Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Lemmer Podcast, and the first tedious joke that I can remember from childhood was people saying things like, If you love it so much, why don't you marry it? Uh you understand the structure of this joke, right? Fortunately, it's mostly died out. But you say something like, Pizza, awesome, I love pizza. If you love it so much, why don't you marry it? Oh I walked right into that. I can't believe I fell for that. But it's not uh funny, and it never ever was. But I think I understand the structure of the ineffective joke, and it was just real simply like if if you're really into the a thing, then why don't you go the whole way? And that's that's what we're getting here in Galatians. Paul is kind of hitting them with a more inspired version of the same structure of the joke. Hey, agitators who are trying to get Gentile adult Christian men to be circumcised to make them loyal to your understanding of the law and the Jewish traditions and bring them back into a state of spiritual slavery. Hey, Gentile agitators here in the book of Galatians, if you like circumcision so much, why don't you marry it? Why don't you go the whole way and emasculate yourselves? I mean, that's literally the verse we're looking at. It's Galatians 5.12. I think it gets treated a little bit like a throwaway verse sometimes when people preach sermons and write books about this because it's an embarrassing topic. I don't think it's a throwaway verse. I think it's the killing stroke of this entire line of argumentation from Paul. But he just says, as for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves. Why don't you marry it? So yesterday and today we're working through as many of the layers of meaning that we can come up with here that are baked into this one very clever turn of a phrase, this very clever dare or challenge from the Apostle Paul. And yesterday, we were talking about, okay, you know, pretty clearly this is just it's a jab, but it's an inspired jab. Why is it inspired? Because Paul is using absurdity to point out the absurdity of their position. They're saying that circumcision somehow pleases God and binds you to the law and earns his favor. And so Paul implicitly is raising the question, Well, how much circumcision? Why wouldn't you do more then? Do you have anything left to give? Well, then why wouldn't you give it? If some is good, wouldn't more be better? But also, I think, like I was saying a minute ago, that he's just simply making the point that like it's always circumcision with you people. You can't get your brain past this thing. You look at all of the beauty and wonders and glory of the work of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the arrival of the kingdom, the knowledge that the future is all going to work out, the beauty of his church, the hope that comes with downtrodden people, having their burdens lifted off of them now that we know that atonement is possible, that God can break the laws of time and space, God who is responsible for all judgment and guilt and how all of that stuff plays out, that in Christ He has stepped in and made true atonement for sin, things we can't go back and fix, that true atonement is available, it's possible, it's all so good, thinks the Apostle Paul writes the Apostle Paul. But you guys, you see this whole beautiful, glorious thing, and all you can think about is Yeah, but how how much skin chopped off your penis? We should do more of that. What? Come on. You know what? If you guys like circumcision so much, and it's always about circumcision, quit chipping away and go all in. It's a very bold statement. It's a very effective statement, but I think there's yet another layer of meaning that a first century audience would have heard here that maybe you and I don't. Okay, uncomfortable subject matter. There is stuff in the Bible, particularly in the writings of the Apostle Paul, that deal with questions of homosexuality, sexual ideas, and behaviors outside the Christian historic norm of just your basic standard issue marriage, which is the only kind of marriage that is spoken to or about in the Bible. There is stuff in the Bible that addresses that. Obviously, those are pretty hot button issues. And you know what? When we come upon a passage that deals with that sort of thing, we're just going to talk about that sort of thing. This isn't a passage about that. Questions about sexual identity, especially questions that dominated the 20 teens in terms of internet discourse and all of that kind of stuff. That's not in view here. And it would be a weird shoehorning to try to look at this passage and be like, oh, okay, well, that you know, we're getting into stuff about like transgenderism or things like it's just not, it's not what's being spoken to. That's not the question in view here. But there was a practice in the ancient world that I do think is in view here, and it's subtle, and that is the practice of taking promising, talented young men who were from certain types of families with certain types of bloodlines, and choosing them from birth to be eunuchs. That is, castrated boys who would grow up to be castrated men, who would be palace servants and advisors, who would have no ambitions to promote their own family lineage because they couldn't have kids. That's a huge part of the reason that all these different cultures and empires around the ancient world would