Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we've got a mystery to solve.

And this is really fun. We're doing light original research here. We're asking lightly an original question about history in the Bible and the history of Christianity.

The question we're asking and working

through together in real time and learning about together in real time is this. Did the book

of Galatians work on its original recipients? That is, did the people to whom the letter

that you and I just worked through Galatians, did that group of people read it and receive it and change what

they were doing? Did it solve their problems? Did it strengthen them for the long haul? And did the

churches that received it work out? Did they stand for decades or even centuries or even a millennia?

Well, I think by my count, they're about six towns that we got to look at. Four mentioned in the Bible, and two maybe implied. We've looked at one of them. That was Derby.

And I think we've got a pretty good sense of whether or not Galatians worked for the Christians in Derby.

Then that sense would be, yeah, I think it mostly did work there. We've got just a tiny bit of

written evidence to suggest that there were some low-powered bishops there between the 300s and

700s, so we know Christianity to some extent was still in Derby at that point. I mean, that's

kind of a smoking gun. Yes.

We also did a little bit of background research on what was going on in Derby in terms of

just it as a town. And we were able to determine that they probably would have been a little shy on

young men because of some misguided military actions by a local king and previous bandit rulers who held Derby.

So that might have been a town that was well into decline, maybe even population collapse.

It wasn't a darling of the Roman Empire, so it wasn't being fueled with resources like some of its neighbors.

So if Christianity didn't have a great showing in Derby,

it might just be because Derby didn't have much of a future after the Bible. But the final thing,

I think we concluded about Derby is there are still answers there. They're just buried underground.

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