Alright, we got to talk about a sorcery fight today. That sounds pretty cool. Well, I mean, one of the sides is doing sorcery. The other side is doing something different than that. We're gonna get to that in a minute. First, I have something on my mind and it's eating at me. There's no joke coming after this. I got a weight on my shoulders today and it's bugging me. And I have decided that we're gonna talk about it because I think a lot of you care about the thing I'm frustrated with. I put out the video series that you and I have been talking about for a while over on YouTube. I put it on my YouTube channel that has existed for, well, I've been working on it for 11 years. So it's it's older than like what half the total life of YouTube. I I always felt like I've kind of been swimming upstream a little bit algorithmically, but that's okay. At times, though, it's been more than a sneaking suspicion. It's been really overt where I will post a video. I don't know why it offends the algorithm or maybe someone at YouTube, but we get these analytics, these graphs, when we publish a video, and I'll have videos with some frequency that are kind of on a rocket ship early on. I'm like, this is really cool. Not because I have some weird need for people to watch YouTube videos for me to feel good. I have great friends and a beautiful family and a wife who I love, and I play sports, and life is just rich and wonderful and beautiful. Church is great. I don't need YouTube views to feel good about life, but I believe the things we're talking about. I think this is true, and I think there's life in it. I mean, everybody likes to talk about things that they think are true and life-giving and meaningful, but that's how we all are as people, regardless of what we believe or how we are. If we see something beautiful, we want to give it away to other people, even people we don't know personally. That's it's just how it is, and that's why I do this stuff. YouTube is not uh a real winning proposition for me financially, it's uh labor of love, it's something I want to do, it's something I've done for a long time. A lot of good things have happened there. I've met so many friends over there, but for a long time I've been really fighting somebody or something at YouTube, and I don't get it. I'll have a video that I publish and I get all the numbers right away in real time, and it's uh it's great, that makes sense given the number of subscribers I have and about what this video is I would expect about this performance. Great, it's right on track. And then for no reason, YouTube turns it to zero and it'll just flatline dead. And of course, I screenshot all of this and I save it because it's kind of a curiosity, but maybe like a fool, I keep going back and then I just publish more things. I'm like, well, I'll just publish my way out of it. And eventually, maybe a year ago, YouTube started sending me messages and being like, we are throttling your channel. Huh. Well, I hate that. So I reached out to them and talked to them. I was like, Well, what's the problem? Well, your channel's inauthentic. I'm like, I don't know what that means, but it's not. Can you tell me what I did wrong? And they're like, no, we can't. Just stop doing inauthentic things. I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I this is like a kind of a hobby. I don't think it's uh I'm not trying to win the internet with this. I'm just trying to make real good stuff. The certain kind of person might really appreciate. Uh I don't even know what that term means. Can you please tell me what I did wrong? They're like, no. No, just you have to figure out what you did wrong. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, how will I know when whatever you're doing to me you're not doing anymore? And they're like, Well, you won't. It'll just, it'll get better. So I'm like, all right, well, what should I do in the meantime? I'll just keep publishing and you know, it might get better. Okay. Do you have any recommendations for me? Like, if you were me, what would you tell me? And this person in the chat was like, Well, I mean, maybe you could consider just shutting it down and starting a new channel altogether. What? I got like 10 years in this, bro. Like, you're being a bad business partner. Can you just go look and figure out what's wrong and fix it? Or just tell me so I can try to fix it? No. So it's been like that for a while. I've been working on this video series for a long time. My goodness, did you all turn out to support that launch, by the way? That's about the most encouraging thing that I've encountered on the internet in forever. So many names that I know from you on Patreon and in the email and in the comment section. And I kind of have a sense of you and how you are on the internet. And I saw all of you over there. Thank you. Yeah, I'm just gonna gush. I don't know. It meant the world to see you respond to this project that Hunter and I have been working on for a year in the way that you did. It is just hyper encouraging. Thank you. At the same time that this video is receiving the best human reception of probably anything I've ever done in the history of the internet because of you and your graciousness, it was also receiving the worst algorithmic treatment of anything ever. It just got zeroed again. Just almost flatline. There's a window of time where it looks like the line of impressions that