This is weird. This is the third time I've tried to start today's episode because the two previous times I tried to start it went way too long, and I got way into the weeds because I'm talking about something I'm real passionate about to get us to Bible things, and I'm just gonna have to do it quicker. Here's the deal. You got two kinds of videos over at YouTube. One of the kinds of videos is a traditional video. It's the shape of your normal TV screen. It's more wide than it is tall. It's 16 by 9 aspect ratio, like a movie theater screen. And all it engages your peripheral vision a little bit more. And these are these traditional videos, they're called longs, I guess. They can be as long as you want them to be. And this is where you get your in-depth educational videos, your interviews, things like you, you know, like YouTube is for. But then a few years back, TikTok, uh Chinese website, won out with the kids, and they're not kids anymore, now they're in their twenties, but they made vertical videos, like if you took your TV screen and turned it 90 degrees, so it's more tall than it is wide, or just like you would hold a phone in its traditional position. It's tall, not wide. And these short videos were just rapid fire, quick hitting videos. You can just swipe through them with your thumb if it gets boring in the first two seconds. You can get on to the next one. And the idea of TikTok, the business model, was to get you lost as a viewer in an endless scroll. And then you look up, like two or three hours have gone by. Whereas back in the day, YouTube was trying to be the library of Alexandria. This is the repository for all human knowledge. You can find it here on YouTube, and indeed it kind of is. It's an amazing website. Well, then YouTube integrated the shorts over on their website, and so now you have two types of videos on YouTube. You have longs and you have shorts. And they mean very different things. I make some shorts on my YouTube channel. Well, why? A couple reasons. One, because you sort of have to if you want your YouTube channel to work. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, shorts lead to people viewing the longs. Shorts are what you do to go out and meet new people. They get you outside your algorithmic bubble. And people watch a couple shorts that just happen to pop up in their feed, and they're like, oh, this guy's interesting. Maybe I'll go look at his actual videos, his long videos, if you will. Whereas longs, you can go all the way down the rabbit hole. You can spend as much time as you want really unpacking an idea and thinking things through, but it's a little trickier to get long videos in front of people. It's harder for people to go and find that. So they just mean different things. And with a short, you have to be so thoughtful about time. You can't mess around at all. You can't be doing introductions. You can't be leaving breaths in there. It's got to be go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And if you leave two extra seconds at the end that reduces the amount of, you know, the percentage of viewer retention of each video, that might be the death knell of that short. It was too much. You should have cut those two seconds. It's ruthless. But with a long, again, you have more time to work through the idea because it's not so urgent. Likewise, there's a big difference in the Bible between the books of Galatians and Romans, even though they cover a whole bunch of the same material. Galatians is more like a short. Romans is more like a long. Now, Galatians isn't truly a short. I mean, when you think of shorts, you generally think of something that's pretty much vacuous and disposable. Galatians isn't that. I mean, I hope not. This is the 187th episode you and I have done together on the thing. So clearly I think it has a lot more merit than a short. But comparatively, Galatians is urgent. There is a problem. There is a circumcision line forming up right now. Dudes have their trousers off. Other dudes in robes are unrolling their felt-wrapped surgical instruments. Something has to be done. Paul gets wind of this thing and he fires off a letter that at least as I read it, you might read it differently. There are smart people who've studied this stuff who see it a little different than I see it as well. But as I read it, I see a letter that is very informed by the circumstances. And I don't just mean that, you know, the Judaizers were there and that the Galatians were fallen for this. I mean that Paul doesn't have any time to get feedback. Wherever Paul was when he wrote this, some people think he was in Antioch. Some people think that he might have been in Ephesus. Wherever he was, he has a logistical disadvantage compared to his enemies here. They're on the ground. They're on site. They can move quicker than him. So I read a letter here where Paul is trying to outmaneuver every single thing that the bad guys might do and then preemptively counter move the counter move that they might make to Paul's counter move, because Paul doesn't have the ability to keep writing letters quick enough to beat them. He's got to try to do it all here with a sense of urgency and pleading. And so this letter hums. I mean, it's flying by. Huge ideas are happening very, very quickly. Whereas Romans has got a little more breathing room to it. Pacing wise, they both don't waste time, but in Romans, there's a little bit more of an opportunity to flesh out the idea, to drill down a little bit deeper on these principles. And that could be for one of two reasons. One, the stuff I just talked about, that Paul writing to the Galatian church is writing at a logistical disadvantage. There is urgency, there is a time crisis here, he needs to intervene right now. He can't sit for a week and write this letter. He needs to fire it off. Thank goodness for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Christians would say. He fires the thing off. Another reason that there might be a difference between the two, though, in terms of short versus long, is that Paul is writing Romans later in his ministry. We don't know for sure when Paul wrote Galatians. And maybe you remember this, maybe you don't, but all the way back at the beginning of this conversation, we talked about this hourglass-shaped province of Galatia, which runs right through the middle of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. And some people look at the internal evidence, the external evidence, and they're like, ah, okay, we're writing to the ethnic Gaulation people, that is, resettled Gauls from France who had been there with their kind of own unique culture and linguistic twist on the Greek that was spoken in the area, and they lived in the northern ethnic region of Gaul Asia. Other people say, no, this is written more directly to the big cities in the Roman