This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast, and we're in the middle of a very fun epilogue, for me at least, where we're working through the question of did the book of Galatians work? So we just finished going through the book of Galatians. We're still on this season, this series on Galatians, that we're getting close to wrapping up here, but I wanted to know. I had a historical question. And my historical question is did it work? Did the churches that the letter of Galatians were written to, did they believe it? Did they take it? Did they internalize it? Did Christianity work out there? And so to answer this question, because of the nature of the geography of this era, the geography of Galatia, we have to really look at about six towns to try to establish an answer from history to that question. We don't know exactly which towns Galatians was written to, but it was surely Lystra, Iconium, Derby, Pisidian, Antioch, andor a little town up north called Gordian, andor a little town up north called Anchara, that almost surely would have been in view in this letter. Just based on Paul's travels, it had to be some or all of those churches that Paul was writing to here. So we're just looking at all of those churches. And yesterday we started looking at the city, the community of Derby. Derby is a little town in Southwest Asia Minor, Turkey. It's straight north of the island of Cyprus, where Paul's first missionary journey started. And it's almost straight west, but west and just a little bit north of Antioch in Syria, well, ancient Syria, which was the home base for all of Paul's missionary journeys. And what we know so far is that it's kind of a barren high plateau area. We got that from the ancient geographer Strabo yesterday. What we also know from a few ancient sources is that this Central Asia area was kind of a wild in-between space politically and militarily. It didn't quite fall under the control of the Eastern powers in the first century BC, in the first century A.D. And it didn't, it took a while, that is, to for it to come under the umbrella of the newly formed Roman Empire. So in the late Roman Republic, which a lot of people, I guess you could say, kind of ended with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, in the late Republic, there was a king named Amentis. We mentioned him yesterday because Strabo, the ancient geographer, mentioned him. This Amentis fellow was pretty influential. He was kind of a unifier, a reformer who went around and saw that all these towns in southern Galatia, if we can call it that, the towns that we've had in view, Derby, Leistra, Iconium, Poseidon, Antioch, he saw that they were kind of a scattered mess, and a lot of other towns around there were as well. And so he made unification efforts. I'm not saying he was like a good guy or a bad guy per se. He was a loyalty, flexible politician and king who made common cause with whichever faction in the Roman Civil War that was going on out west, seemed to be winning. At some point, he was all team Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Then at the very end, when it was clear Mark Antony and Cleopatra were gonna lose and that Julius Caesar's godson Octavian was gonna win, all of a sudden he liked Octavian a whole bunch. And Octavian, who became known as Caesar Augustus, that is the Caesar who called for the censuses that caused Mary and Joseph to go back to Bethlehem and Jesus to be born there. Caesar Augustus appreciated that this Amentus, the last king of the Galatians, came around to his side. It looks like Amentus was given a very long leash there in the region we're looking at of Galatia to try to pull everything together and get rid of little micro-kings and bandits and pirates with either the blind eye of Rome or maybe even the blessing of Rome. What we know, though, is that at one point he conquered the king of Derby, who was like a bandit king. That's pretty cool, right? Derby, a few decades before Paul showed up, was ruled by bandits. It was a hive of scum and villainy. Ooh, interesting. And then Ametus came to town with the casual blessing of Rome, wiped out that king, built a palace there, and started to build walls. This is Strabo's geography book 12, chapter 6. There's the town of Derby, which lies closer to Cappadocia than to any other country, and was the royal seat of the tyrant Antipater Derbetes. But in my time, Strabo goes on to say, that Derby, as well as a couple of other towns, have been held by Amentis, who attacked and killed Antipater Derbides, and then effectively received possessions from the Romans as a result. And indeed, after destroying, presumably, the occupiers there in and around Derby, Amentus, the last king of the Gauls, built for himself a royal residence there. And though he was building a new wall in the same place, he did not live to complete it, but was killed by the Cilicians when he was invading their country, and he got captured, and there's a whole story there that isn't particularly relevant. What Strabo does go on to say, though, is he indicates that these ambitions of Ametus, the last king of Derby, were very costly, that the young men all died from this whole region, that he would come along and conscript these men and do his army, his unification army, and that it was very expensive in terms of loss of life. And so this region, and particularly Derby, where he kind of set up shop late in his reign, didn't have a lot of young men around the time of Jesus' birth and in the first few decades. This is very important to our conversation, because Derby continues in some prominence for a little while after the New Testament, but it seems like a town in decline that's only kind of being propped up by the Roman presence. There's no more King of the Gauls there, descendants of Amantis, to keep things moving forward. The Romans have set up colonies in neighboring towns, but it doesn't look like Derby got quite the same blessing from the Romans, even though we do know that Derby really tried to be like, we're also very Roman. Hey Rome! Hey, emperors, we're also great. In fact, we decided to rename our town Emperor Claudius. Claudius ruled from 41 A.D. to 54. So Claudius was probably Emperor when the book of Galatians was written, and was definitely emperor when Paul went to Derby. So during that time, they were trying to rename themselves and rebrand themselves as Claudio Derby, and even minting coins from there that had Claudius' image on it, to be like, look, you could favor us too. But there's not much of an indication that that happens. And it's possible that Derby had already, just mathematically, experienced such a loss of life with their young men that they went into some kind of local population collapse. And without an influx of a serious Roman presence, there just weren't young men enough to keep this town on the upswing. So it still maybe looked okay. It was still maybe coasting from its glory days when Paul showed up, but it was maybe a town in decline already. So I think this is really important to our conversation because at least for this one, for Derby, we have an indication that factors that have nothing to do with Christianity or the arrival of the gospel or the book of Galatians might