Come and study Holy Scripture with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed tradition,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

When we get started in just a minute, We'll be picking up at the beginning of chapter 20 in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.

As I now always say, because it's been slightly altered now, you can go and listen to the first Bible study on the Book of Acts online at Ancient Faith Radio, because it is now posted there.

We've caught up that close at least.

So if you want to go back and hear the introduction to the book, you can do that there. In chapter one, I think, too. But

so to get us caught up to where we were last time, St. Paul is on essentially his third sort of

missionary journey.

He came to Ephesus last time,

and Arthur has helpfully brought us a visual aid in the form of a Chotchke from Ephesus,

which is the, this is a design for tourists, a replica of what the goddess Artemis, as she was worshipped at Ephesus looked like.

We commented last time on the fact that she looks a little different than

any other statue of Artemis you'd find anywhere else in the Greek or Roman world, because she had

been sort of smushed together with other Eastern mother goddess figures. We talked about how

Roman culture sort of assimilated. A lot of the religious beliefs of conquered territory

sort of brought it all together and just said, oh, well, this is really, these are really all the

same. You know, gods just by different names. And that was a strong approach when you're

looking to sort of religiously unify a diverse empire of

peoples if you could just sort of say ah that's all the same you know you can let sort of whatever

local festivals they have go on you know and just file it all in this oh this is all part of one

part of one big thing we tend to one. Part of one big thing.

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