Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we're working through the question right now of whether or not the book of Galatians worked, which is pretty ambitious for us to declare that we're capable of figuring that out. Okay, maybe we can't totally figure it out, but I think we can get, I think we can come up with some pretty good, informed, educated guesses and evaluations here, but we gotta earn it. So we're one day into that. This is day two of working through the process of what happened after Galatians, all working our way toward the answering the question of whether or not it worked. Yesterday, we kind of reset the question of what is Galatia, what's the history of this region, where did Paul travel there? And do you remember like 278 episodes ago when we started this? And I was like, I don't know whether the letter of Galatians was written to the northern half of the hourglass-shaped province of Galatia, or to the southern half. It's a big mystery. Could go either way. I maybe tipped my hand a little bit and was like, maybe right now I'm leaning this direction. Well, after doing all this work and going through the whole thing, I'm pretty convinced it was written to the southern Galatian churches. Yeah, of course I could be wrong, and I weight evidence outside the Bible into this as well, and I think the southern theory makes the most sense. So we talked about that yesterday, and we started talking about Paul and what happened to him after he wrote the letter to the Galatians. So if we're gonna grant the Southern Galatian theory, this is so far down the rabbit hole already, then the timeline would be as follows. Jesus comes along around four-ish BC. His public ministry starts in the late twenties, maybe thirty A.D. But the way everything adds up, it probably makes the most sense that Jesus was crucified in twenty-nine or thirty A.D. It's hard to do the exact math on that, harder than you would figure. But somewhere in the very early 30s A.D., while Pontius Pilate is still in charge, you got a situation where the disciples have the birthday of the church, the day of Pentecost happens, Acts chapter 2, people become Christians en masse in Jerusalem, and the global church is born on that day. Not one institution, not another institution, the whole thing. It's borderless, it's huge, and it's this little mustard seed that's going to grow up into this gigantic thing. The book of Acts tells us that story overtly in the Bible, but then also there's a whole bunch of other little details in the letters that make up the rest of the New Testament that we can use to cobble together more about what happened and fill in some of the gaps in terms of the account that Luke gave us in the book of Acts. So we know that early on the story of Christianity in the 30s was really centered around Jerusalem. It was Jewish Christians and followers of Christ preaching Jesus to other ethnic Jews. We know that the leadership there did not like early Christianity and they flogged them from time to time. Eventually things went from not great and uh war of words to a hot war. There was an incident. Somebody killed somebody else, and that r really ignited things. It took it all to the next level. It set things in motion. And that particular martyrdom was of Stephen. Stephen probably had some Greek connections as well as Jewish, and the religious leaders illegally executed him by stoning, and that is where we meet Paul. Back then they called him Saul. And then Paul approved of it. He was there. He thought it was cool. He was outspoken afterwards. He was giving people a hard time who were sad about Stephen getting killed. He was like, that is not enough. That is what people like Stephen have coming. That is what Christians have coming. I am going to chase this down to the ends of the earth and I'm going to prosecute it further. Well, everybody gets all pretty panicked about that, I'm sure, maybe forgetting for a moment that God is ultimately king of these things, and God wasn't going to have Paul do that. So God knocks Paul to the ground on his journey up to Damascus, where Paul was going to persecute more Christians, and Paul flips from team kill Christians publicly to team promote Christianity and get flogged and beaten and eventually killed for his faith. It's really one of the most amazing stories in all of history, in all of the Bible. It's one of the most consequential stories in all of history in terms of the fallout of things, the murder of Stephen, and what that set in motion with Paul, and what God did in Paul's life, and then what God did in Paul's life after Paul flipped. I mean, really, name a more consequential personal biography than that story arc right there. Indeed, we've spent the last year working through the implications of that incredible story. Well, of course, everybody's a little skeptical of Paul early on. It takes a while for him to earn the trust of the other Christians, but eventually he does. By the late 30s, he's accepted by Peter and James in Jerusalem. Not long after that, probably in the early to mid-40s, he starts to travel a little bit and is even helping in ministry, particularly in Antioch. Now I made a video a while back