province of Galatia. The people down there wouldn't have been Gallic in terms of descent. The Gallic culture wouldn't have been as pronounced there. But it's called Galatia because the Romans called it Galatia. Well, depending on which one of those two places you think it was written to, Galatians was either written in the early fifties or a little bit further down the road in the mid-fifties. Doesn't sound like that big a difference. But it's kind of a big difference because if Galatians was written in the mid-50s, that means it was written only a couple of years before Romans was written. So Romans was written then maybe either seven-ish, eight-ish years after, probably about seven years after the book we're working on, Galatians was written, or it was written a couple of years afterwards. Either way, significant time has passed. I mean, these are very important years we're talking about here, between 50 and 57-ish AD. Now we know when Paul wrote Romans, because the the timeline works itself out. We know that Paul had wanted to go and visit the Roman church for a long time. He didn't found the Roman church. Peter didn't found the Roman church. That's a common misconception, but biblically it's it's clear Peter isn't the founder of that church. A church was probably founded by people who were there at the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. Maybe some of the early influence of Paul coupled with some of the disciples of John the Baptist, like Apollos. Apollos is one of the disciples of John the Baptist. He ended up in Alexandria in North Egypt. Obviously, Paul went more on the northern arc of the Eastern Mediterranean and Greece and Turkey, Asia Minor, things like that. But eventually those two guys kind of took the same approach and ended up in some of the same places. They both wielded influence in particularly Corinth, and both Paul and Apollos had people they influenced there who went out and founded churches and led in other places. So Apollos kind of represents the John the Baptist family tree and how it kind of went out on its own from John the Baptist's revivals and then reconnected with the Jesus stuff through Paul. And obviously, you know the part of the family tree that Paul represents, he was called by Jesus himself, and the apostles who were called by Jesus himself affirmed that. So those two branches seem like they might really deviate, but they end up being kind of one and the same and growing and fusing together. And so out of both Paul and Apollos in the day of Pentecost, I mean, there's more than just the churches Paul is planting, is the point. And so Rome has probably been there for quite a while as a church by the time the book of Romans is written. Paul says he's been wanting to go visit the church in Rome. And it looks like Rome would have been one of the first, or maybe the ultimate destination stop on Paul's fourth missionary journey. But at the end of Paul's third missionary journey, he stops off in Ephesus. He's traveled around, and there's been a big famine in and around Judea Jerusalem. And so Paul's collected all of this money from these Gentile churches to take back to the Jewish Christians. It's a huge deal. So Paul really wanted to go west while he's dragging around this big bucket of money, but he adds it up and he's like, hey, I've got all this money with me. But also to make Christianity move forward the way it needs to, we just have to. Right now, we have to go bless the Jewish Christians, the ones who did have the upper hand, with a gift from the Gentile Christians, the ones who did have the lower hand. This could put an end to so much of the feuding and tension that the book of Galatians deals with. So Paul, even though people are begging him, don't go back to Jerusalem, they're gonna kill you, dude. Even though a prophet who had been proven to be reliable is begging Paul at the end of the third missionary journey, don't do it. Paul's like, I gotta go. I want to go to Rome. I want to go west, but I have to go to Jerusalem first. I gotta go face my old schoolmates. I gotta face the people who've been saying horrible things about me. I have to deliver this collection from the largely Gentile churches and use it to prop up the largely, well, not largely, the Jewish churches, the original churches that are born out of the traditional Jewish homeland. And so he bravely, resolutely sets his face toward Jerusalem, and he goes and he does that. And of course, rather than then being sent again out on a fourth missionary journey, he instead gets arrested, then he gets transferred up to Caesarea, and then Paul talks to a couple of governors up there in Caesarea on the coast, Felix and Festus, and then he gets taken by you know imperial retinue, he gets escorted to Rome, where he is to face trial there, and that's where the book of Acts ends off. We can piece together more after that, and we'll get to that later. But when Paul is kind of at that crossroads, that decision point, ah, do I go west to Rome with this whole bunch of money on hand, or do I go east to do what I think I need to do? He was in Corinth. And so he writes Romans from Corinth, and then shortly after that he makes his way back to Jerusalem and faces his arrest. And hey, what do you know? Eventually he ends up right where the letter was sent. He just ends up there as a prisoner. So the relationship between Galatians and Romans, which we're going to read a huge chunk from tomorrow, is this. Galatians reads a little more like a short because it is more urgent than Romans, which reads a little bit more like a long because it has time to unpack it. Well, Galatians was written to address a specific problem, but it was also earlier on than Romans. And now, Paul, in addition to maybe not having quite the same degree of urgency in writing to Rome from Corinth, he's also had more time to observe the patterns, and there's one more time for more questions to develop that Gentile Christians have as it relates to the law and Judaism and the Bible and how it all works. And so by the time he writes Romans, he's sort of ready to write this master treatise letter explaining the whole thing and consolidating a whole bunch of stuff that he's no doubt spoken to a whole bunch of times. As a result, there are all sorts of themes in Romans that are handled in long form where they are alluded to in shorter form in Galatians. And from time to time, it's been helpful for us to run over there to Romans and hear a little bit later on in the game version of Paul speaking to the same kind of stuff. We've dipped into Romans a whole bunch. I haven't taken an episode to talk about how these two fit together. Now we have it makes sense because there's going to be a lot of Romaning next time around. All right, that's plenty for the moment. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.