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Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we've got a mystery to solve, and this is really fun. We're doing light original research here. We're asking lightly an original question about history in the Bible and the history of Christianity. The question we're asking and working through together in real time and learning about together in real time is this. Did the book of Galatians work on its original recipients? That is, did the people to whom the letter that you and I just worked through, Galatians, did that group of people read it and receive it and change what they were doing? Did it solve their problems? Did it strengthen them for the long haul? And did the churches that received it work out? Did they stand for decades or even centuries or even a millennia? Well, I think by my count there are about six towns that we got to look at. Four mentioned in the Bible and two maybe implied. We've looked at one of them, that was Derby, and I think we've got a pretty good sense of whether or not Galatians worked for the Christians in Derby. Then that sense would be Yeah, I think it mostly did work there. We've got just a tiny bit of written evidence to suggest that there were some low-powered bishops there between the 300s and 700s, so we know Christianity to some extent was still in Derby at that point. I mean, that's kind of a smoking gun, yes. We also did a little bit of background research on what was going on in Derby in terms of just it as a town, and we were able to determine that they probably would have been a little shy on young men because of some misguided military actions by a local king and previous bandit rulers who held Derby. So that might have been a town that was well into decline, maybe even population collapse. It wasn't a darling of the Roman Empire, so it wasn't being fueled with resources like some of its neighbors. So if Christianity didn't have a great showing in Derby, it might just be because Derby didn't have much of a future after the Bible. But the final thing I think we concluded about Derby is there are still answers there. They're just buried underground. Since we talked last time around, I found a cool travel blog from a couple who went to Turkey and just wandered around in fields and talked to some local farmers and were like, we can't find it. Where is Derby? And somebody knew and pointed them in the right direction, and they were able to just go walk around and look at it, and I saw some of the pictures they took. It was cool. It looks like they took a drone photo as well that showed the whole tell, the whole mound of Derby and what was left or what had been excavated. It's I mean, it's nothing. It is a tiny fraction. So even since last time we talked, I am more convinced than ever that the answers you and I really want, the proof we want about how well Christianity took there after the book of Galatians, it's buried. You're just gonna need somebody with a shovel to get in there and somebody with a good eye to know what they're looking at. It's gonna take money, it's gonna take time. But the answers are there. They're just entombed and need to be unearthed. That's kind of fun, isn't it? There's still real live quests and mysteries out there just waiting to be sorted through. Okay, well, here's another mystery that's just waiting to be sorted through, and that is our second town we need to consider. That is Lystra. Now, we talked for a while about what evidence we can gather from the Bible as to how this all worked out, and Lystra is the most mentioned of these six cities, and I think we can make the best biblical case that Galatians won in Lystra, and that the faith stayed strong there for an extended period of time. We got three generations of Christians we know are from there Lois, Eunice, and then Timothy, the great young acolyte of Paul, partner in mission with Paul Timothy was from there as well. What we do know from history, and it really isn't much, outside the Bible, Lystra is almost unreferenced in ancient sources. It's more lumped in with some of its neighbors. So what we learn from ancient history is that Lystra really wasn't that big of a deal either. Both Derby and Lystra. I kind of imagined they were really big, important towns, but I think they kind of weren't. I think Lystra got a little bump ahead of Derby in terms of influence because probably just location-wise, it made more sense for Caesar Augustus, maybe a couple years before Jesus was born, to make it a Roman colony. And that's a big deal. You kind of won the lottery there in the early Roman Empire if you got singled out to be a Roman colony, because it means you get a military presence, so bandits aren't going to be an issue anymore. It means you get a legal presence. It also usually means you still get your own ethnic leadership that you know knows the background of your people. You get uh I already said money, but you get a bunch more money, but also I think everybody there got citizenship. Maybe this is in the Bible. I'm embarrassed. I don't remember if it is or not. Some of you are probably laughing at me right now because you know the answer to this, and I don't remember it off the top of my head. But whether it's spelled out in the Bible or not, Timothy is presumably also a Roman citizen, right? He lived in a colony town. So that means every door that would be open to Paul, who was a citizen, would also be open to Timothy, which would make him, again, a very strategic, well-positioned ally for what Paul was trying to accomplish. So even though Lystra wasn't a giant town, it was a little closer to sort of the larger regional capital, which we're going to talk about next time around. That's Iconium, modern day Konya. But, and maybe this is the smoking gun, maybe this answers our mystery or question right here. Lystra is consistently mentioned