Alexander the Great was this 18-year-old conqueror who just obliterated all of the structures and expectations politically and socially of the whole world. For my money, after Jesus of Nazareth himself, he is the most influential human being in the history of human beings. No joke, here's my case for it. He rewrote the map, went and conquered everything, redrew all the boundaries, but more importantly, he just wrecked the cultural, social, linguistic boundaries. He brought with him the Greek language and a whole bunch of people who wanted to be married who were Greek. And he intermingled the Greeks and the Macedonians and the Anatolians, modern-day Turkey, and eventually, even though this was a point of some tension and regret, the Jewish people, the Egyptians, Alexandria is in Egypt. That's named for Alexander, because he made it. The modern-day Iraqis, the modern-day Iranians, all of the people in between, the Persians, the Medes, even the Indians, get roped into what he's doing. And effectively, he even shapes life on the Italian peninsula, which gradually would displace the center of power on the Greek peninsula to then dominate the world with a whole bunch of Greekish ideas as well. Alexander Greekified everything, and that changed planet Earth. But there were a couple of pivotal battles in there that are really curious when you zoom in all the way to the level of what actually happened on the battlefield. Now, Alexander was tutored by literally Aristotle himself. So he's a good teacher. He had a good sense of what happened on a battlefield and how to manage his business there. And he had the complete trust of his allies and his teammates. And so in back-to-back battles, the Battle of Issus and the Battle of Gaugamilla. The point is, I don't know how it's pronounced. It always sounds like Gargamel to me, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's said. So just fill it in in your own brain. There was a battle and it was important. Here's what Alexander did that is so fascinating. He would always set up his right-hand man, his right-hand man. He'd always put him on his left. This is a guy named Parmenian, and his job in both of these battles is just hold the line, absorb the great big punch that we're going to get from our Persian enemies, and then Alexander would go off to the right and he would go in this weird way. Now, Darius, his enemy, the guy who, if he kills the whole game, is over and Alexander conquers the world, was always set up in the middle, surrounded by elite foot soldiers, just straight across the way. So Alexander, rather than going right at the thing he needs to get to, would always take this big arc around the outside. And especially at Gaugamella, he does exactly that. And eventually this little break opens up. And rather than continuing to try to finish his business on the two flanks and the front lines, Alexander exploits that little gap in the line. He's like a running back, bursts right through it and goes right for Darius. Let's just end this whole thing right here. It almost works. Ultimately, Darius flees the battlefield. Alexander decides to go and bail out his buddy Parmenion to demonstrate his loyalty and quality as a commander. And that's effectively the end of Darius. The Persians crumble and Alexander is victorious, and there's so much more to talk about. But there's these moments that are very decisive in history where you look at a great strategist and you realize that instead of running right at the thing they want, they take this kind of circuitous route, and only in retrospect can you understand why. So it is with Jesus' strategy in his plan to accomplish the things he needs to accomplish. As we move through the book of Matthew, it's just going to get more and more evident that this thing needs to happen in Jerusalem. This is where the whole trajectory of the story is headed. But at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, we see this. Verse 12 of Matthew 4. When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee, leaving Nazareth. He went and lived in Capernaum, which is by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali. That's up north. It's the wrong way. It's not the right way to Jerusalem. It's not where the impressive people live. So why, strategically, why is Jesus going in the wrong direction? Is he fleeing a confrontation that he's not ready to handle? Something that he thinks he'll be embarrassed if he does too early? Or does he have some kind of Alexander the Great like crazy, clever strategy that is only going to take shape and that we're only going to understand as it unfolds? Well, the program is called the 10-minute Bible hour. I am a Christian and rather enamored with the whole uh Jesus thing. So surprise, it's the latter. He had a plan and a strategy and a really good one. Jesus isn't just going to go up north to regroup or hang around. He sets up his base of operations near the Sea of Galilee, for the most part on the North Shore. I don't think he ever even set foot on the southern shore in the main town on the Sea of Galilee, which was the town of Tiberias. Instead, he sets up in this little fishing village named Capernaum. And we're going to figure out pretty quickly that he makes a lot of his most important connections with his disciples in this area, that most of the really iconic miracles that you totally remember from Sunday school, or if you're one of the people who listens to this and you never went to Sunday school and you're not in the Christian thing at all, you've still heard of the miracles that happened around this area. Almost everything other than Passion Week that you picture about Jesus, well, or his birth, happened up