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Okay, this is wild. You remember yesterday when we were talking about the acts of the sinful nature, the acts of the flesh in Galatians 5, 19 through 21, and a couple of things that are on the list of things that you, I mean, this wouldn't be good. You wouldn't want to do these things. A couple of the things that were on that list of not good things were idolatry and witchcraft. Remember yesterday when we talked about ancient witchcraft and how it was a pretty big deal that people took seriously, and there was a lot of money in it, and people made jewelry out of their witchcraft spells and incantations and binding spells and betting spells. And it made both a cool fashion statement, but it also, as you wore it around, contained a little curse against your social rival. Remember that? Because it was yesterday? Well, get this. While you were listening to that episode yesterday, I was actually traveling with my family because we went on a big giant vacation the last couple of weeks. I used to record this podcast every day, even if I was traveling. I had a little pocket microphone. I'd take it with me. I thought it was really charming that I'm just recording this wherever I am. But then I went back and listened to how it sounded, and it was crap. So I decided that I would just record in advance when I'm going to be traveling now. And then sometimes I tell you, sometimes I don't. The episodes just come out and whatnot. Well, the last couple weeks I've been in Ireland with my family, which was awesome. I've never been there before. That was probably the most familiar place I've ever visited. I've been to a lot of countries for a bunch of different, pretty cool, interesting reasons, most of which has to do with church in one way or another. But Ireland, of anywhere I've ever been outside the country, that felt the most like me and what I'm used to. Maybe it's in my blood or something. I don't know. I was I loved it there. I thought it was great. And before I tell you what happened there and how it relates to the whole witchcraft thing, I gotta do the Midwestern disclaimer because that is definitely in my blood. And this is the thing where people from the American Midwest tell you about something that they did or purchased that could cause you to think, hmm, well, that's a little spendy. But then to dampen that, the Midwesterner has to say that they used a coupon. So I need to tell you about my coupon. The coupon I used was points from our credit card. We save these up, and every couple of years we get enough points to do basically a whole giant, crazy family extravaganza trip for nothing. Like just for the cost of food that we were gonna do anyway. Flight, car rental, hotels, admission to stuff. We had that all set up on the credit card because Camilla's a genius with that kind of stuff. And so we did our big trip, and it was amazing. I made a ton of videos there. Those are gonna be coming out over on the YouTube channel, maybe starting even like this week. I'm just gonna start putting them out. They were really fun. A lot of cool Christian pilgrimage stuff. One of the things that I did over there while I was Christian pilgrimaging to cool different Christian pilgrimage sites is I went to the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin. I'm pretty sure you say Chester Beattie. It looks like Beatty. Maybe people say Beatty. I don't know. I've never heard anybody say it out loud. Isn't that weird when you do that? When you read things in books and so forth, but not listen to audiobooks, and so you see a name or a word that just comes across a page in front of you for your whole life, but then all of a sudden you go to say it in front of someone, or in this case, well, a lot of someone's, and you realize, dang, I don't actually know how to say that for sure. Seems like half the time that's Beattie, and half the time that's Beatty. I'm gonna go with BD. Whatever the case, it's in Dublin, and we went to this museum. It's not a real huge museum or anything, it's more of a collection of documents from three threads of human history. One is Islam, one is the East, largely China, and one is Christianity, mostly the Western version of Christianity. But I mean, I don't know, I don't know that I even say that. It's just Christianity is the thread, right? So on the top floor, I had heard that some of the oldest manuscripts of the Bible that are intact and readable, even with rudimentary ancient Greek skills, which I have that you can go there and you can see the best stuff from the famous Chester Beattie or Beatty, Beattie collection right there. And so sure enough, I went upstairs there and they had, let me see, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, maybe ten, I guess it would be ten of these ancient biblical manuscripts, all in Greek, just sitting there. You weren't allowed to like touch them or lick them or pick them up or anything, but you could get right on top of them. They're all hermetically sealed, and they have been, I guess, since the founder of the museum and the museum itself came into custody of these like a hundred years ago, ninety years ago, something like that. So I got a great look at a super old chunk of the book of Daniel while I was there, and that was fascinating. Dang it, I want to get you to the witchcraft stuff because it's a really cool payoff, but I gotta tell you about the Daniel thing first. Daniel, you might recall, is the Old Testament book that has the most amount of Aramaic in it because Daniel happened around the time of Persia. Aramaic was the international trade language of the Persians, as you'll recall. And so there are these big chunks of Aramaic in the middle of Daniel that I remember from seminary, our professors were like, ah, this part's pretty hard. I'm just gonna level with you. Our confidence level on translating, say, you know, that we'll just go with what we have here, Galatians into English from the source material we have is, I don't know, it's like a hundred. Like we're really, really sure that what we're reading there is a very accurate English reflection of what was written down in the first place and what we get from all of our source documents, all of our manuscript evidence from you know, the super distant past. But Daniel has a couple parts that are is just hard because it's Persian-era Aramaic. It's tough. We don't have a lot to compare it to. It's dealing in pretty obscure, difficult to understand imagery anyway. So yeah, I mean, just straight up, my professors were very honest. These are professors, by the way, who are super enthusiastic about the authority and reliability of the Bible, but also super honest. And they was like, look, this some of the stuff in Daniel 7 here. Yeah, even for the experts, it's real hard. What was crazy is when I went and looked at the manuscript from Daniel, sure enough, it turns out that the manuscript they had was from Daniel 7, which is exactly the one I would want to see, because there's a break between the Aramaic and the English right there at the end of Daniel 7. And so I wanted to see what they would do with it. Sure enough, there's a break even right there in this ancient manuscript. Well, the manuscript is from the 200s AD. Wild, right? That's the oldest piece of Old Testament I've ever seen. Oh no, no, no, no, that's not true. Because I've seen some Dead Sea Scrolls. Okay, this is one of the oldest pieces of Old Testament that I've ever seen. Dead Sea Scrolls mostly predate Jesus, so you know, I guess those would be older. But the point is, it's very, very, very old, super old Old Testament, especially. The gap was right there. The division on the page in front of me that I could bumble through like an idiot who isn't very good at this language at all, the gap was right where it ought to be. Well, this Daniel manuscript that I was looking at at the Chester Beatty Library and Museum in downtown Dublin, Ireland, it was obviously derived from the Septuagint. And it's okay if you don't remember all of these terms. