Be safe is not my favorite greeting when you part ways with people. It wasn't a greeting at all when I was a kid. Be safe. Now it's kind of a greeting. I like it. I'm not gonna get mad at people. Like I mean, I like the sentiment of it that people are trying to be nice. Like, why would you be mad about anybody trying to be nice? If somebody says, Merry Christmas and you're not into Christmas, like, come on. They were trying to be nice. If somebody tries to convert me to their religion or whatever, which happens to me all the time because of what I do on the internet, everybody's always like, you should become of this because it's the one true thing. You know, on the one hand, it can be kind of annoying because most people who say it are a little brash about it. But on the other hand, hey, thanks for thinking your thing is true and real and legit and not wanting me to be an outsider to that. So I'm not trying to gripe too much about the be safe thing as a greeting, but I do think it's indicative of where our hierarchy of values, of good is at at this moment in society. And it hasn't always been that way. Be safe is a greeting that has only existed very recently because it's a path to walk that has only been an option very recently. The world's tough. Things happen. And maybe we imagine that we can control things a little better than we actually do. I'll tell you who didn't imagine that. The early Christians. They knew it was going to be tough and they leaned into the tough stuff. One of the tough things that they were told to do was not just to save their own skin, but they were supposed to look out for each other and not just look out for each other as a priority, but they were supposed to look out for their enemies, people even outside the boundaries of Christian faith. Galatians 6.10 says, Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of faith. We've been thinking about that for quite a while. To help us think of that, I've brought on the this book, The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark, and we've been looking at a specific set of examples for how Christians in the first few centuries of Christianity lived out this command, this instruction from Paul in Galatians 6 that I just read here, how they lived that out in the face of tremendous pressure, in the face of plague, and not lightweight plague, like serious plague. And what we find as we dig through this is that the people, the the pagan assumptions about what to do when plague comes around were really selfish. Abandon your own, bail, do whatever you have to do, survival, safety, be safe, is the only objective. It was that way during the Persian era age, the Persian versus Greek era of Athens. We got an account from Thucydides, the ancient historian, about how people behaved back then. It was that way in Rome during the time of Marcus Aurelius in the 160s. It was that way in the 250s when it happened again. It was that way in the 360s when it happened again. And even Julian the apostate, who hates Christianity, had to admit the Christians, as they have opportunity, do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. He didn't say exactly that, but basically what Julian said was Galatians 6.10. Wow. Rodney Stark even points out that the great and famous physician of the era of Marcus Aurelius, as soon as the plague came around during that time, Galen fled the city, set up shop in a villa, boarded up all of the gates and entrances, and rode it out in the countryside so he would not die. That's somebody who I don't know, I don't know if Romans took the Hippocratic oath, but I mean that's somebody who theoretically is sworn to serve and care for people in plight, and who is showing up instead of this great genius of ancient medicine? That's a bunch of uneducated Christians who were just simply living out the instructions of Christ, the instructions of Paul to go and serve other people. But how effective would what the Christians actually did, how effective would that be? Because remember, at the heart, if you've been with me for the last few days, at the heart of Stark's argument is that how Christians responded to these series of epidemics, these calamities, is a big part of why Christianity won out as being viewed as the truest, realist thing, and how it effectively defeated and crushed ancient pagan religion, which couldn't handle pressure, apparently. So he runs this list of hypothetical numbers, and uh, it gets pretty intricate. I'm not going to take you through all of this. Um, let me just read this paragraph. Here we go. Some hypothetical numbers may help us grasp just how much impact Christian nursing could have had on mortality rates in these epidemics. Now, Stark acknowledges that depending on what these diseases actually were, and medical historians have different theories, whatever they were, they're the big, the first big widespread outbreaks of certain diseases that now we vaccinate for and we can kind of contain. But back then, basically no immunity existed, and all the Roman roads that led to Rome also spread new diseases, and as a result, they got hit really hard with these things. So even if it was like smallpox or something, which we know is bad, it would have been really bad back then. Stark acknowledges that they didn't necessarily have the medical technology or knowledge needed to know exactly how to treat all these things, but he breaks down some basic agreed-upon figures for how much just simple nursing would accomplish. And he quotes another scholar who touts the values of just simple food and water and care, even if people didn't have medical knowledge, says, when all normal services break down, quite elementary nursing will greatly reduce mortality. Simple provision of food and water, for instance, will allow persons who are temporarily too weak to cope for themselves to recover instead of perishing miserably. I mean, that sounds like common sense to me that some sort of nursing is going to give you a better chance of getting through it when you're fighting for your life during a pandemic than being left alone out in the streets, like what happened in Athens and what happened around the Roman Empire. So hypothetically, let's begin with an imaginary city having 10,000 inhabitants in 160 AD, just before the first epidemic. In chapter one, Stark says that he calculated that Christians made up about 0.4% of the empire's population at that time. So let's suppose that 40 of that hypothetical city's inhabitants are Christians, while 9,960 are pagans, a ratio of one Christian to every 249 pagans. Now let's assume an epidemic generating mortality rates of 30%. That's that's real bad, over its course, and that 30% is what you get if there's no nursing. Nobody shows any care. Okay, he goes on. Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more. Dang. Okay, so that's a lot. So let's assume a Christian mortality rate of 10%, because the Christians would stick around and provide care for each other. So going with modern notions of how much nursing would help, they were going to reduce the Christian mortality rate to 10%. Imposing these mortality rates in 36 Christian and 6,972 pagan survivors in 170 after the epidemic. Now the ratio of Christians to pagans is 1 to 197. So that's a big shift. That's his point. That if Christians provided nursing and care for the sick and pagans didn't, that alone would change the ratio from one Christian to 249 non-Christians or pagans to one Christian to 197. I just think that's fascinating. Very cold, very 10,000 foot view, but just a fascinating way to think about it. And he he put numbers to all of this. I'm running out of time. I'm not going to be able to walk you through all of this. You can get the book. Let me give you a little more. So then he goes through and he calculates what the conversion rate. He's got a pretty decent formula for how to calculate that, what the conversion rate would be over a given time. And over a decade, over two decades, that ratio gets much tighter between Christians and pagans. And so then he projects that out over the course of all of these plagues that happen. He takes it out a hundred years, and Christians continuing to provide this care, doing good to everyone, but particularly to those who belong to the family of believers. And that ratio would go from one Christian to 249 pagans in this hypothetical town to one Christian to eight pagans in this hypothetical town. Yeah, projected out over a very long time, it changes things dramatically. I hate to do this. I really wanted this conversation to be our last one, working this through, but I I love this material and I do not want to rush to land the plane on this. I have some stuff that I want to say that's important to me, that's important to, I think, kind of put a cap on this whole Galatians thing. So we're gonna do one more day. I'm just gonna pause right here in the middle of me talking. I'm gonna finish the recording right now, and we'll pick up right where we left off tomorrow and finish this little rabbit trail arc that we're doing here at the end of Galatians. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.