have already been so in motion that Derby was going to go into decline anyway. And if it did go into deep decline, well, there might not be much left there to look at. They might not have had money to build any kind of early churches. They might not have had enough money or population base to be influential enough to really get mentioned. So on the one hand, that is worth noting. But on the other hand, we've got just a few scant records from the 4th century A.D. through the 7th century A.D. of four bishops who we know nothing about, who apparently presided over some little diocese that was headquartered in Derby. So what that tells me is that at the very worst, Derby maybe died down for a while, then experienced a resurgence, and bishops were appointed there for a little while before it went back into decline. Now we know that ultimately the fate of Derby and the little towns right around there is whatever was left got more or less crushed during the invasions that ended the Byzantine Empire all the way up in like the 11th century. But I suspect that little Derby was pretty much already gone and off the map before the Byzantine Empire was formally defeated by the Seljuks in 1071. Okay, so we got a couple of clues about Derby here. One is what we know about the history and the general trajectory of the town before Paul and Galatians even showed up. Two, we've got a little bit of documented, written history that indicates that at least at some point there was at minimum a resurgence of the church there a little bit, or at maximum, maybe this little church in Derby kept chugging along all the way up to about 700 A.D. There's no mention of any representative from Derby showing up at any of the big church councils. We've got pretty good records of who went to that. So if there were bishops or there were a church there, they weren't influential enough to get that invite. It's kind of a bummer for them. But that leaves one more thread that we need to pull on here. We got, you know, the extra biblical historical stuff. Number two, we've got church documentation stuff. But number three, what happens if you put a shovel in the ground? Is there anything there? Has anybody ever wondered about derby like we're wondering about right now? Well, the answer is yes, people have wondered about it, but they just don't have enough money to do much about it. Like so many little towns in the Bible, Derby completely disappeared. It got covered by sand and dirt and maybe other buildings or whatever. As I'm looking at a photo of what tiny bit of excavation has occurred at the site of Derby right now, it just looks like a farm field and like western. It looks like Scotts Bluff, Nebraska to me. It is exactly how Strabo described it in his geography. This windswept, maybe a good place to graze a donkey or something. So what's been excavated here? I would estimate that what I'm looking at that got excavated in 2013 is maybe. Let me look a little bit closer. I think I've got the dimensions. Yeah, 250 by 150 meters have been excavated. And there is a mound that stands apparently at its highest point, 30 meters in height. So it looks like there's actually a ton that could still be excavated here. But there was work done in the 1950s and then work resumed in 2013. In the 1950s, they did find a couple of inscriptions here saying it's derby. So we're pretty sure this is derby. But even though they've found a nondescript religious building, which is probably more likely to be some sort of pagan temple than an early Christian church, but you know, maybe they haven't figured out exactly what was worshipped there, who was worshipped there. Despite that, this just, I mean, it hasn't drawn funds. And so I think this has sat dormant for quite a while. This has not looked like a tourist or pilgrimage destination, but I bet a bunch of the answers that you and I are curious about are sitting underneath this pile of dirt right now. And at some point in our lifetimes, I bet somebody digs it up, finds the funding for it, and we get more answers about whether or not Galatians stuck in the early days of Christianity. I know we've been going for a minute here, but I want to do one more thing, and this is incredibly simplistic, but I'm just gonna go to the place where Derby is on Google Maps right now, and I'm gonna include the town that it is near, the modern town of Karaman, and I'm gonna go up here in the search bar and I'm gonna search church and hit enter, and we're gonna see what happens. Are there any Christians still there? Well it looks like it. Yeah, here's a church in Karaman. I mean, it's very ancient looking. But yeah, that's an ancient Christian church. That's still there. I see some super old frescoes here. It looks like one of the Holy Family. Yeah, here's another church. This looks much newer. Let's scroll down a little bit closer to the actual ruin site and search church again. Okay, interesting, interesting, interesting. Here's something called Dagpazari Church. It's a historical landmark. And what do people have to say about it? It's poorly maintained and nobody cares for it. Yeah, there is not much left here. There are no signs for it at all. It can be visited, but it's been destroyed. Sadden to see history in this state. The original name is Koropisos. I don't know what that is, but it's right in the region here, and it does look like that is some sort of ancient church building. There's a lot of relics of churches here that are so old that nobody even knows what to do with them or when they were there, at least according to Google Maps. Okay, well, that's very interesting to me, because a couple of these churches, as I'm looking at the map, are just exactly where I understand Derby to have been. I mean exactly. Okay, is there anything worse than listening to someone scroll things on the internet? Because you get that half-brain speech. Oh, look, uh, just look at that. Sorry, you're all very patient, but that was very interesting to me. We're gonna check Derby off the list, and in terms of a level of certainty, one being we have no idea what happened there, and ten being we got a pretty good sense. I'm gonna give Derby like a two or a three, but what we see there indicates that Christianity hung around. We've got four bishops from 381 to 672 AD. We've got the ruins of very ancient churches around Derby, and we have a valid theory based on ancient sources for why Derby might have just been in population decline, and that would offer us an explanation for why we don't really hear about it much after the Bible that has nothing to do with whether or not the message took, but just has everything to do with political stuff, population stuff. I'll tell you this. I know we've got more on Lystra because I've cheated ahead a little bit, but I don't know about the other ones. So we're gonna unwrap that present together and keep trying to get to the bottom of whether or not Galatians worked. I just want to pull on a few more of these threads and see if we can offer a smart take on a really valid historical question that I don't know if anybody has properly answered before. So we're gonna keep working on it for a bit. All right, that's good for now. Um Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.