All right, we're gonna do an exercise to get started today. And it's the kind of exercise that is a lie. Nothing about this story is true. It never happened, but hypothetical, I'm making a point. It's gonna work. So just wherever you are, close your eyes and imagine the following scene. Even if you're driving, close your no, no, I take that back. If you're driving, you can keep your eyes open. Picture the following. When I was younger, I went on a trip with my family back when Bush was president to New York. And we went to the huge, famous park there, and the trees were beautiful. It was autumn time. And I met a local New Yorker there, and he is a very thoughtful person who was from a very different world than me, and we kind of hit it off and became friends. And over the years we've stayed in touch, and I would say a lot of his ideas, which are very different from mine because he's from a very different place than me, have kind of informed my ideas. Okay, you can open your eyes now. What are you picturing from that story? Did you catch the ambiguities? Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. I'm going to go through all of the ambiguities, of course. Here we let's just get started with this. When did I go on this trip? In your brain, what are you picturing? Well, some of you are thinking, oh, well, you went on a trip with your family. That's probably your kids and your wife. So maybe that happened while George W. Bush was president, and you were picturing the first decade of the 2000s. Maybe others of you heard those words and you just immediately went to when I was a little kid, and I went with my parents on this family trip. And so maybe you're picturing the late 1980s or early 1990s when I was little and when George Herbert Walker Bush was president. Those are different Bushes, father and son, but they're both the Bush presidency, right? It's ambiguous, it's hard to tell what I'm talking about. All right, let's break down the next set of details here. Where did you picture this hypothetical trip happening? I'm guessing some of you went right to New York City, the hustling and bustling. Maybe some of you, when I said New York, immediately pictured New York State, something bigger and more diverse. But as soon as I said the great big famous park, I'm guessing a whole bunch of you immediately thought, oh, okay, that clarifies that he's talking about Central Park. I've seen it in movies. There's the videos where that guy goes around and makes fake farting sounds that are popular on YouTube right now, and everybody seems real offended at first. But as soon as he walks away, they all laugh. Everybody laughs at farts. That's the lesson of those videos. So maybe you're picturing all of the scenes that you remember from Central Park and you imagined me in that environment. But maybe some of you are thinking, well, there's a huge park in New York called Adirondack Park. That's been there for a long time. It's like the biggest nature preserve or pretty close to it in the whole country. And maybe it's not quite as famous, but it's pretty famous. And maybe some of you just went right there in your brains. Well, these are very different things that are geographically very separated. And then when I said I met a New Yorker. Well, if you were picturing Central Park in New York City and you were picturing this trip happening during the first Bush administration, then you're imagining me not meeting a crusty dude in his mid-40s who's got the Brooklyn accent. You imagined me meeting another kid who's Gen X or an older millennial, and we hit it off and we were pen pals over the years. And you would have therefore extrapolated our relationship out to being written communication through letters. Long distance phone calls were expensive back then. If you've been paying attention, you know that I didn't grow up with a lot of money, so I probably wouldn't have been calling this friend, this New Yorker kid on the phone. But others of you, if you had this during the second Bush administration, you would be picturing an adult, maybe somebody else who's got kids or similar interests, and we hit it off, and we stayed friends via, you know, the cell phone, text back and forth, fire back and forth emails, whatever, things like that. And further, whichever era you imagined, if you're picturing me meeting this person in Central Park, you're imagining a very different kind of New Yorker than if you imagine me meeting some rural New Yorker who loves the wilderness and the trees and the wildlife and the fishing in Adirondack Park, somebody I maybe met on the trail. These are very different things. And given the information I gave you, there's a lot of different combinations of versions of this story that you could arrive at. Now I know that was a five-minute introduction, but it's really important for helping us to conceptualize and not be overwhelmed by a thing that we're gonna have to think through together in the coming weeks about the book of Galatians and specifically who the Galatians were. You see, the conundrum historically and biblically about who this book was written to by the Apostle Paul kind of works the same way as the hypothetical that I just gave you. We have enough