My parents have a chair at their house, and it's famous because it's Uncle Abe's chair. Who is Uncle Abe, you might wonder? I don't remember exactly, and that is going to disappoint my parents when and if they listen to this, because they've told me several times. But I don't remember exactly who on my dad's side Uncle Abe is connected with. But here's what I do know about Uncle Abe. He was a prince of a man. That's what everybody said about Uncle Abe. And that's what everybody still says about Uncle Abe. How was he a prince of a man? I don't know. I don't know all the specifics. I don't know why he was so great, but what a wonderful way to be remembered. And I think of it every time I see Uncle Abe's chair, and I think to myself, how would I like to be remembered? Man, I don't know if I'm tracking for a prince of a man at this point in my life, but I'd be okay if I got there someday. I'll tell you somebody who was a prince of a man was Titus in the Bible. And this is the Titus episode, because yeah, we're working on Galatians, yeah, we need to move forward, and yeah, we're making progress, and this is fun. But the last couple days we talked about Titus and how Titus came up with Paul's whole reasoning about how the Jerusalem elders clearly didn't have any problem with Titus, who wasn't circumcised. He was a Gentile Christian. We worked all that through the last couple days, but I didn't want to just gloss over the Titus thing. He comes up in the text here. He's a prince of a man. He's worthy of a one-day rundown of what we know about him. So here we go. Titus episode. We don't know exactly where the guy came from. I have a theory about that that I'll talk about a little bit later on when we get to where he ended up. But what we do know is that he was one of two dudes who were both Gentiles, who were both younger than Paul, who somewhere along the way, Paul led to faith in Christ and then mentored, all the way up to the point where these guys became very, very loyal and very, very useful. They inherited all of the superpowers of Paul, his talents, his skill set, his connections, and they got to a point where they could stand in for him as a proxy and became hyper-trusted. Now, if you think about what that means back in this day and age, what does Paul do for a living, right? He travels all over the place on these gigantic journeys and he knows everybody. He's hyper connected, but he doesn't have the benefit of electronic communication, so he's doing all of this work and communicating with all of these people by written letter. But also, we know, I just what we're seeing in the book of Galatians, is that it was really easy for somebody to come along and be like, oh, we speak for these people over here in the ancient Mediterranean world. It would take a long time to vet that and figure out who was telling the truth and who wasn't. So having people who you could count on to go and stand in your stead or even reliably deliver a letter and say, You recognize my face, I am so-and-so, I speak for Paul, and this is a letter from him treated as authoritative. Titus was awesomely useful in this regard, but you see what the stakes are as we've been working through Galatians. I mean, the fate of people, of entire churches, of entire trips worth of progress, are in play with all of these things that Paul is contending with. So having these trusted guys is a really big deal. Well, Titus, as we've discussed, was maybe a little bit younger in his faith at the time that the Jerusalem Council happened, which I don't know exactly. I mean, there's people have different opinions about this, but we're gonna say late 40s A.D. for sure. I think 49 A.D. is probably the best guess for when that happened. I've heard some people say 50 A.D. I don't know, they do it for a living, they're smarter than me. It's probably one of those two years. So Titus was a younger man at that point, went on the trip, showed well, well enough that Paul would use him as a point of reference for getting it right when it came to Galatians chapter two, as we've been looking at. So in the early going, if nothing else, he's a test case, as we've discussed. He's somebody you could point to and be like, look, does that look like the fruit of the Holy Spirit? Okay. And is he a Gentile? Okay. And is he circumcised? He's not. Okay, well, that proves something about what Peter's been saying, about what James has been saying, about what's happened on this prove it journey. Titus was in the flesh evidence of the reality of Gentiles becoming Christians without subjecting themselves to the entire Old Testament law simply through faith in Christ. But Titus did a lot more than that. Eventually, he gets mixed in with the church in Corinth, which was an up and down church, which makes sense because Corinth is a weird town. It was a colony and there was an old version of Corinth, then it got rebuilt later on in the Roman Empire. And so it's a Greek location, but really Roman culturally, and they had weird sex stuff there, like weird sex cult stuff. I've been there, you can still see the evidence of it. I'm not going to describe it because I know the kids listen to this, but it was a whole thing. They had a whole mountain and a high version of Corinth, like an old Corinthian version of the town way up high. They called AcroCorinth. And up there, you had these shrine prostitutes who would snake their way down the hill with their lamps lit and everything. There's all this imagery that goes along with Corinth as it sort of played out as a contest between the values of the kingdom, the family, ethical, even sexual values of the kingdom, versus the really darkly, religiously pagan sexual values of this sort of Greek, sort of Roman old school town that was at the crossroads of all of the classic ancient Greece stuff. So Titus, in order for him to get dropped into Corinth and be at the Corinthian church, given what we know about how tense things were, it means that he was seriously trusted by Paul for seriously heavy lifting. And so Titus is there alone in Corinth, helping out Paul. And then eventually, somewhere in Paul's third missionary journey, he's supposed to meet up with Titus at Troaz, but in 2 Corinthians we find out that they missed each other or something. And so Paul goes on to Macedonia, which isn't too far from Corinth by today's standards. And Titus catches up with Paul kind of up in that direction in the city of Philippi and is like, ah, sorry, it's hard to meet. We don't have cell phones or anything, but here we are. It was no doubt a very happy reunion. And Titus makes the reunion even happier by being like, hey, guess what? Great news. You wrote kind of an angry letter to the Corinthian church. They kind of listened, and