Right on the front end today, I want to say thanks to everybody who supports this program.

This thing happens because of you, and I'm ridiculously grateful.

Hey, my friends, it's Matt.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and yesterday we started a great big game of

What If History about the whole conundrum, the whole situation with Paul and Philemon and

Onesimus.

There's a lot of question marks surrounding this,

but I think we can do some good logical Bible detective work to piece together what the most

likely scenario is here, and I think the most likely scenario is very fascinating. Now, the big picture goal of all of this, just to kind of

keep a carrot out in front and keep us moving forward, is to try to get to a place where we feel

we can answer the question, what if Paul hadn't sent Onesimus back to Philemon? But just between

you and me, it's just an excuse to give this

thing structure as we try to use the Bible and logic to flesh out the circumstances here.

Yesterday we got cracking on that, and today we continue by considering the whole Paul

prison thing. We're assuming, and I think the best assumption is that Paul is in prison in Rome.

This would be the imprisonment that happened to him at the end of his final missionary journey

that we hear about, at least in the Bible. Paul gets arrested in Jerusalem. He gets transferred

up to Cessaria, which is about a day's walk from Jerusalem in Israel.

He talks to a couple of Roman governors there who don't quite know what to do with them. This is all

at the end of acts. And then finally, Paul does something that's a much bigger deal than it

sounds like to you or me. He appeals to Caesar, which was the right of every Roman citizen. Because Paul was a

Roman citizen, they have to honor it, and they put him on a boat, and they ship him off to Rome.

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