Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we're in the second half of Galatians 1 here, tracking along with the Apostle Paul as he tries to refute a bunch of untrue things that were said about him and the timeline of his life. I don't think he's just trying to be cocky because he loves his story so much. Rather, what we're seeing is that the truth of Paul's story is kind of joined at the hip to the spiritual fate and well-being of the people of the Galatian churches. So Paul has to do the painstaking work of pushing back on the untrue version of the story and holding up the true version of the story. If you didn't catch yesterday, you might want to because it'll all make a lot more sense in light of that. I'm going to have my buddy Jeff play some music and we'll pick up right where we left off. Okay, so let's step back for just a second and see the big picture of this timeline again here. It's important to Paul in the book of Galatians. I'm just going to try to get this right in our heads as well. That visit to Jerusalem that looked like it could have gone crazy but got smoothed over by Barnabas, that big high tension reunion, that happened in probably 37 A.D. Almost immediately things turned sour with the Grecian Jews and they try to kill Paul. But when the brothers learned of this, that is a plot to kill Paul, they took him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus. That's Acts 9.30. That probably happens still in 37 A.D. He's not in Jerusalem very long at all. It's cut way short. And after that, Paul is probably back up in his hometown of Tarsus for the better part of a decade. It isn't until the mid-40s, 46, maybe even 47, that Barnabas and Paul reunite and go to Antioch and start to connect with the Christians there. And that connection with the church in Antioch in 47 AD is what is going to give birth to that prove it journey, that first missionary journey that Paul and Barnabas go on together, where probably the Galatian churches in view in the book of Galatians were founded. So Paul was in training probably during the ministry of Jesus to be a Pharisee. And I don't think it's crazy at all to imagine that some of Paul's Pharisee and training buddies, some of his classmates, might have been the ones who were deployed to Jesus in Matthew 22. Remember, Jesus had come into Jerusalem, and the Pharisees and Sadducees are all trying to set traps for Jesus verbally and publicly. And Jesus is obviously doing very, very well. And so then the Pharisees are like, well, we'll just send our younglings over. And so the Pharisees in Matthew 22 send some of their disciples to go over and be like, You're so wise, and we want to learn from you. Tell us, is it right to pay taxes to Caesar? We just want to know what you think. You're so smart. And Jesus sees through it and famously gives the render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's reply. And I obviously Paul, you know, he didn't meet Jesus in the flesh, so he wasn't one of that little gang that went over and asked those questions. But I bet he knew those guys. He was probably a part of roughly that same crop of up-and-coming Pharisees. So then after that, you get the events of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and it is shortly after that, probably around 30, 31, maybe into 32 A.D., that Paul graduates from apprentice Pharisee to full-blown Pharisee. And one of his first responsibilities there is to be present at the execution of Stephen, which probably happened in 32 A.D. That causes a bunch of the Christians in Jerusalem to scatter. This again would have been one of his very first official acts as a Pharisee. He's trying to make a name for himself and climb the ranks. Paul was like, hey, I'll go track them down. I'll go get the Christians wherever they fled. I'll find them. And so he puts together this expedition to Damascus. There, of course, you've got the dramatic conversion events that happen there that are recorded in Acts chapter 9. That probably occurred in 34 A.D. after some persecution that he'd done in the meantime. And then the story is really airtight in Acts chapter 9 in terms of the timeline. He has his event on the Damascus Road. He goes to Damascus where he meets Ananias as he is supposed to. He's blind. He receives teaching. The scales fall off his eyes. He's a Christian now. Apparently, he was there long enough to irritate people talking about that. I think there's a really decent chance that he came and went from Damascus. Because there's a few years in Paul's timeline, if you really carefully go and add it up with all the different accounts we get of where he was and when he was there, there's a few years that are kind of vacant, and it corresponds pretty neatly with what Paul is saying in Galatians 1.17 about taking some time to go into Arabia. And it looks like right at the end of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, from probably 34 to 37 A.D., Paul is out in the wild preaching, growing, doing the things that he says he is doing. Where is Arabia? Probably not the Arabian Peninsula, probably not modern-day Saudi Arabia. We're probably talking about Arabia as a legacy name of some of the leftover boundaries of the Persian Empire and two of the smaller, weaker empires that came out of that. There are certain regions that those later expressions of Persianism touched that would be referred to as Arabia that would not be on the Arabian Peninsula. So probably Paul was still in the zip code of Damascus, but maybe out east in the desert wilds or something like that. He's there for three years, according to Galatians 1, 17. And then it looks like he probably went back to Damascus. Then there's an incident where he has to flee, being lowered out in a basket. He wouldn't have had a big enough reputation, probably, for that kind of uh crisis, that kind of manhunt to be on for him when he first converted. So it makes sense that his reputation grew while he was in Arabia. And when he came back to Damascus, there was more hand-wringing and panicking about that. And then he finally goes to Jerusalem. So we're talking about a conversion