Hello and welcome to the Scriptures A Real podcast.

This is the podcast where we talk about elements of the scriptures that have made them more real for us because we believe that helps us draw more power out of them and apply them to our lives better.

And we certainly need the power of God in our lives as much as we can have it.

I'm your host, Carrie Mielstein, and I'm so grateful to have my longtime friend and colleague, although that makes us sound old, so maybe you shouldn't say that.

But Dr. Gay Stratharne, who is a professor of ancient scripture like I am.

She's also the associate dean in my college, the College of Religious Education.

And you'll notice when she talks that Gay is from down under. And she studied at BYU, but also at,

well, I think you studied in Australia for a little while. You were a physical therapist,

weren't you? Yeah, I did. Yeah. And then at BYU and then at Claremont Graduate University, that's the

name of it now. I think you told me that last time. And you can hear more about Gay in our

earlier podcast. For those who have been following, she's been with us a few times now, even last year

with the Old Testament and so on. So I'd encourage you to go back and find those episodes with Gay, and you'll find that she's always good. So anyway, thank you, Gay. Thanks for being with us. Thanks, Carrie. It's good to be with you. Thanks for the invitation. Well, you're welcome. What else should we know about you, Gay? She plays cricket and is an avid cricket fan. I should say that. She taught a bunch of us had to play cricket once and that was actually a lot of fun. Yeah, I don't play it very well, but I do like to watch it. And it's World Cup is coming up, so that's a bit exciting at the moment. And you have to kind of stay up late at night to watch it, I think. That's right. Because the time zone. Well, wonderful. Today we're going to talk about the epistle to the Galatians,

which is, we're finally starting to get into some of the shorter epistles, and I'll just remind

our audience that we're studying them in the order that they are in the Bible, which is not

chronological order, but kind of order of length, except for Hebrews and a couple of things

like that. But anyway, but largely order of length. And so we're getting into some of the

shorter. We have several epistles that are this kind of mid-range length as we go from like

Galatians through Thessalonians and so on. So, Dr. Strathern is going to walk us through this. And so why don't you just tell us where

you'd like to jump in? Hey. So I think just the kind of a brief overview of Galatians,

in some ways this epistle is different from many of the others. Paul is not writing to a single city or a

single branch of the church like he is maybe in Corinthians or Romans, nor is he writing to a

specific individual like Timothy or Titus. But chapter 1 verse 2 says he's writing to the churches, plural, in Galatia.

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