as the successor to Sopater. And the most ancient lists of bishops from Iconium confirm this. So I mean, that's amazing. They can point to a guy who literally wrote a Bible verse as being one of their first bishops. There are a bunch of cool legends and stuff that go along with Sopater and Tertius that have them going on just wild missionary adventures. I don't know. Maybe they happened. These legends sound kind of like things that happened with the Apostle Paul. They were traveling companions with Paul. So, I mean, the stories of them branching out and going on their own adventures have some pretty dramatic miracles with like a Daniel and the lions, or rather like a Shadrach Meshach in a Bednego situation where a young lady becomes convinced that Christ is real, but the king, maybe it's her dad or something, is like, no, put her in that building and burn the building. And then she survives it, like Daenerys Targaryen surviving the pyre. Then lots of people are converted. And I think both So Pater and Tertius were both martyred as well. I don't remember what the story is of their martyrdom. I guess I could have looked that up. But the point isn't So Pater and Tertius in this conversation. The point is Iconium. And dang, you know, if we just look at the ancient in the Bible and outside the Bible literature, it's clear that Christianity, like the true Christianity, really took in this town very early on and was bolstered by people who would have been representatives of Paul, who knew him very well, who knew the contents of Galatians, who knew what Paul preached, who echoed that, who the Bible confirms were faithful, either metaphorical kinsmen or literal kinsmen working with Paul. I mean, Tertius is in agreement with Romans. He physically wrote it and wrote one of the verses. And Romans, in a lot of ways, is just the very polished, expanded version of the theology of Galatians. So yeah, we got all kinds of evidence from in the Bible and outside the Bible that Christianity really took in Iconium and that it was a Christianity informed by the theology that you and I just worked through in Galatians. But there's some more stuff to uncover here in Iconium. So we're going to work on that more tomorrow, including a report that I have for you on some archaeology stuff there, as well as a well-known character from Iconium, from whom we have some writings that might overlap a little bit with Galatians and give us some brand new smoking gun type evidence or connectedness here. So, what do we have so far? Derby? It looks pretty good. We don't know a whole lot about how things turned out, but it seems like Christianity stuck and Derby just kind of went into decline. Lystra, a little more stable than Derby. We know a little bit more about it. It looks like that was also a town that eventually went into decline when the Romans pulled away their support and their finances. And we know a little bit more about it than Derby. It seems like Galatians worked on them too. The early returns on the third town we're looking at, though, Iconium, are very, very positive. And that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg because we got more Iconium stuff tomorrow that is going to take us even deeper into this and give us the most clarity we have had so far in our entire quest to figure out whether or not Galatians worked. Mormonana, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.