as a diocese, even if not many of its bishops are mentioned. It's consistently mentioned as a functioning diocese all the way up into the 800s A.D. So, yeah, looks like Christianity worked out there. Now, at this point, you're probably starting to figure out the pattern that we're going with for evaluating these questions, right? We're looking at what the Bible points to in terms of whether or not Galatians stuck in each of these towns. Then we're looking at written records to see what we can get there. And they're a little bit scant, but we've been able to come up with at least something for Derby and Lystra. But then after that, we're looking at archaeological records. What have people dug up? Well, in Derby, not much yet, but in Lystra, more. And this is really exciting. Things are happening in Lystra archaeologically right now, as I'm recording this. Excavation started in earnest about a year ago. I mean, we've known where Lystra is, just south of Iconium or modern day Konya in Turkey. We've known where it is for a really long time. And calls have been going out since the early 1900s to say, you gotta get money for this, you gotta excavate it. It's a treasure trove. This one, like you know, archaeologists from back in the day were saying, this is very excavatable, this is well preserved. You want to get somebody in here. Well, that is happening right now. Turkish teams are excavating it, and they just got done with a summer camp where they brought in a whole bunch of students to do the work. Archaeology is pretty cool this way. I've got a buddy who's into it. Some of you have met him before through my stuff. His name's Dr. John Monson. He's a longtime professor of archaeology with a PhD from Harvard. He's been at Wheaton and uh Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He grew up in the Holy Land. He's just a delight to talk to, a dear friend, and he knows so much about all of this stuff. And in knowing him, I've got more of a sense for what a dig kind of looks like. And it's the sort of thing where you really can bring in people who maybe aren't total experts, but they can sort of learn on the job if they're willing to be trained and just how to be careful and what to look for. And so apparently they're doing one of these camps with novices or students who were early on in their training for this kind of archaeology, and they had a really productive summer. They're just reporting back on what they found, and what they did, apparently, is they focused their efforts on excavating a marketplace and an early church. What? Jeff, why didn't you insert some kind of like that's amazing sound? Like some kind of isn't there a sound effect or well, you should have ba pa, you should have felt something right there emotionally. Because it's a pretty exciting moment. There are layers upon layers of this church, but the people in charge of this dig are reporting even within the last couple of weeks that the layers of this church that's built upon a church, that's built upon a church, that's built upon a church goes back solidly to early Byzantine era stuff. So we're talking about a church building here that is at least going back to maybe a couple hundred years after Paul showed up, a couple hundred years after Galatians was written, and who knows what's under that. There's a lot to unwrap. I'm looking at a drone shot of Lystra right now, and I can kind of see the curvature of what looks to me like the front end of a church, like the sanctuary or the altar area of a church, the foundation, what's dug so far looks kind of stubby and stumpy. It's not like a grand cathedral or anything. But as I pull back on this drone image and look at it from even further away, I get a sense of how much is left to dig this. I mean, it's just this huge tell, that being like a hill in which an ancient city is buried. And there's this little tiny sliver that's cut out of it. There's a lot left to be unpacked in Lystra, but my guess is that we're gonna learn a whole bunch about what's going on there, and we've already seen physical evidence of Christianity's presence after the time of Galatians. So I am prepared to say solidly from Bible evidence, extra biblical written evidence from back in the day, and from archaeology, Lystra took Lois, Eunice, Timothy, high five. Y'all won out. Great job. Paul, Silas, Barnabas, high five, Jerusalem Council. There's one for you, James, Peter, everybody all around. Whoever actually wrote most of Galatians until Paul rudely grabbed the pen from you, boom, high five. Nice job in Lystra. That worked out, and really, in some way, I'm a Christian because of what you did there. There's a lot of other reasons I'm a Christian too, but their faithfulness and the people who stacked these stones in this building I'm looking at right here in Lystra back in the day, just like me, they received the faith handed down to them that was true and accurate, the one revealed by Christ, revealed by the Holy Spirit that you and I look at in the Bible. That's exciting to me. That's a fun connection. All right. We're calling Derby a most likely, but we could use more information. We're calling Lystra a solid yes. That is a win. Galatians won, the gospel took there, the church did well. Next time around, we're gonna go up the road just a few miles to the modern Turkish city of Konya, ancient Iconium, and we're gonna see how it worked out there. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're doing the thing I forgot a thing. Also, the people who are doing the Lystra dig, they have an Instagram account. Sign of the Times, right? Isn't that crazy? I'm looking at pictures from the summer's dig and everything. That's just awesome. So we'll link that down in the description below so you can see it for yourself. Okay, now that's it. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Liver Podcast. Let's do this against the