Hello, my name is Matt Whitman. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we are at the end of season five, a season we did on the Book of Galatians. But this fun little epilogue that we're doing right now is a bit of history mysterying. We're digging around together to see if we can figure out whether or not the Book of Galatians worked. That is, whether or not it made sense and clicked and stuck for the original audience,

to whom it was written.

So in my estimation, that means there are six towns that we got to look at to see if Christianity

worked out there.

The first two are Derby and Leistra.

We dug deep into those two, and what we discovered is, well, they haven't been dug up real well yet,

but there's some historical indication, a few little records here and there,

that indicate that Christianity stuck in those two small towns.

It probably really did go into decline pretty quickly after the New Testament for reasons unrelated to Christianity.

There's maybe a little bit of ruins in the town of Leicra that point to a very early church there.

So this is encouraging. That gives me the impression that maybe it worked. But now we're about to head

up the road from the site of ancient Leicester to the site of another town where Paul visited and where there was an early reception to the message of Christianity, probably a town that the Book of Galatians was directed to.

And that is the modern day city of Konya, K-O-N-Y-A.

Back in the day, they called it Iconium, and Paul visited here on multiple occasions,

and it looks like, even though it was a little rocky, that eventually a church presence

stuck here, probably Judaizers showed up and there was some

confusion about what the actual message of Jesus was. And my suspicion is that what we're

going to find today is that Paul got them back on track with the letter to the Galatians

and back on track with a couple of in-person visits that he made

and that it really, really stuck after that. It looks like Christianity did awfully well in Iconium.

And here is why. First, let's start with the Bible side. There are a couple of teeny, tiny little hints, a couple of references to a pair of characters who are historically associated with Iconium. Because we got some extra biblical lists of bishops that go way back with Iconium.

Like, it could be argued that we have records that say there were bishops from shortly

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