make eunuchs. Sometimes they would take these eunuchs as slaves from conquered people groups. Sometimes empires would have a whole sort of eunuch pipeline where they would have previous generations of eunuchs who had served in the life of the court and all of the intrigues that go on there as advisors to the throne who would select promising young men and subject them to this treatment and then nurture them in the art of statecraft and intrigue and court life and all of that stuff. It seems very foreign to us, but ancient empires thought it was a very worthwhile thing to have a whole class of people, admittedly, a very, very small minority class of people who did not get to make this choice for themselves, but they thought it was worthwhile to have a whole class of people who were gifted in these arts and who were around the throne and who would not have family interests of their own to pursue or to elevate. This is portrayed in fiction as well. I mean, the role of eunuchs in stuff like Game of Thrones is very, very pronounced and really pretty much hits the nail on the head in terms of what the ancients were thinking by having this practice. Well, in the stuff we looked at in uh the last few seasons where we dealt with Persia, the eunuch thing was a really big question and eunuchs feature prominently in the story of Esther. It's kind of a surprise, a twist, a turn that the eunuchs take a liking to Esther and help prop her up, and that the eunuchs end up siding with what is right and against the evil Haman in that story. That would have been a subversion of the expectations of a fifth century BC Jewish Persian audience, so they would have expected the eunuchs to be scoundrels, but in Esther, overwhelmingly, they're not scoundrels. However, just a few years after the events portrayed in the court of King Xerxes, the Achaemenid Persian king who Esther was married to, just a few years after the Book of Esther closes, Xerxes dies because of court intrigue and basically an assassination plot involving eunuchs. The reputation of eunuchs in the ancient world was that they were smiling, cloying, say nice things, present themselves as physically unthreatening in any way, but deep down they're always working an angle. Deep down, you don't trust a eunuch. I cannot state strongly enough. This is in no way a corollary to modern conversations about homosexuality, gender identity, transgenderism, many of it. This is a completely different equation. Eunuchs were a slippery political class not to be trusted, whose loyalties would change with the political breezes of the day, and who were the most gifted at playing on your emotions and manipulating people to get them to do things that weren't in their best interest, but that might advance whatever agenda a eunuch was playing for in a court. So I would posit to you that when Paul says, I wish these agitators would go the whole way and emasculate themselves, that maybe part of what he's intoning is that they're behaving like eunuchs. They're scheming, they're manipulative, they're dishonest, and their genital situation would more closely match their behavior if they cut the whole thing off. Remember, in this very same phrase, he's calling them agitators, as for those agitators. Now, look, is it possible that this is a stretch and I am taking a whole bunch of lore from the ancient world and inflicting it on this text? You know, I wish it weren't. It would be way more fun if I could just say for sure that's what Paul is doing, and I am the knower of things, but I'm not the knower of things. And it is entirely possible that I could be wrong in terms of Paul's intent here, but I guarantee you that someone along the way, very close to the time that it was written or since then, has looked at this and gotten the same vibe from it that I just got. It isn't that big of a stretch. Seems very foreign now, seems like this wouldn't be a subtext that would be there, but in the ancient world, it's hard for me to imagine that that Paul wouldn't have known what this imagery would conjure in the mind of his readers. It's hard for me to imagine that Paul wouldn't have thought about how effective this remark would be in likening these agitators to the kind of ingratiating, cloying, dishonest eunuchs that all of these people had heard stories about and knew to watch out for because they were the epitome of tricksters. Sometimes at the end of episodes where sensitive things come up, I like to say the following Grace and peace to everybody. I'm not trying to pick a fight with anybody. I know that life is hard and weird and tricky and weird things happen. And when you politicize every single issue ever as we are in the habit of doing, it becomes harder to have civilized conversations like adults about things. But grace and peace to all of you. I wish every one of you the absolute best. That said, aha! We are done with the as for those agitators. I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves part. Now I have to decide between now and next time around whether we're gonna go and do a little dip into Romans for a couple of days, because there's some stuff there that I think clarifies some things we're looking at here. Or if we just move forward into this really fun, constructive proposal part about life by the spirit that comes up next. I don't know. I'll figure it out. I'll get you back. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.