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Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I have a book recommendation for you. No, I don't. No, I don't. I'm not actually going to recommend that you read this book, but we are going to talk about this book for just a minute, because it's pretty cool. The book is called The Chronicle of Fredegar with its continuations. It was written by a handful of people. It took several generations to write the Chronicle of Fredegar. It was written in the 500s, 600s, and 700s A.D. We don't normally talk about stuff that forward into history, but I got a reason. Just a minute, we're going to get to the reason. But first, there's an exciting, juicy history story, and I just can't pass it up. So the Chronicle of Fredegar tells the story of the Central European, the Christian kingdoms that came after the Roman Empire kind of petered out and moved east. Europe at this time is looking for new leadership. The kings are weak. Rome is weak. The Pope, I mean, it's not nothing, but politically fairly weak during this time as well. But I'll tell you who wasn't weak during that time, the Muslims. Islam is a brand new thing. They just thought of a new religion, and immediately it turned violent. And I don't care if that historical analysis is somehow offensive to people. I don't like the way we kind of try to sprinkle sugar over the top of really ugly things and really ugly movements in history. Here's the reality: Islam was a bulldozer and wildly aggressive, like to the level of Alexander the Great, except it wasn't spreading Greek culture, it was spreading Islam. And Islam quickly covers North Africa. And then a Muslim leader, the caliph, jumps the Mediterranean from North Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar into southern Spain, the Iberian Peninsula. And the idea is to conquer all of Europe and take Rome and displace Christianity. And it's, I mean, the stakes are enormously high. And I'll be honest with you here, in the 700s, when this is gaining momentum, I mean, they're kind of not catching Europe on their best day. Europe is very vulnerable at this point because there aren't a lot of competent families running things. There isn't a really stout king. There's a weak old dynasty that's still in place, one that gets referenced in the Matrix movies of all things, called the Merovingians. They're Frankish. And their kings by this point are they're Christian, but they're pathetic. And who rises? That was pretty mean. Like I don't know them personally. I don't know. To me, as a history guy, when I read about it, look, the chronicle Fredegard looked like they were real weak, whatever the case. This mayor of the palace, a guy named Charles Martell. Remember that name. It's going to come up later. Martel means the hammer. That's kind of cool. You can sort of hear it in the Spanish. Martillo is Spanish for hammer, Martell. I think that's pretty awesome. So Martell, the mayor of the palace, not the king, rides out to meet the Muslim caliph at what becomes the Battle of Tours, kind of between France and Spain. This is kind of Europe's last gasp. They lose here. There's nothing to stop Islam from spreading over everything. So it's a you know pretty high stakes as high stakes go. Maybe the highest stakes battle since Jesus and up until Dunkirk, World War. I don't know. I mean, it's a really big deal, right? Well, long story short, Charles Martel wins there in 732 A.D. at the Battle of Tours. That kind of creates the dividing line between European Islam and Christendom. And the result is that Martell's descendants become very powerful, including the very famous Charlemagne, who is crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 A.D. Well, this new Carolingian dynasty, they wanted to record what was awesome about them, and they wanted to record their own little personal legend about how they got to be such a big deal so people could, you know, so they could buy into the narrative and support the crown. I mean, I get I get it. It's cool. And the book they leave behind is a really cool multi-generational chronicle. Again, the chronicle of Fredegar with multiple continuations. I think there are like four or maybe five continuations that go along with it. It has cool medieval pictures. You can kind of picture I'm looking at one here, and it looks like there's a king and maybe a queen, and they got bows and arrows, and it looks like there's a duck, but the duck has legs like a person, and it dances with them to celebrate something. Makes me want to read the book more. One of the really cool things about this book is that for this important time in history, we have primary sources because we have manuscripts going back to just right at the time that this was in the process of being written. So the provenance of this book is great. We know that we're reading what was written down in the first place. We got multiple super old copies. The importance of this book, The Chronicle of Fredegar, is huge because it talks about a very important moment, not just in the history of politics, but in the history of the church and God's redemptive plan. I don't know if God gave Charles the hammer, Charles Martel, superpowers at the Battle of Tours to defeat Islam. Maybe. Maybe God still moves the hearts of kings and decides the outcomes of certain battles. I don't know. I'm kind of flat-footed. I haven't really thought about whether God won the Battle of Tours. But dang it, I sure like the outcome because I wanted the church to persist. And it did when Islam was in a very, very conquery mood, and the resources of Islam end up going south and east at that point, all the way into India, all the way out to China, all the way south into Africa. But this Chronicle of Fredegar has an intact provenant. So we know it's reliable. We know it's old. It tells a very important story about the history of God's redemptive plan and the history of Christianity and the church. And it's good. So I got a question for you. Why not just tag that onto the end of the Bible? I mean, wouldn't that be cool to just get, you know, another book, another testament of what happened with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and eventually then the church and how the Holy Spirit guided. I mean, we could have another chronicles in the Bible. Why don't we just get the Bible committee together? I don't know who's on it. There's got to be somebody, and just have them do like a, you know, Bible vote or something and be like, there, now all of Christendom has agreed that the 67th book of the Bible will be the Chronicle of Fredegar. Well, there's a lot of reasons we're not going to do that, even though it's a great book, and even though it's worth reading and knowing, and even though we know it's reliable and at least it's, you know, old, maybe it exaggerates or