Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and you may want to hike up your learning trousers because you are in for one nerdy conclusion to this whole season on Galatians. Oh, we're going down the rabbit hole. There's interesting stuff that still needs to happen as we try to evaluate the one lingering question, which is did Galatians work? Did the book work? Did the letter work? Did it fix things? Did it make stuff better? I mean, I think we can agree that we both just spent a ton of time on it together. So it worked for us. It's been meaningful for a whole lot of other Christians. It's in the Bible. I guess that counts as working. I've written a lot of letters. None of them are in the Bible at all. So that's pretty great. But what about to the original audience? Did it take? Did they get it? What happened to the early churches there? What happened to the Christians there? So we're going to be looking at that and we're going to come at this in some weird ways, where I mush together history and Bible and a little bit of knowing things and a little bit of guessing about things. And I know that there are some of you, you don't like it when we do the history thing. I don't hear from you very often, but every now and then I know that there are some of you who are like, I don't like your history. I don't like it when you mingle the history with the Bible stuff. Whenever you do that, I take the signed picture of you I got at that flea market in Albuquerque and I tear it up into a million little pieces. And then when you talk about the Bible again, I tape it back together. But I know there are a lot of others of you, far more, because I hear from you more, who are like, oh good. Bible and history mushing. I like it when we do that. So that's what this next little segment is going to be. And by segment I mean a few episodes. And by a few episodes, I mean maybe a few episodes. We gotta peel back some layers here. If we actually do want to get to the bottom of this question, and it's a fun question because it is a bit of a historical black hole. This isn't something that's been written about a whole lot. I've been spending some time over the last week doing some original research on this, and I've come up with some really fun stuff. In the course of doing some research on what happened with the book of Galatians, what happened to the early Christians who read it, did the Galatian church work out? Did Galatians work? In the process of doing that, I've also come across some very fresh information. We're talking about experts digging things out of the ground in the part of the world in question here from the time we're looking at, that I think gives us some very brand new clues, brand new data as to what to make of the question of how things turned out for the Galatian churches. So we're gonna have fun. I'm sorry for my earlier creation of a fictitious critic who doesn't like mushing Bible and history together and who has all the accents at once. The first and most obvious person we got to follow up on to see how Galatians worked out is the author of the book, Paul. We know quite a bit about what happened to him after he wrote this, but you'll recall that there was some debate on the front end as to who specifically Galatians was written to, and when specifically Galatians was written. You will recall that the Roman province of Galatia runs north to south through modern-day Turkey and it's shaped like an hourglass. You remember this? It's like 270 episodes ago. So it's been a minute. I'd forgive you if you forgot some of it. The northern half of that is the half of that that lends its name to the province of Galatia. It's named after the Gauls. That's right. There's some Frenchies who moved over there hundreds of years before the time the book of Galatians was written, maybe in the wake of the big shakeup that came after Alexander the Great's march of conquest. There's these Gallic colonies over there. And so North Central Turkey took on that nickname long before the Romans ever showed up. But under the first emperor of Rome, do you remember his name? We're doing history trivia here. Do you have it? It's part of the fun here is you get a whole bunch of things in your hip pocket when you didn't even mean to. When you're just running on the treadmill in your unitar, just having your fun, you accidentally absorb history things. You got it yet? I stalled for you. Caesar Augustus. Caesar Augustus's original name was Octavian. He was the godson of Julius Caesar. After Caesar got shanked in 44 BC, there was a big civil war that ended with Antony and Cleopatra committing suicide by Cobra in Egypt. That effectively ends the last of Alexander's line of generals, the Ptolemai Empire. Whatever's left of it is basically gone at that point. And young bright Octavian takes the name Caesar Augustus. He emerges from the mess of the late Roman Republic Civil War. And maybe it's not a formal announcement, but effectively he restructures things in such a way that now you have a Roman Empire. He is the first emperor. He wants to get a handle on how many people live there and what he's conquered, so he calls for a bunch of censuses. In one of those censuses, Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem, and that's where the book of Luke kind of gets started. Okay. That same Caesar Augustus also made a bunch of new provinces and drew new lines on the maps to be reflective of the ambitions that he had for his new empire and how it would be organized. Part of that organization included mingling old local ethnic traditions, some even religious, mingling some old ethnic rulers and structures of authority with a Roman governing presence in all of these different little provinces scattered around the Roman Empire. Of course, in Galilee and Judah, that character was Herod the Great, the local ethnic ruler who played along there. Well, in Galatia, the very name of the province is a nod to the old ethnic. It's a nod to who was there before in the good old days. But what we see with Caesar Augustus when he builds out all these things is that he also sticks pins in the map strategically. He's got a good sense of his land and where the weak points are. And so he puts outposts of government and barracks, military outposts all over the place. And he even makes some new colonies. These Roman colonies, you know, some of them are built on the top of much older cities. Some of them are resurrections of old dead cities brought back to life by Augustus or later Roman emperors. But these Roman colonies effectively are Roman cultural outposts meant to help lock things down and create cultural and legal unity across the young empire, uh, you know, dating from a few years before the birth of Christ up until, well, the time we're looking at here in the book of Galatians, mid-first century. So when we're talking about Caesar Augustus's Roman province of Galatia, shaped like an hourglass that runs