Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast. And when I was growing up, I used to watch The Simpsons. It was a little risque. So my parents, they kept a close eye on me while I watched that. But it was clever. And it was my first introduction to, I don't know, not sarcasm. What do you call it? Satire, I guess. I mean, they made fun of everything. It was really fun. That was a pretty influential show for me when I was a kid. And one of the things

that I think was very clever about it is that they set the show basically nowhere. They set it in

the fictional town of Springfield, right? But where is Springfield? Because there's a billion of them in the United

States. And so throughout all the course of all the episodes and everything, you can try to

triangulate which one you're talking about, but you never know because it's just such an

interchangeable town name. Well, I think one of the real interchangeable town names from New Testament times was Antioch, also Cessaria, also Alexandria.

Really, any town that was named for some really big, important historic character was probably going to have other towns named for it because it's a big important character and how are you going

to satisfy the ego of somebody who has enough appetite to want to name a whole bunch of towns

after them. So when you say Alexandria, you always picture the one in northern Egypt, but there's a

bunch more. When you say Cessaria, we're usually talking about the one on the coast that was the seat of government power for the Romans in the time of Jesus, but there are other ones.

And when we say Antioch, we're usually talking about the town pretty much directly north of Jerusalem on the east coast of the Mediterranean

back then. It was in Syria. Now it's in the corner of modern day Turkey. But that's not the only

Antioch. There are a bunch of other Antiochs. And the second most famous one is the one we're

going to talk about today. It's Pasidian Antioch, which is one of the four towns that I think it's most likely that the book of Galatians was written to in the first place. It is also the fourth town that we're going to go visit and see what we can dust off and dig up to try to answer the question, did Galatians work?

Well, in Derby and Leicester, it looks like Galatians worked, but those were really little towns.

So there's not a lot of evidence left there.

But what we do see certainly gives the strong indication that Christianity stuck for a long time.

In Iconium, where we've been hanging out for

the last couple days on this podcast, just unequivocally, Galatians worked, Christianity stuck,

and even 300 years after they received the book of Galatians, either directly or maybe they

were the second people to get it. We've got writings from an ancient bishop from there that is directly referencing Galatians.

So not only did Christianity catch on in Iconium, not only did the book of Galatians take root in Iconium,

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