event that probably happened in 34 A.D. And it's not until well into late into 37 A.D. that Paul finally makes the difficult journey back to Jerusalem. There's just so much that can go wrong here. The Christians aren't going to be sure what to make of him, but also his former classmates, a lot of those other classmates who were asking Jesus about whether it's right to pay taxes to Caesar, they're full-blown Pharisees now, too, and they're probably not going to like what has become of Paul. It doesn't seem like he's going to have a lot of allies there, but Barnabas, according to Acts chapter 9, steps up, well, literally says, But Barnabas took him, that being Paul, and brought him, that being Paul, to the apostles. He told them how Saul, Paul, on his journey had seen the Lord, and that the Lord had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus. So Saul, Paul, stayed with them and moved about freely in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. This is all happening in 37 A.D. But it's very short-lived because we find out that some Grecian Jews get real, real mad and they tried to, quote, kill him. Verse 30. But when the brothers learned of this plot to kill Paul, they took Paul down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus. Now we get a huge gap in time from late 37 A.D. all the way up until probably 47 A.D., where Paul is back in Tarsus, and then he and Barnabas reconnect. They connect with the Antioch Church, and it is there that the idea gets cooked up to send Paul out on this prove-it journey, his first missionary journey to go and spread the gospel. And there's a decent chance that the churches in view in the book of Galatians were founded on this journey that probably happens in 48 A.D. You'll recall that right after that first missionary journey where he first meets the people of Galatia, it's right after that that he goes down to Jerusalem. And in Acts 15, you've got the Jerusalem Council where James and Peter and everybody are there, and they all agree, yep, this is for the Gentiles too. And you'll also recall that right after that big meeting in Jerusalem, Paul took a letter and went right back up to Antioch and relayed to all the Christians there what the findings were at the Council of Jerusalem. And then he went out on another missionary journey. And pretty much everybody agrees that it's somewhere on this second missionary journey that the book of Galatians is being written. So there's our timeline. It's a little bit tiresome to go through and piece it all together. I'm sure it's a little bit tiresome for Paul to have to go through it and lay the whole thing out, but it's an important timeline because it establishes or it supports what Paul is claiming. There isn't a window in here for Paul to have gone to Jerusalem, be wined and dined and cooked up and prepared and prepped and conditioned to go out and be a product of something out of Jerusalem. He's barely there at all, just long enough to be signed off on and then hurried away to safety. And then he's only back there long enough to be there in this official capacity at a meeting where everybody else was too, and where all of the content of the discussion was very public and recorded and vouched for. Otherwise, he's been on the road. He's been hustling far away from Jerusalem, communicating gospel stuff for, well, at the time Galatians is written, maybe 12 years, 14 years, 15 years, and almost none of that time has been in Jerusalem in any way. So it really is a laughable accusation that he's some sort of product of Jerusalem. If anything, his relationship with Jerusalem has been a little bit tenuous, a little bit dangerous even during this time. I'm sure Paul would have much rather skipped all of this timeline stuff, and there's even more to come in chapter two that we'll look at next. I'm sure he would have loved to have skipped all of this and gone right to theology. I mean, he couldn't help himself. He did a bunch of theology on the front end before he got into the timeline stuff. But it's not just about sticking up for his own reputation. There's something bigger at stake because he was the message bearer. He was the guy carrying the baton who showed up and said, This is the message we have heard from him. This is the one. It's the message of the gospel of Christ. You guys should receive it here in Galatia. He's the one who showed up and took the slings and arrows and rocks and physical punishment. He's the one who paid the price for all of this stuff. Yet for whatever reason, the Galatian church is still wobbly on it. And they're still wanting to try to accommodate all the voices and listen to both sides of the argument. And Paul's like, look, there's not a two sides to this. Their facts are wrong. They're lying about the timeline. They're lying about where the message I put in front of you came from. It's from God. It's not cooked up by people in Jerusalem. And I think Paul is saying, if you look at the timeline of my life, you will see there's no window in there to allow for what they're saying happened to have happened. I wasn't in Jerusalem enough for what they're saying to be true. I was out and about on the road and in all of these other places enough for what I'm saying to have been true. So the timeline matters and these details matter. I'm sure this is a frustrating thing for Paul, though, because it does feel like minutia. It does feel petty and overly detail-oriented when he wants to take them out to the big picture of the important stuff. But hey, Brandolini was right about this BSA symmetry principle thing. It takes a ton more energy to refute bullcrap than it does to cook up the bullcrap in the first place. If anything, I think Paul deserves applause here on the front end of his letter for how efficiently he is doing away with the nonsensical bullcrap, with just simple facts about the timeline that all point toward one historical and theological conclusion, which I'm sure he was very eager to get back to discussing at this point in writing his letter. Galatians chapter two. Next time around, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.