whatever. And I don't really looked into it. I mean, come on, what a stupid question on my part. It doesn't rise to the level of Bible. It doesn't meet any of the tests of the Bible. That is, the scriptures that Jesus affirmed, the Jewish scriptures that were the Old Testament, or stuff embraced by the church in the early going, written by authoritative people, affirmed by Jesus, teaching the exact same stuff and accurate. Chronicle of Fredegar is cool, it just doesn't rise to those standards. Yet we can still acknowledge it's cool. Why am I telling you all of this? Why am I taking a whole day on this when we're trying to talk about Philemon? Because my friends, we're like two layers deep right now. Are we going to come back up for air with Philemon? Oh yeah, we are. But in order to do the setup for Philemon, I had to take us into a couple of cherished books that are incredibly valuable, incredibly old, I think, reliable-ish, as ancient documents go, and treasured by Jews and Christians alike, but not Bible. These books are called First and Second Maccabees. There's also a third Maccabees that even fewer Christians think belongs in the Bible. And then there's, I think, even a fourth Maccabees that almost no one, maybe like a couple of little teeny tiny groups, think belongs in the Bible. Protestant Bibles, evangelical Bibles, most Bibles that are in print in the English-speaking world, do not have first and second Maccabees in the Bible. Though the people who make those Bibles would say first and second Maccabees are important and scripture adjacent and really worth reading and knowing, they just don't quite rise to the level of Bible. Catholics disagree with this. That was not an easy process for Catholics. Even during the time of Jesus and the early going of Christianity, first and second Maccabees among Jews occupied a different place than the Old Testament scripture. I mean, the Jews still liked them and they still found spiritual wisdom in them, but they weren't a part of the collection, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that we call the Septuagint. Am I overwhelming you right now? You got this. Don't get all screened, just slap the slap the face a little bit. I know we've been into like the Battle of Tours in 732 AD, and now we're into the time before Christ and everything. But I think we got this, and I think it's important to set it up. So stretch it out for a second. Stay with me. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. It was handed down in Hebrew. But during that time we've been talking about the last couple of days, after Alexander and during the time of his generals, the time of the Diadochi, everything got Greekified. Remember, Alexander just seeded Greek language right over the top of the soil of the entire world. It's kind of mean. But he did it, and now Greek becomes the lingua franca of every that's the language everybody speaks and does business in. And a ton of Jews end up in Alexandria, Egypt. And after a couple generations, they don't speak or read Hebrew anymore, but they still believe in God. And the elders want the Jews to still believe in God. So under the reign of the Ptolemaic Empire, they pull together in the 200s BC. The legend is, I think, 70 years. I think it's 70 scholars. Well, LXX, I can figure it out. And all the scholars they go and translate the Hebrew Old Testament, which did not include first and second Maccabees because they hadn't been written yet. They translate the whole Old Testament from Hebrew into the Greek of the day. As the legend goes, this isn't in the Bible, this is a legend. They came out and every single one of them produced an identical translation. Do I think that happened? No, I think that is a legend. And what I think probably happened is a bunch of people worked on it, translated it. Maybe they even did it in separate rooms and they came together and they reconciled it. During the time of Jesus, the Septuagint was very, very popular. But when the Septuagint was made, the book of first and second Maccabees hadn't been written yet. So those weren't in the Septuagint proper. Those were later editions that tell the story of things that hadn't happened yet when the Septuagint was getting rolling. Bible translation isn't quick. So these timelines, I mean, they might overlap a little bit, but first and second Maccabees, and especially third and fourth, they're after the fact. They're in limbo. And when you go and you actually read, and we're going to talk about this over the next few days as we fill in this story of what everything was like by the time we get to the book of Philemon, when you go and you look at the actual composition of first and second Maccabees, this is what I think you're going to see. Wait, where are we at time-wise? Nope. We're just going to pause right there, and I'm going to talk more about how first and second Maccabees feel when you read them tomorrow. Final thought here. I know there are some of you who are here listening who are Orthodox or Catholic brothers and sisters, and you're like, dang, dude, I did not like that. You didn't say it the Catholic or Orthodox way. Well, I didn't say it the Catholic or Orthodox way because I'm not convinced or compelled by it. And if I were, I guess I'd be more likely to be Catholic or Orthodox. But what I'm really interested in here is not sorting out this question that really didn't clearly take shape until the 1500s. That's when Rome solidified the presence of these two books in the canon. What I am interested in is exploring what these two books tell us historically and in a spiritual context about what happened to God's chosen people between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And we can agree on this. It's important and it's interesting, and it's going to really help us round out our sense of how we went from where the Old Testament leaves off to the situation into which the letter of Philemon was delivered in the context of the New Testament. So if I have irritated you, I would like to cash in a few of my let's give each other the benefit of the doubt chips that I have earned over the course of our relationship. And thank you for your grace with me. Even as I am honest about convictions, we might not precisely share. I think we can get along anyway. And wouldn't you rather have me just be honest about those convictions instead of trying to pretend that I think things I don't to earn some sort of false unity? I would rather do convictional unity where we just acknowledge we might not see it the same way. High five and get on with it. Speaking of getting on with it, that's what's going to happen tomorrow. If you do get bored, though, Chronicle of Fredegar, great book, doesn't belong in the Bible, but it is a great book and you might get a kick out of it. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.