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Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We're in the middle of a two-part circumcision episode. So, same morning as last time. If you got kids or whatever, you might want to listen to this one first because it's about circumcision. I don't know if you want to talk to your kids about circumcision that much yet. So maybe just listen to it. We'll see where we go. All right, let's pick up where we left off. Well, after the Persian era, I mean that ended with Alexander the Great's conquest in the 330s BC, about a hundred years after the Bible leaves off. Alexander then, as you know, quickly dies, and a bunch of his generals divide up the whole remaining Alexandrian Empire, and they follow the impulse of their leader, their hero, Alexander. What was Alexander trying to do? He was trying to Greekify the whole world. He wasn't even really truly Greek himself. He was Macedonian, basically Greek. And so he tried to make everything Greek. We call the pre-Alexandrian Greek world the Hellenic world or Hellenic culture, that is legitimately Greek. Think Hellen of Troy. And then we call the Alexandrian age the Hellenistic world, meaning something like Greek-ish. Well, in this Hellenistic world, the Jews had a real tough time with the circumcision thing. They had an identity crisis tied to, of all things, circumcision, their one physical mark that differentiated them from other people. At first, the relationship between the Jews and the Macedonians was pretty good. Alexander the Great was welcomed as a conqueror into Jerusalem bloodlessly. The high priest at the time took out the book of Daniel and was like, hey, look at these prophecies. I think these are about you. And honestly, I'm I think the high priest might have been accurately interpreting that. You go toward the end of Daniel, it kind of looks like it's talking about Alexander the Great showing up. Well, Alexander found that to be very compelling. He seemed to rather like the Jews. He went on his march of conquest for a long time after that. And initially the Ptolemids, Ptolemy and his descendants, Cleopatra eventually was from this family in Egypt. At first they had custody of Jerusalem, and it doesn't seem like there was a lot of friction there. It seemed like kind of the vibe of the Jews' relationship with the Persian Empire carried forward during this time through most of the 200s. But eventually there was a little custody change, and the people from Syria, descended from General Seleucus, the Seleucid Empire, they came to control Jerusalem, and that didn't go so well. They really wanted to push the Greek thing, the Hellenistic thing, and a couple of their kings, one in particular a guy named Antiochus Epiphanes, what, the fourth? Is that right? Am I making stuff up now? It's weird. You study these things for your whole life, and every now and then you just go blank. Like, was it the fourth? I think it was the fourth. I don't know it's Antiochus Epiphanes is one of them. He really got sick and tired of the Jews not participating with Greek culture. Well, what does Greek culture include? Well, public baths, also the Olympic Games and wrestling. And we have ancient accounts of these sports which happened in the nude occurring, and if Jews wanted to participate, it was kind of weird. Like it was socially awkward. Like how come how come that that doesn't look right? What are you doing over there? And so somehow, and I maybe there's you know people who've done research on this and actually understand what happened. Somehow, some sort of Again, I hope you I hope you cut the kids loose for this conversation. I'm doing my best here. I'm not doing my my very best. I'm doing like 80% my best here. Somehow, some ancient surgery got developed to take remaining skin in an adult who had been circumcised as a child and train it back into looking uncircumcised. Are we having fun yet? Because I'm having a blast. This is one of the best days of my life, actually. This is the conversation I've yearned to have with you since I launched this podcast in October of 2019. I'm so excited that we're finally here and that we can have this together. How did that work? I don't know. I don't have the foggiest, and I haven't mustered the heart to try to Google it even in a safe search mode. So somehow they did it, and it was compelling enough that it became fashionable in the second century BC to try to Greekify your nether regions if you were a circumcised Jew. And it was part of this larger question of what will be our fate? Which way, Jewish man? Will we go and follow the trendy, fashionable, easy ways of the Greeks and abandon our unique identity and abandon the covenant we have with God to make a new covenant with Antiochus Epiphanes and the Hellenizers? Or are we going to dig in and hold fast and pick up on the legacy of stalwarts like Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah, the last great heroes of the Old Testament, Esther, Mordecai, who stood their ground culturally and refused to embrace the culture of their neighbors. Remember, this is the problem all the way through the Old Testament. Let's try to be sympathetic to the Judaizers here. All the way through the Old Testament, what did the Jews get wrong? They went and engaged in the horrible pagan practices of their neighbors. They worshipped false gods. They sacrificed their own children to Molech, you know, to try to fit in and just be cool. Like you I mean, you don't want to be weird, don't want to be off-putting, like we're you know, we're trying to have good relations here with people. At some point you have to be practical, you have to be realistic. You gotta do certain things to keep the peace in the region, like sacrifice some of your babies on a piping hot altar. That's how screwed up the thinking got. So in the second century, right before the Maccabean Revolt, which led to a hundred-year Jewish free state that was terminated in the 60s B.C. when Pompey Magnus showed