north to south through modern-day Turkey, Asia Minor, they called it back in the day, we're talking about a northern half of the province that is culturally pretty different from the southern half. We're talking about a northern half that is less populous, that is less developed, that has less friendly roads, less infrastructure, less Roman commercialism and taxation, and fewer meaningful Roman colonies. When we talk about the lower half of Galatia, we're not talking about the ethnic Gauls, we're talking about Jews and Phrygians and Romans and people from all over the world, really. But we've also got in southern Galatia several very prominent, very recent Roman colonies founded by Augustus. So they're very pro-Rome and they're also very pro-Greek gods, because this is the old stomping grounds of the Greeks and a little bit the Persians, if you go back far enough. And so that explains some of the antics and things that come up when Paul arrives there in the book of Acts. Okay, so we're refreshed on the North Galatia, South Galatia thing. Paul didn't go to North Galatia that we know of. We have no record of that at all. It is possible that he swung through there on a later missionary journey, but I've done some more research into that since we initially talked about oh, did you write it to the northern Galatians or the southern Galatians? And as I've learned more about what the infrastructure looked like up there and what the population density looked like up there in northern Galatia, I'm less and less convinced that there's any chance that the Letter of Galatians is to North Galatia. I think it's gotta be to Southern Galatia because we know that he was there. And those four big cities of southern Galatia, Derby, Iconium, Lystra, and Pisidian Antioch, remember those, we're going to talk about them a lot over the next few days. They're all also in the orbit of where we're going next in the next season of this podcast, which is Colossae. And even though they're quite a ways on a map west of the great city of Ephesus, which, you know, obviously got its own letter and features prominently in Paul's travels in the New Testament, the road between Ephesus and these four southern Galatian, very important cities where we know Paul was, that road was the equivalent of an interstate highway. It was called the Via Sebaste. Sebaste? I think I'm remembering that right. It has a name, is the point. And a lot of the roads in Rome, we know where they were, but they didn't have names. And the roads that went north out of southern Galatia through the two prominent cities of northern Galatia, Gordian and Ankara, or modern-day Ankara, Turkey, those were more administrative routes. They weren't popular commercial routes. They made their way up north to Byzantium. And you might be thinking, Byzantium? Well, that's Constantinople, which later became Istanbul. That's a big important city. Yeah, but it wasn't at this point. It hadn't blossomed just yet. So there was a lot of Roman activity maybe on these roads, but I don't think Paul would have gone there based on my research. I think the southern theory is way more likely. We know he was in those towns. I really think this is probably who he was writing to, which means that if you and I want to pull on the thread of what happened to the Galatians after they got this letter, pulling on the thread of the southern Galatian cities is going to be way more useful than poking around at the northern Galatian cities. But I'm still going to pull on the thread of the northern Galatian cities as well, just in case, because I found a couple interesting things about that that you're going to dig. Okay, so there's our setup on the whole Galatia thing. Paul went through southern Galatia. We know for sure on his first missionary journey, it didn't go real well, but you know how Paul is, he was stubborn, he dug in, even though he got beat up real bad. He still apparently left behind some semblance of a church. And probably around the end of that first missionary journey in 48, 49-ish BC, he gets wind that things aren't going well in Galatia, that these agitators have come in, and that prompts him to fire off this letter, this fiery letter, to the Galatians to get things straightened out. Well, if indeed Galatians was written to the southern half of the hourglass, and it was written between Paul's first and second missionary journey, then that means Paul went back through the towns that received the letter of Galatians, and it's in the Bible. So we're gonna get at least a few details that way. But in addition to going back, oh wait, where are we at? Oh my goodness. This is just what happened. This is how you get 300 episodes out of Galatians. This is it's I sit down at the thing, I intend to hurry. I think I was talking about stuff the whole time, right? We I mean, I don't it didn't seem like we were screwing around a whole lot, but I look over here at my timey thing, and we're already at 13 minutes. And while 13-minute Bible hour would still technically be TMBH in the most literal sense, I really want to try to get back toward that like 10 minutes of content. And that's that's the deal we make, and it's gonna be real fun. Okay, well, I'm just gonna pause there and we're gonna talk about what happened to Paul, and we're gonna talk about what happened when he went back to Galatia and see if we can find any clues there next time around. And then after that, we're gonna go up north and see if there are any clues up there in case maybe this was written to the northern part of the hourglass. And then after that, we're gonna come back south and we're gonna say, like, all right, what happened in southern Galatia? Surely we know something about Lystra, Derby, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch and how things might have worked out there. And we're gonna crack this nut and we're gonna come up with a reasonable evaluation when all is said and done of whether or not Galatians worked. All right, that was quite a bit. Plenty for now. Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour pod. Go wait! Hold on, Jeff. Okay, last note. I had to take a week last week and travel and make videos and stuff for the YouTube channel, which are gonna be really cool. You're gonna like those, by the way. So we stacked up a bunch of stickers and mailing stuff, but they're not out yet. So don't panic if you haven't seen them. This is your final call. Everybody who has signed up and is supporting in any way to make sure that we have the right address in Patreon or Planning Center or wherever you might support, or you can still jump in real quick at any level. Everybody who supports at any level is gonna get a Galatians sticker to celebrate this time that we've worked on this thing together as we come into the ultra-final home stretch of our season on Galatians. Okay, now that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon, and then we'll get to the city.