where I mistakenly was like Antioch. Well, Antioch in Syria. It's in Syria. It's not in modern day Syria. My understanding is that Antioch is barely in this weird little corner of Turkey. Who knew? I didn't I didn't know that. Hopefully I'm right now. When I look at it on an ancient map, what I can say is this Antioch is a long way north of Jerusalem. It's all the way in the little corner, the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea, and it really is more in the orbit of Turkey, and it's way closer to the towns of southern Galatia than it is to Jerusalem. So that's where Paul is really getting his start in the 40s. Antioch is where they were first called Christians. There's a whole thing happening up there. Christianity popped in Antioch really early. And so there's this whole orbit of there, of Christian stuff happening. And Paul's a really big name in that. He pounds pavement, he goes and talks to people. He is more than willing to walk into the lion's den and have people be mad at him and yell at him and even beat on him. He just keeps doing it anyway. And eventually, probably in 46 and 47 A.D., Paul gets the blessing of Antioch to go and take the opposite show on the road of what he wanted to take on the road when he left Jerusalem. Instead of going out to persecute Christians, now he's going out to try to make Christians. And his first big stop is in southern Galatia, Derby, Iconium, Passidion, Antioch, and Lystra. And it's ugly. He gets stoned a little bit and beaten up pretty good, but somehow there's church that comes out of that. And after Paul's first missionary journey is over, he goes back to Antioch. He's there for quote, no little time. This happens well, he talks about in Galatians 2, and this would be in Acts 14, that he and Barnabas are in Antioch for whatever, maybe a whole year. No little time is what he calls it. And this wasn't my read on things at the beginning of this season, but right now my best guess would be that somewhere in here is when he writes Galatians. It would make sense that the letter could get down the street to him quickly. I've theorized he might have been in some other places around the Mediterranean world over the course of this podcast. But right now, my best theory is that maybe Galatians was written from Antioch in 48, maybe 49 during this time. Why? Well, because things were ramping up to a Jerusalem Council that needed to happen in 50 A.D., which is the one where they got together and Paul was like, here's what's happening. The Holy Spirit, these are Christians, these Gentiles are Christians, it's real, they're not circumcised, and they're Christians. A lot of the stuff that gets addressed in Galatians gets formalized at the Jerusalem Council, which is in Acts 15. The whole chapter is all about that. And if this is the case, then Galatians is the first Bible letter that we have from Paul. It's the earliest one. Well, then Paul goes on another missionary journey, and we start to get toward an answer as to what happened and whether Galatians worked on this second missionary journey as Paul goes back to a couple of these towns in southern Galatia. Now you're going to read in some places that some of these towns I keep mentioning are, well, some of them are in Pisidia or Pamphylia. It's not really Galatia. But a lot of the sources that say that are outdated. It looks like there was a little window of time right here in the middle of the first century where Galatia was bigger or there was kind of a lumping of names. I mean, there's a town in Costa Rica where we went to Spanish school with my family. It's called San Isidro, but it's also called Perez, but it's also called Perez Zeladon, but also the region is called Perez Zeladon. And it lumps together. There's sometimes fluidity to place names, and sometimes there's legacy place names. Like if you go to Denver, you know, Mile High Stadium isn't the name of the Broncos Stadium anymore. But it also totally is. So if in 2023 somebody said, I watched a Broncos game at Mile High Stadium, nobody now would be like, that's a fraud. That's not the name of it. That hasn't been the name of it for 20 years. Well, yeah, but it has been in common parlance. And in the times when different people owned the stadium, they'd be like, you know, it's Sports Authority Field at Mile High. It's Mile High Stadium at Invesco Field Shops Field at the shops with two Ps and an E of the Sports Authority Enron Field Sporting Warehouse, because that's how sports fields names were for about 20 years, right in there. Whatever the case, names change, and it looks like the most recent evidence supports the idea that Galatia, either colloquially or in reality, was a little bit bigger than what we used to think it was, which further supports my Southern Galatia theory. I'd almost consider making this a double episode right now because I want to see this whole line of thinking through how we go from the writing of Galatians through the Jerusalem Council. But we don't do double episodes only on very special occasions. So I'm going to divide it in half. We will pause there and we will pick it up right where we left off next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.