is YouTube putting it in front of people is basically zero, like a trickle, a few, a handful, single digits per hour, which is nuts. I mean, my YouTube channel has 265,000 subscribers. I mean, it's not the biggest YouTube channel ever, but the math just doesn't make any sense. And it might sound kind of whiny, but when you go and you actually look at the numbers of how YouTube works as a function of math, that isn't possible. The numbers aren't possible. So I put out a short video today. I think it was real fun. It's 22 seconds long. Same thing. Just a like crazy rocket ship, amazing start, and then flatlined, just dead, turned off, killed it. I don't know why. So I'm hearing from some of you who are saying it doesn't even show up on my channel when you go to seek it out. I'm hearing others of you say that you're getting a content restriction notice, like my video on the book of Genesis is offensive or adult content or something. You kidding me? Like I got lightning bolts over almost every single image of Adam and Eve in the garden. I did my best. I mean, come on, it's Genesis. So this podcast that happens in real time, and you get whatever version of me you get on a given day. And here's where I'm at. I've been doing a thing for going on 11 years, and it's been a huge part of my life. Uh, I'm thinking about shutting it down. I don't know. At some point, you're just an idiot to keep throwing that kind of work at that kind of thing when you have a dishonest business partner, and I'm referring to YouTube. They won't tell you what's wrong, they won't communicate with you. Either a human or a machine learning algorithm just decides that no internet, sorry, you don't get to see this Bible video, and we're just turning it off. And then that's it. There's no recourse, there's nothing I can do. Just labor super hard and make another thing and hope that the algorithm doesn't notice that I published this time and doesn't zero it. So it's pretty aggravating. I don't know. I'm thinking about colonizing a different YouTube channel and just starting from scratch. I really like making videos, I like doing this. I just I don't get what's wrong. YouTube has made it clear, something is wrong both by their actions and their overt spoken words, but they won't tell me what, and there's nothing I can do. So that's where I'm at. It's really discouraging. Fame is not interesting, YouTube popularity is not interesting, it's not what I'm doing. But having videos zeroed again and again and again, it's not the best investment of my time. It's not shrewd, it's not a smart use of the resources of my life and my energy that I've been given. So I really got to think about that stuff. Hmm. We didn't get very far in the book of Acts. Would you be okay if this were a long episode? That'd be all right. I needed to dump that off. Feels way better to say that into a microphone. But I also really want to talk about Acts because I'm really liking this story. And this next part is, yeah, I'm just gonna do it. Here's the deal. We're on the first missionary journey. Paul and Barnabas have set out from Antioch, and it's really the church in Antioch, not the home base in Jerusalem, but the church in Antioch, where the Christians were first called Christians, that commissions this trip and sends them out. Now, Paul's a tent maker, and apparently he's pretty good at it. And that might seem like not a good way to make money now for most people, but I think it was a pretty good way to make money back then. So Paul, well, at this point he's getting called Saul still at the beginning of Acts chapter 13, he had a way to support himself. Also, probably he had backing from some benefactors who wanted to see him go out and do this stuff. And these are people who, for whatever reason, weren't in a place in life where they could go out and do this trip themselves, but they recognized Saul's pretty good at it. He's well positioned, his life story fits. Boom, let's get behind him and make this thing happen. So he goes with the blessing of the church, with the wind in his sails from the church and the Christians in Antioch and the blessing of the church down in Jerusalem. And he follows that pattern that I was telling you about yesterday. He goes first to the Jews, to the synagogue, and he reasons with them from the scriptures, trying to prove to them that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the one who will reign on the throne of David forever. And oftentimes some people come around and some people don't. Oftentimes, the next phase in the story is people get mad and they either politically undermine him or physically try to hurt him. And then usually he will leave some leaders in charge who he's commissioned and brought up quickly, and then he'll escape from the situation like Lando in the Millennium Falcon escaping from the exploding Death Star, just barely getting out in the nick of time to go and repeat this process at the next location. Well, the first location that we get here is Maritime. We leave Antioch and we go by ship to Cyprus with Saul and Barnabas and with John, John Mark as their helper. This kid was promising early on. Looks like maybe somewhere on this trip he got a little bit homesick or struggled with what the journey was about, maybe bit off a little more than he could chew. He tapped out, and then later John Mark taps back in and matures and contributes a tremendous