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that predates Jesus by a couple hundred years. Most of the references and the gospels and so forth are to the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It was a very widely used version of the Old Testament. It was very well regarded. The Jews believed that God supernaturally oversaw and managed the translation from Hebrew into ancient Greek when that all happened in Alexandria, Egypt, during the reign of the Ptolemies. That was the family descended from one of the generals who helped out Alexander the Great and then took over after him. So as I'm looking at this 200s AD fragment of Daniel chapter 7, I'm seeing this gap where the Aramaic runs out, where the Hebrew picked back up, and the gap was still there, which I think is a holdover from the Septuagint. So it was just cool. It was like this whole chain of custody, just with this one little space in the manuscript that I could see this whole chain of custody in the story, all the way from me through the history of the church, including the complex history of the church in Ireland, all the way back to the history of the early church and manuscript copying, all the way back to the Septuagint and Jews in Egypt, all the way back to Alexander the Great, and through him all the way back to Persia, and through him all the way back to Nebuchadnezzar, and through him all the way back to the southern kingdom of Judah in its last days. Just amazing. There was a copy there of Revelation 12, which was interesting as well. I had trouble making things out from that. Some stuff from Hebrews, two pages of Hebrews, a bit from 1 Corinthians, and a bit from 2nd Corinthians. This is crazy. It's written by the same guy as the book that you and I are looking at in Galatians. I mean, Paul did those two letters. I mean, I I'm staring at that. I'm just going, how many copies is this removed from the one that Paul wrote with his hand, or that whoever was sitting there helping him write it wrote with his hand? Five? Seven? Ten? Not that many. This is really fun to feel that proximity. So the Bible manuscripts there were everything. They had a chunk of Luke, Mark, and all of it's pretty legible too. It's just incredible. But next to all of that, if you kind of go around the corner, there was uh an old Ethiopian, I guess, Cushite magical incantation scroll for stuff like what we were talking about yesterday here. So there's another point of connection for us. And that was pretty fascinating to look at. It's later than the era of Galatians. So, you know, it's a little bit better preserved and a little bit fancier. I don't know what language it was. I don't think it was Coptic, but I don't know, maybe something derivative of that. I just couldn't tell. It was very, very tiny writing. And there were elaborate paintings on there, like maybe a person or a goblin monster or something. And there were two scrolls that I saw that were these kind of binding scrolls, like we were talking about yesterday when we were looking at Galatians 5 and the list of very bad things. And one of them was very thick and very elaborate. It looked like that would you wouldn't want that one because it had a lot more words on it. So I would assume that it would, if it worked, it would do a lot more bad things to you. So I didn't like that one. And it's the one that had the monster face painting on it. Then there was another skinny one, and I could kind of picture how you could roll that thing up, and it looked like it had been rolled up very tight. You could roll that thing up tight enough that you could wear it as a piece of jewelry, like a bracelet. You could fit it inside of a little cylinder or something. And I don't know how people use it. Like you pull the thing out and unroll it, because I mean unrolled, these scrolls were probably a meter, two and a half feet, three feet, something like that. You'd have to stretch your arms quite a ways apart. And if your vision wasn't good, you'd have trouble reading all of that, just getting it into focal length, let alone how small the letters were. But I don't know if something goes really wrong at a party and you have one of those Chester beady Ethiopian wizardry binding curse spells or something, you got it in your jewelry. Do you just like take it out right there at the party and unroll the whole thing and just start reading it at your rival or something? Like, what if they go to leave? Do you like you is it like you called it? You have dibs or something? You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't leave during a binding spell. Once I start it, you have to listen to the whole thing. You can do your own binding spell when I'm done, but I called it and you can't leave. You can't triple stamp a double stamp on a binding spell. I don't know, because it would take a really long time to reel all of that off in a heated moment. You want to want to try it on like a battlefield or anything. But it was really fascinating to just see those in person. I've seen lots of pictures and stuff of these kind of ancient amulets and wizarding spells and whatnot that Paul was speaking against in the New Testament, including Galatians chapter five. But it was pretty cool to see them, you know, not just pictures and whatnot, but to actually see it in the flesh. And it was even cooler that as I was seeing it, the episode of this podcast, it was dealing with exactly that thing was coming out. So all of that was pretty cool. We didn't make any progress on the Bible today at all. I'm embarrassed. I'm so sorry. But you know, I guess we have time, and we'll make progress tomorrow and we'll get out of the list of very bad things section that we've been in for a while. This is a nice detour from all of that. No, I'm not going to apologize for this episode. I thought it was pretty cool. I thought you'd like the Daniel thing. And I like talking about stuff like this because it's a reminder that even though this all seems very long ago and like we are very separated from it, we're not. We're super connected to all of this. And it really actually didn't happen all that long ago. And the wiring of the people that made them do all the stuff on this list is still the wiring we have. It's not like we've evolved as a species into some new and unrecognizable thing. I mean, as I read the Bible and I read ancient stuff, human nature looks real similar to what I'm reading from the ancient world. So I really enjoyed seeing all of that and sharing it with you, also as a reminder of just how connected we still are to all of this stuff. All right, we'll actually finish up the list of very bad things next time around. Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.