we've got some good progress going on there. And so it looks like Paul then wrote 2 Corinthians and sent it back with Titus to Corinth. So it seems like Titus kind of has his fingerprints on other parts of the Bible as well. And then Titus also participated in raising funds for the church in Jerusalem after that. Again, all of this is recorded in 2 Corinthians. The middle chunk of 2 Corinthians chapters 7 and 8 give us a lot of the details of this timeline stuff. I'm just reeling them to you instead of reading the whole thing. So then later on, Titus becomes associated with Crete. Again, Paul is just all over the place. Titus is all over the place. And Crete is another place with a totally different cultural background. Crete is the headquarters of Minoan civilization, a civilization that predates Greek civilization as we think of it, in terms of, you know, like Xerxes and the Spartans and brave Leonidas and Athens and Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and all of that stuff. The Minoan version of Greek civilization goes way back before that. Maybe the Philistines were associated from this, all the way back in the time like King David, like the 11th century B.C., the legend of the Minotaur is from there. Some people think that Minoan civilization on Crete is what Plato was talking about when he talked about the lost civilization of Atlantis. There was a volcanic eruption way back, like clear back around the time of maybe the Exodus, that might have wiped out one version of Cretan civilization. So this is a very, very, very, very old place that still had some lingering memory of being the great naval power of the entire Mediterranean. So on the one hand, Crete is going to be a place that's drawing on a whole bunch of ideas that they picked up all over the place from way back in the day doing all of this naval trade. They've got distinct art and music and architecture, but also there's sort of in a Greek cultural bubble that is a little different than other expressions of Greekism. And so Titus must have been very culturally savvy, very emotionally intelligent, very dialed on the history of civilization and art and culture and all of that stuff to have been able to freely move between these different places where he showed up. He handled his business in Jerusalem well, so well that Paul holds him out as an example of excellence. He handled his business well in Corinth so well that Paul trusted him on multiple occasions to be there. He handled his business well in Crete. And when he did have questions, that's the occasion of Paul writing to Titus to say, all right, well, you know, here's what you need to do in managing all of these different elders in these little pockets of house churches and community churches in all these towns in Crete. And Cretan expectations for morality are going to be a little bit different. There were sayings back then about being a Cretan. Maybe you've heard that too. They thought of ethics and behavior and how to treat other people a little differently than some of their neighbors. And so Titus kind of had his work cut out for him to be a guide in terms of personal conduct and Christian kingdom values contrasted with what were considered to be stereotypical Cretan values. Paul gives him a bunch of guidance on that in the book of Titus. And the impression that we get is that that must have gone pretty well. And Titus was still in great standing with Paul, even at the end of Paul's life, because during Paul's final imprisonment in Rome, which we think happened at the Mamertine prison, a prison that I have been to multiple times. It just blows my mind that 2 Timothy was written in this hole in the ground that you can still go visit for the $20 admission ticket. It's very sobering to go in there. You can see the little shaft of light coming through the ceiling that must have illuminated things well enough for Paul to grind through writing that. His vision had failed mostly as an old man, or maybe he had somebody helping him write it, probably that. And Paul says specifically that Titus had been there with him in that prison cell, in that space, when he's writing to Timothy, basically saying goodbye to his other protege, Timothy, and saying, like, hey, if you make it here before I get executed, bring my coat, it's cold in here, and bring this batch of scrolls, I'd like to read these things, please. I mean, it's a very sober letter. And if you've been to that little hole near the Capitoline Hill in Rome, that Mamertine prison, you haven't just stood somewhere where the Apostle Paul almost certainly was, you've been somewhere where loyal, faithful prince of a man, Titus, almost certainly was. Well, it looks like Titus was not there when Paul was executed, which happened a little further out toward the edges of Rome at what is now the Trefontana Abbey, the Three Fountains Abbey. But Titus, according to tradition, went on to Dalmatia, which is across the Adriatic Sea, just basically straight east of Florence, maybe just a little south of Florence, in a beautiful part of Croatia where King's Landing and Game of Thrones was filmed. If you've ever seen that show, I don't recommend it. It's offensive. I just I don't know. Watch, you get the idea, there's a disclaimer there. And apparently he lived out his days there, founding the Dalmatian church. And tradition holds that a bunch of people were martyred there early on, probably Titus as well. And it's interesting because a couple hundred years later on, the emperor Diocletian, who was a very competent emperor and pretty good for Rome in every way, other than he was vile and horrible toward Christians, he was from the same town, the same region that Titus is believed to have founded the Christian church in. And then Diocletian came along a couple hundred years after Titus was there. But it's really interesting that one of the greatest persecutors of the church on the Roman governmental side came from a place that received the gospel and Christianity probably from Titus, but also there was a lot of foment and a lot of anger toward Christianity there, enough to have killed people early on and produced a guy who was one of the great murderers of Christians in the early going. In the whole Bible, we just don't ever see Titus flinch. He looks great every time he's on screen, every time he's referenced. He doesn't do a lot of big, dramatic, splashy stuff. He's just steady, faithful, reliable, present, willing, really truly a prince of a man. I'm a big fan of Titus. I think this was a worthwhile aside, and we are back to pressing forward in Galatians chapter two next time around. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute five hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.