Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And when I travel, I like to go to weird, obscure history places. Places where really cool things happened, but then for whatever reason, they weren't commemorated. There's a museum, there's not a lot of artifacts sitting around, there's not a lot of bricks from the buildings that might have been there, whatever. Just they got cleaned up and repurposed or just grown over or mostly forgotten. I love to go to those kind of places, and I love to use ancient sources or from whatever it was, sources, to try to figure out where it happened and then go and see if I can find any hint, any remnant, any unnatural little hill, or a stack of rocks that looks like maybe a person did that, and go and inspect more closely, or a little bit of an artistic flourish on some architecture that looks like it's not from the prevailing age of the architecture in that part of the community, and maybe it's a vestige of something older. Some examples. A little while back, I took my family to Ireland, and we saw a lot of the obvious things that you would see when you go to Ireland, but I did some homework and I found a very primitive Roman era Christian settlement that isn't well documented. It's way out on the west coast of Ireland, where some of the it's one of the first Christian communities that would have adopted this when Christianity made its way to Ireland, way, way, way back in the day. And so we drove clear out there to the middle of nowhere, no humans around. I mean, there were some sheep, I guess. And we went out on these cliffsides out by Skellig Michael, if you know what that is, it's like a stone pyramid that sticks up out of the ocean where Luke Skywalker crashed his X-Wing in the ill-fated Star Wars sequels. And we looked and looked and looked and looked and nothing was marked, and finally, I found it. It was way more primitive and way more wrecked than I ever could have imagined. But any doubt that I had that this was a primitive Christian stone settlement from way back in the day, was erased when I found this super rugged, beat up tombstone, grave marker, that has the most ancient of Celtic crosses on it. It was so cool. And if you want to see that, the newest video that I put out on the YouTube channel, it's called How to Go to Church. The very first video clip that comes up in there, like 20 or 30 seconds in, is me digging around there. The wind was so bad it ruined all my audio. So I don't know how I'm gonna actually publish the video I recorded there when I went and found it. But it's rad. Also, side note, that video was had gremlins in it. That was one of the most difficult videos I've ever tried to export and upload. It's meant to help people who are trying to go to church for the first time in just a very practical way. So if you want to do a brother a favor, you can just go watch that video for the clip I told you about, or you could just watch it because you want to watch it, because I think it's good and helpful, and who knows, maybe you'd want to pass it along to somebody you know who's thinking about going to church. Okay, how about another example of this kind of exploration where if something big happened here, there should be something that reminds us of it. My great-great-granddaddy, Edward Whiteman, got burned at the stake on April 11th, 1612 in Lichfield in England, and the town's kind of grown over it. I mean, there's still buildings from that time, but it's time passes, whatever they're trying to do, life there. But if you go and you look really closely and you know where to look, there is one little plaque that commemorates the most pivotal moment in the history of my family, and it says the following Edward Whiteman of Burton on Trent was burnt at the stake in this marketplace for heresy, 11th April, 1612, being the last person in England so to die. And you know, it seems like history is so separated from us. That's the what are we looking at? 413 years ago as we're talking right now? Yet my family went to help Roger Williams with Baptist church stuff right after that in early Rhode Island, and then there's just pastor after pastor after pastor in that family, and then it kind of went dormant for a while, and then my dad became a Christian when he was a kid, and that reawakened to some kind of thing there, and now you're listening to this podcast. So that burning that happened in 1612, if you are listening right now, it affected you. Weird, right? Okay, one more. The 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Illinois, the Columbian Exposition, one of the coolest things ever. They built this whole giant white classical city. More people than lived in the United States of America, bought tickets at one point or another for this massive fair. It was amazing, but it wasn't built to last. And it pretty much all went away. And if you go to this place where there was amazing splendor just 130 years ago now, it's all gone. But you would think that if something that big happened there, there'd be something left. And sure, there's one building that got converted into a museum, but that's more museum than history at this point. But if you look close enough, sure enough, you can find some little manhole covers, you can find one bridge with some beautiful carvings on it that date to the fair. You can find a lamp post with carvings on it. So there's just these little tiny things where you go and look and you dust off the right thing, and you can go and discover them for yourselves. I mean, it hasn't all been