This is the Baimah podcast with Marty Solman. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today we

find ourselves in the ancient city of Pergamum and hear the letter to their church in its

original context.

Yes, so we're going to continue on this little journey. We've been trying to figure out

how to apply the hermeneutic that we typically use in our study here at Baimah. How do you

apply it to the apocalyptic literature of Revelation? And so rather than try to explain

the whole thing all at once, we're using the seven letters of the church as to kind of

baby step us into and through this learning curve. And so one of the things that we've

been doing in these first three letters is just looking at the context. What is the cultural

context of the letter? Because we're so used to reading Revelation and being totally

just kind of like, it's so vague, it's so crazy, it's so hard to understand, it's just

this really intimidating book. And so we're trying to show that it's really not intimidating

when you know what you're working with when it comes to apocalyptic literature. And so

in chapter one, we looked all at all these references and all these references that

John was using were coming out of the text and they were coming from what kind of book

sprint apocalyptic literature. Right. So so John was pulling very intentionally material

from that genre to let his readers know, this is what I'm doing. Books like Zechariah

and Daniel. Absolutely. Absolutely. Lots of that. So, then the second step to kind of

the next little baby step we're making is we're trying to show how cultural context changes

absolutely everything. And you've been to Turkey with me Brent. How how how realistic

was that? How much did context change the way you understood Revelation? Well, Revelation

in general is just so completely misunderstood. But when you add the context into it, it's

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