on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. So this is where it all went down. And Capernaum, it really is nothing remarkable about the town. Obviously, fishing was the big deal there. There was a Roman outpost nearby. I don't know how many soldiers would have been in that garrison, but I know there was a centurion. Centurions commanded more than a hundred men. You'd think centurion, it's probably like a hundred, but by this point in history, it was more than a hundred men that were assigned to a centurion. So I don't know, maybe a few hundred Roman soldiers handled the north shore of Galilee out of this base that was east of Capernaum. We know that Peter lived there, and at least his mother-in-law lived there as well. We know that because she got sick, and we see a resolution to her problem coming up a little bit later on. And it looks like Jesus straight up set up shop in Peter's house or next door to Peter's house. And what's crazy about it is you can go to this little village and you can see the synagogue that was there, or the synagogue that was built over the synagogue that was there at the time of Jesus. You can see uh the place where they would have boat launched out to fish on the Sea of Galilee. You can see the remains of what tradition at least says is Peter's house, and there's no competing tradition. So that's probably it. I think there's a Byzantine kind of shrine, pseudo-church thing over the top. I don't know, maybe it's Catholic. You'd think that'd be Catholic if it's Peter. I don't know, I can't remember for sure. But whatever the case, I mean, nobody lives there now, it's full of tour buses and everything else. But you can get a really good sense if you go to Capernaum of what this little freshwater coastal town was like. You can get a sense of what it would have been like for Jesus to, you know, bop out of the house there where he was staying, you know, under under Peter's roof and wander down the street to go and hit up a little bit of business or talk with some people or get in a boat, or for that matter, like this is really kind of probably pretty crass. But one of the things that I wanted to size up when I was there is like, okay, if this is Peter's house, I'm guessing they didn't have indoor plumbing. Like, where did Jesus go to the bathroom? Fully God, fully man, you cannot be offended. Stop being offended right now. Jesus went to the bathroom somewhere. And it was just even as trippy as that sounds, it was just kind of an interesting moment for me when I was there, just thinking about that. Like that occurred right here. Everything human about this guy during at least the high points of his ministry occurred in this really not that dazzling little town. So he's Jesus of Nazareth, but he almost just as easily could have had the nickname Jesus of Capernaum, if we were to be fair to where the majority of his reputation building things happen, Capernaum would get more credit. So there are some theological reasons for this that get broken down that come from the prophet Isaiah. And we're going to talk about what that means next time because that goes beyond geography. The big thing that we need to take home with us as we transition into the scene and setting of all of Jesus' public northern ministry, which is the vast majority of his public life, is that he chooses to set up shop in a place that is not that impressive. He chooses to set up shop in a place that has an occupying Gentile Roman garrison adjoining almost immediately to this community. He chooses to set up shop where the primary means of income are something as simple and age-old as fishing. He's going to draw on that analogy and that imagery in very dramatic and memorable ways that continue to shape, frankly, you, me, and the entire world around us. And it's also a place that people just would have, you know, cruised by. It's kind of a natural intersection point of a couple of important ancient roads that would have brought all kinds of people through Capernaum, which gave Jesus the opportunity not just to interact with Capernaum itself and the little neighboring villages that we'll become familiar with as we work further through Matthew, but also some outside characters who are only there because it serves as a crossroads, including the guy who wrote the book we're putting all the effort into studying. So we will definitely hearken back to this conversation about the setting of all of these things, but I want to get into the theology of the setting of all of these things tomorrow. In the meantime, hey, it's been a while since I have properly said thank you to all the people who are supporting the program. And I was really encouraging last week, by the way. I I don't I don't remember how many people jumped on, but I mean there's a handful of new people who jumped on. And I get a little email notification when that happens. And every time I do, there's just kind of this moment of hey, like that, that's that's really cool. That really helps. That makes this more long-term sustainable and makes me feel people like people like doing this with me. And so just thank you for the encouragement. I'll tell you who else is really encouraging is just all of you. So thank you for being here and for doing this with me. Those of you who support at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. Uh, you absolutely rule, and everybody else who's here, you don't have to support the podcast. It's great if you do, it's awesome if you don't too. I'm just so glad we get to have a conversation like this in this way at this level of depth. Okay, let's talk theology of geography of Jesus' choice for a home base. Manana. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Catch you soon.