uncovered. You you can do this. There's stuff that people don't know where it is, but that you'd think there should be some hint in most of these places. Well, likewise, it seems to me that if Galatians worked, there should be some hint in one of these towns in southern Galatia we've been talking about, or maybe one of the little but most prominent towns in North Galatia that I've brought up a couple of times. And so, like I was saying yesterday, and as I'm saying today, you know, here for the next few episodes, you and I are gonna go digging through the ancient past at some of these sites, and we're gonna see if we can metaphorically dust some stuff off and find any clues that have maybe gone unnoticed that would suggest that Christianity stuck in these little towns, which really are. I mean, Leystra, Derby, Iconium, Pasidi, and Antioch, this is kind of a black hole of history. This is not some kind of hotbed or hyper-influential place in the time of Jesus and the New Testament in the first few centuries after that. It's kind of a windswept plateau. There was things got hot and there was a lot of fighting and stuff right before Jesus showed up, and Galatians was written and Paul showed up. But from the time of Jesus on, just pretty tame and not very well documented. So let's start by going and dusting some things off in the first town Paul visited, the one that I should say, the first team to receive the gospel, that being Derby. Derby looks like it was a bigger deal fifty or a hundred years before the time of Jesus and before the time of Paul. This little area had been a crossroads between the old Persian Empire, going back to like, you know, Nehemiah and Xerxes and Esther and all of that kind of stuff. It had been a crossroads between Persian culture and the easternmost parts of Greek culture. So it's kind of blended in that regard. We'll then add to the fact that the Gauls came in a few hundred years before Jesus and worked their way from the north down into this region we've been looking at. And what you've got is a little backwoods area with a very odd mingling of cultures and expectations. Then add to that that the Romans came and planted a couple small colonies right here, and it becomes even odder yet. Then add to that Christianity showing up and it becomes even an odder mix yet. That's O D D E R not O T E R. The delightful, playful aquatic mammals isn't what I'm describing at all. The ancient geographer Strabo, who was born about fifty years before the birth of Jesus, and probably died exactly at the time that Jesus entered into his public ministry, so maybe the mid to late twenties AD. This Strabo fellow, he wrote this detailed geography of the Roman world, including a bunch of history details. And he actually talks about Galatia. The details he gives us are pretty interesting. Do I have time to read you the details? I need to read you a little bit. I can't spend two days promising that we're gonna go dust off these metaphorical history sites together and see if we can find something and then give you nothing. So here's one passage describing this area. Book twelve, chapter six, Strabo's Geography. He says, The plateaus are cold, bare of trees, and grazed by wild asses. I'm allowed to say it, because it's contextually appropriate. Did I have to put the emphasis on it? No. Did I? Yeah. Though there is such a great scarcity of water, and even where it is possible to find water, the wells are the deepest in the world, just as in Sawatra, where the water's actually sold. But still, although the country's unwatered, it's remarkably productive of sheep, but the wool is coarse, and yet some persons have acquired very great wealth from this wool alone. Amintus, the last great, really important king from this region, who we're going to talk about more tomorrow, had over 300 flocks in the region. In this neighborhood is also Iconium, a town that is well settled and has more prosperous territory than the above-mentioned ass grazing country. He then goes on to say that piracy was a big problem in the area, but the the Romans came in and they defeated most of the strongholds of the pirates that were situated on the sea. And then he goes on to describe a little town near this area called Derby. And tomorrow we'll look at what he has to say about that. And I think we're going to find a clue that's going to be helpful in how we interpret what we know about Derby and how things went there with the gospel. Okay, finally, let's talk about the elephant in the room before I hang up the phone here. Obviously, I can't go as far down the rabbit hole as I want to go with all of this stuff. I'm only going to give myself a handful more episodes on all of this. So we're going to be pretty assertive and going in metaphorically, digging into these undug places over the next few days. We're going to hit on more of these ancient sources, and basically we're just acquiring our second set of clues. We did the Bible clues. Now we're doing the archaeology and scant historical references clues, but I do think it's going to paint a picture of this region that is going to be a fun thing to wrap up this season on Galatians. Last reminder on the way out the door, I got that video I was teasing a little bit earlier about how to go to church that Jeff is linking down below that has those clips in the early moments of the super ancient Christian site that we found in Ireland. I think you'll get a kick out of that. Thanks for considering taking a look at it. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.