amount. But Saul, I mean, come on, we know this guy's a hard driver. And when he does something, he does it to the nth degree. And that's the kind of intensity with which this story gets underway. So Acts 13, verse 6, here's that sorcery showdown I was telling you about. So interesting. Now I'm going to start in verse 4. The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, Saul and Barnabas, went down to Seleucia and sailed there to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, now that is not the Salamis of 480 BC fame, where the forces led by Themistocles of the Athenians defeated the invading Xerxes of Persia. But I mean, come on, it's got to be related, right? I think the Salamis on Cyprus is an older Greek settlement, maybe than that name of the straits there in mainland Greece by Athens. I don't actually know how it works, but surely one name informs the other. But don't confuse this one with that very, very famous battle, that very decisive battle that essentially marked the high watermark of Xerxes' attempted invasion and conquest of the Greeks. So it says when they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the Jewish synagogues. So there we go, right through the paces that we talked about. And John was with them as their helper. Okay, I already mentioned some stuff about him. Verse 6. They traveled through the whole island until they came to Paphos. There they met a Jewish sorcerer and a false prophet named Bar Jesus. So this guy is fashioning himself as son of Jesus or spiritual descendant of Jesus or inheritor of the powers of Jesus. So the Jesus stuff, I mean, this is really interesting because the fact that the guy took this name tells us something about how popular Jesus had become already, even this far away. Clearly, this is catching on. Clearly, people have heard the stories, and this guy was willing to put his whole name and his whole reputation next to Jesus in a weird, twisted way because of all that Jesus had accomplished. And I mean, apparently this had currency on the island of Cyprus sufficient that it made sense for this guy to do this. So there's this guy, his name is Bar Jesus, and he was an attendant of the proconsul Sergius Paulus. The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. Okay, now to you and me, this is going to seem right off the bat like not that big a deal. Like naturally, well, who are all the people we know who are on the island of Cyprus right here at this moment in history? Well, let me see. We got Saul and Barnabas and John Barges, the sorcerer, and we got Sergius Paulus. Cool, those are all the characters we know. Of course they should get together. It's like that same thing in our brain where we're like, oh, those two characters in the movie are attractive. They should definitely fall in love and smooch and then get married and have babies because they're attractive and they're both in the same movie. How hard is this? So for us, our modern brains are going to look back on this story and be like, well, naturally, the Roman appointed governor of this entire island, someone with political prestige on the level of Pontius Pilate, would just invite two strange people practicing what to him is a new religion right into his gubernatorial palace. Of course he would risk his reputation on doing that. That just makes sense. But it doesn't make sense. When we look back on history, our brains are always like, uh, if I went back in time, I would be the smartest and the best. I would be a king or prince or princess and I would have adventures. And as I am in the habit of liking to remind my students when I do classes about history, no, you wouldn't be. You would be a poop shoveler. Almost surely, statistically, you would be a slave or some low-ranking serf, and so would I, because that's just what the odds say. And so when we read a story like this, I think we tend to project a sense of importance on the point of view characters that is maybe drawn from a sort of modern sense of the importance of each and every individual that really isn't true. And so as a result, we don't notice how exceptional something like this is. We can't picture properly how this would have hit for the original audience who would have looked at something like this and been like, Well, are you kidding me? His first stop sent out the door by the church in Antioch, and he gets invited to the Roman governor's palace, the palace of a proconsul, and he is just like the proconsul just invites him in. It's like, explain Jesus to me. What? That doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. That is incredible. That in and of itself would have smacked of the miraculous to the original audience who were steeped, who were immersed, who were brining in the reality of the inaccessibility of the Roman noble gubernatorial structure. Just incredible. But here's another thing that's incredible. For a long time, during the early age of criticism of the Bible from the late 1600s into the early 1900s, it was very fashionable to say that this was an error, that Sergius Paulus never served on the island of Cyprus, or this wasn't a guy. This was just a made-up name, a made-up character, critics of the Bible said, to legitimize Saul or Paul in the way that you and I were just talking about. But as is so often the case, all of those criticisms from that era end up being debunked and shamed by the reality of archaeology. Because