up, the revolt that made that happen, the Maccabean revolt, was over this kind of stuff, these identity questions. Blood was shed to throw off their Syrian oppressors, to throw off their Greek oppressors ruling from Syria. It was hard-earned to regain this Jewish identity. And now they're losing it again, not with a Greek occupation, but with a Roman occupation. And now some of these Jewish people are like, and now we're losing it again because of Christianity and people like Paul who are going around saying this just doesn't matter anymore. So on the one hand, I think you've got to be a little bit empathetic to these guys. They are trying to pick up where Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther and Mordecai and Zerubbabel all left off, the last great heroes of the faith. They're trying to carry this thing forward. They're trying to see the identity as a people, the people of God, not collapse under the pressure of the Greeks and then the Greek-ish and the Persians and now the Romans, they're trying to fight back and take a stand here and be like, we don't want to see this beautiful, important, unique aspect of who we are go away. We think that this stuff that Paul is talking about is a hollowed-out version of the covenant, and he's throwing the baby out with the bath water, and he's going too far, and so we're here to straighten things out. On the one hand, I get it. They're trying to learn the lessons from the Old Testament, they're learning the wrong ones, they're missing on this, but you can kind of see it. On the other hand, what Jesus said was really clear. The Old Testament points toward Jesus. Paul is winning this argument here, he's right. What is cutting that skin gonna do? Really, make a theological case for what cutting that skin is going to do. Paul is right when he says if you do this as a way of like saying, like, oh, I'm gonna follow the law, I'm gonna follow the whole law now, you're going in the exact opposite direction of what makes sense. Effectively, by getting that cut, what you are declaring loud and clear is of the two routes that have been proposed, faith, which is what Abraham picked, and it was credited to him as righteousness, and when we do faith, we join Abraham, the man of righteousness. Or abide by the law and keep the whole thing. But you know, remember, cursed is everyone who doesn't keep every word, everything that's written in this book of the laws. That's a risky one, but you know, if you're gonna keep it, you gotta keep it all. So circumcision, I mean that's part of the deal, because curse is everyone who doesn't follow the whole thing. Which way, Galatian Christian? Faith in Christ or faith in the law, a tool that was meant to point you to Christ. Well, a lot of them are gonna be tempted to choose this arrested development and put their faith and their hope in the law, in which case, circumcision, I guess, it's just part and parcel. It seems so weird and foreign to us today that this would even be a debate or a thing that would happen at church or that you'd have to go through. But I guess coming out of the Old Testament, it sort of makes sense that they had to wrestle it through, and Paul is swooping in at the last moment, like grabbing the hand of the guy who wields the scalpel to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Almost like the angel coming in and staying Abraham's hand with Isaac. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, don't cut that. Hold up, put down the sharp instrument. No, no, no, no, no. There is a better sacrifice here. We got Jesus' sacrifice on the cross has handled this in a way that what you're about to cut, hey, that's not gonna do anything. It's completely performative, and in fact, you're falling into a trap here. Do not make that cut. So there's real stakes here, is what I'm trying to drive at. And I can't bel I've hesitated so much in this conversation because there keep on being little things that I'm about to say, and then I'm like, no, I'm just gonna think better of that. I'm not gonna say it that way. So thank you for bearing with me. But my point is this this isn't just heady, abstract theology gobbledygook that Paul is riffing on here. He really is rushing this letter to intervene before a whole bunch of these people who he knows and likes and cares about receive adult male circumcision, and he's not just trying to spare them the pain and the humiliation. He's also trying to spare them going down this sunk cost route of being like, no, I I you know I put a stake in the ground here. I made a gesture, I did a thing, I allowed my blood to be shed in a way that everybody knew I was doing it, for me to declare loud and clear, flagpole in the ground, my hope is in the law alone, and I have gone all the way to absolutely keep that law. This letter might have seemed harsh up to the point that we're at, but when you really think about what's at stake here and what's going on and what was unfolding and the report that Paul got, this is a very merciful, angry letter that we're getting from Paul. He is trying to help these people who he loves. He's also trying to advocate for the true gospel, because if you put your faith in circumcision, which is a symbol for putting your faith in the whole law, I mean, you do the circumcision thing, you're saying I'm all in and I couldn't really be more all in, your soul is in peril. That's the argument that Paul is making. But speaking of argument, we'll dig deeper into the actual text and structure of his argument and try to flesh that out a little bit more next time around. Okay, back-to-back circumcision episodes. I think we got through that relatively unscathed. I hope so. Do you feel weird? I felt weird a couple times in the middle, but now I'm good. It's weird. It's like we know each other better now. Feels like we can talk about anything now that we've talked about that. All right, more on this stuff next time around. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon. One, two, three, four.