information about who the Galatians were from the book of Acts, from the book of Galatians, from extra-biblical stuff to eliminate most possibilities for who could be that audience. It comes down to really two possibilities for who the Galatians of the book of Galatians actually are, but I dare say it is nearly impossible to definitively nail it down to say it was definitely these people at a definitely this exact moment. In the same way, given the information I gave you, it would be impossible to nail down exactly where I was in New York and exactly when I was in New York, and exactly what kind of New Yorker I met. Now, when we pick up the book of Galatians and we read through it, this disparity, this question, are we talking about one group of possible Galatians or another group of possible Galatians? This disparity, this question, it doesn't matter very much for interpreting the book because it works either way. What Paul is writing to, the phenomenon that causes him to write, is something that was a big deal. It was bigger than just one region of Galatia. It was affecting Christianity everywhere. It was the question of the day in early Christianity. And indeed, as we turn the page in our lightning run through Acts here into Acts chapter 15, we see that this was a question all the way back down at the home office in Jerusalem as well. Everybody is wondering these same set of questions. How Jewish do these new Gentile believers need to be in order to be accepted and fully in? But there are a few finer points as we go through the book of Galatians where, yeah, you know, it would be helpful for filling in the timeline and getting a little tighter view of who we're talking with here if we had a little clearer sense of which one of the two places we are talking about. You don't need a lot of explanation about why me saying I went to New York to the Great Big Famous Park is confusing, because New York is a state and New York is a city. They're both called New York. There are two great big famous parks in New York. One lands you squarely in the city, the other lands you squarely out in the countryside in the larger state. And to further add to the ambiguity, if I am in New York City in Central Park, I am also in New York State. But if I am in New York State at Adirondack Park, I am not in New York City. The Galatians thing, I think, is actually a little bit easier. Galatia was a Roman province that was shaped like an hourglass. Are you picturing it? It runs right through the middle of modern-day Turkey, Asia Minor, almost from all the way in the north, almost to the Black Sea. Maybe at times it did touch the Black Sea, this region of Galatia. And it ran almost all the way to the Mediterranean Sea in the south. And again, it's shaped like an hourglass. So it's got a pinch point in the middle. It's a very unusual shape. I can't think of really any countries that are shaped like an hourglass to liken it to. It's odd and it's weird. Well, the stuff you and I just got done or are just about done looking at in Acts 13 and 14, happen in the lower portion of that hourglass. That's where all of these cities are. However, it's also possible that Paul, maybe on the second missionary journey, he's going to do more of these. I mean, the prove it journey worked out. Spoiler alert, there's going to be more journeys. It's also entirely possible, though not explicitly mentioned, that Paul went and founded churches in the northern half of the hourglass that is sort of this historic Roman territory of Galatia. But here's a point where it's a little more confusing than the New York analogy, because I mean whether I traveled to New York in this hypothetical story during the first Bush administration or the second, it doesn't matter. All the boundaries of New York are the same in 1990 as they are in 2006. But these Roman provinces, they did evolve and change over time. However, any time that the book of Galatians could have been written, the shape of Galatia is basically the same. Now we're going to talk a lot more about this, but the conundrum is pretty straightforward. Historically, the preferred position of Bible readers and Bible scholars from across the spectrum of biblical thought and theological convictions has been that the book of Galatians was written to the historic tribal homeland of the Galatians and of Galatian culture and even of Galatian language. And indeed, the name Galatia is taken from the name of the tribe that occupied the northern half of the hourglass there. And these are the Gauls, a Celtic tribe from France. This is kind of wild. If you're like me and you're a Viking Celt, well, this is one of the places where ethnically your people probably show up in the Bible to at least some degree. Well, that's kind of fun. We've had some long episodes around here lately, and I'm looking at the time, and I've decided this is not going to be one of those super long episodes. We're just going to split this one into two. We're going to workshop the whole question about Galatia and its history and the shape of the province and who we're talking to in the book of Galatians. More next time around, we'll just pick up right where we left off. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.