from the mid to late 1800s up until now, the name Sergius Paulus just keeps popping up on inscriptions in all the right places at all the right times to indicate that, nope, that's exactly the guy who was in charge. And not only do we now know that Sergius Paulus was indeed the proconsul of Cyprus during this time, but we have so many other external references that have come out of the ground regarding Sergius Paulus that we can now accurately date this trip and when it must have started based on all of the accounts that we have now found of Sergius Paulus. And it's an interesting thing. This guy, he wasn't just a, you know, a silver spoon dude who was given this great position as proconsul of Cyprus. He's a dude from probably a pretty good family who still had to earn it. Because one of the inscriptions that we've found regarding Sergius Paulus from around the turn of the last century is actually in Rome. And it turns out that he was one of five guys whose job it was to monitor the flood stages of the Tiber River and do flood and water management seasonally there to ensure that Rome would thrive and not get wrecked by the river that was supposed to be its very lifeblood. Here's how that inscription reads, which is dated to 47 A.D. and which was found in 1888. Here we go. Paulus Fabius Perseus, Gaius Agius Marulus, Lucius Sergius Paulus. Wait, let me say that with more emphasis. Lucius Sergius Paulus, Gaius Obelius Rufus, Lucius Scribonius Libo. The inscription goes on. The commissioners of the banks and beds of the Tiber by the authority of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the Emperor Claudius, leader of the Senate, marked the boundaries of the Tiber floodplain by placing boundary stones on the bank from the Trigarum to the Pons Agrippa. Fun side note, did you catch the reference of the name Agrippa there as well? Remember when we were talking about Herod Agrippa, who killed James? And that's a name there. Just boom, boom, hardcore evidence. This is really fun. But then we've also got inscriptions with his family name and his first name and last name in Pisidian Antioch, giving the impression that his family was very prominent in this region. And all of this adds up to clarity that he really was the governor at this time in Cyprus, just like the Bible says that he was. And further, the Bible describes him as being an intelligent man. And it would seem that Claudius thought of him the same way. Remember, Claudius was an excellent administrator, and he viewed this Sergius Paulus fellow as being reliable enough to trust with the well-being of his capital city in terms of public works and management of what would be the greatest natural threat to the well-being of his city, that being flooding. And apparently Emperor Claudius thought Sergius Paulus did such a good job that he elevated him to this higher rank of proconsul and gave him a region to oversee on his behalf. So the biblical description of the competencies of Sergius Paulus match with Claudius' impression, apparently, of Sergius Paulus. All of these things are details that the original audience would have been likely to know off the cuff. I think it's just comical the critics of the Bible were like, oh, it's just a made-up name. Well, then why would anybody keep reading or preserve this document? The original audience would know the whole thing was a lie. You people are just silly. You can't take a swing like that and just make up a name and think that the original audience would be so stupid as to fall for that. Clearly, the names in the book of Acts made sense to the original audience, and they would have known about the guy's reputation. And so my point is that if this dude, and we're going to look at this next time around, is compelled by what Saul is about to say to him and were to become a Christian, that would be an incredible boost to the whole message of Jesus thing. It would be an incredible win right out of the gate on trip number one for Saul and Barnabas. If someone this good, who even the Emperor of Rome himself, who is a pretty solid competent emperor, says is competent and brilliant, if that guy signs up, it's going to really matter and carry a lot of weight, frankly, a lot more weight than it's going to carry for you or me as a modern audience member. That is, unless we do a lot of work to kind of put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience, which hopefully we have done. Thank you for listening to my thing at the beginning of this conversation. I feel some stuff today. I'm a little frustrated. I'm not quite sure exactly what my next steps ought to be or how to do this, but I want to make a really cool series of videos about the Bible because I think it would be helpful. And it's something I really love talking about and I want to do, and I feel creatively compelled to want to do it. And at the risk of sounding overly pious and self-important, I feel, in my own strange way, spiritually compelled to want to do it. I want to do it because I believe in it, but I don't want to battle some dumb algorithm the whole time. Yeah, suggestions welcome. Thank you so much for hearing me out on that. And also, thanks for being interested in the material that we talk about. This stuff is a blast for me, and I'll make the next episode not this long. All right. Thanks for tolerating all of my going on and on. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.