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Paul_s 4 Missionary Journeys Explained in 1 HOUR · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: The road from Jerusalem to Damascus runs about one hundred
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  Speaker 1: and forty miles north, climbing out of the Judean Hills,
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  Speaker 1: dropping into the Great Syrian Plain, and ending at one
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  Speaker 1: of the oldest continuously inhabited.
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  Speaker 2: Cities on earth.
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  Speaker 1: Sometime around the year thirty four of the Common Era,
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  Speaker 1: give or take a year, a pharisee in his early
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  Speaker 1: thirties was riding that road with a small armed escort.
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  Speaker 1: He carried letters of authorization from the High Priest in Jerusalem,
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  Speaker 1: granting him the legal right to enter the synagogues of Damascus,
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  Speaker 1: identify any followers of the Way, and bring them back
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  Speaker 1: to the Holy City in chains. He had already done
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  Speaker 1: this in Jerusalem its seventy judge. He intended to do
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  Speaker 1: it everywhere the new sect of Galileans had spread. His
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  Speaker 1: name was Saul, and at noon, with the sun directly overhead,
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  Speaker 1: a light brighter than the sun struck him to the ground.
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  Speaker 1: He heard voice speak his name twice. Acts Chapter nine,
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  Speaker 1: verses four and five recalled what came next. He fell
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  Speaker 1: to the ground and heard a voice say to him, Saul, Saul,
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  Speaker 1: why do you persecute me?
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  Speaker 2: Who are you? Lord?
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  Speaker 1: Saul asked I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, he replied.
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  Speaker 1: Three days later, Saul of Tarsus would rise from blindness
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  Speaker 1: as Paul Doo Apostle, and the Roman world would never recover.
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  Speaker 1: To understand who fell on that road, we have to
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  Speaker 1: go back about thirty years in west across the Mediterranean
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  Speaker 1: to a city called Tarsus. Tarsus sat at the southeastern
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  Speaker 1: edge of modern Turkey, on the Sydnus River, behind a
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  Speaker 1: bay that had once belonged to the Phoenicians and now
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  Speaker 1: belonged to Rome. The geographer Strabo, writing in the late
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  Speaker 1: first century before Christ, ranked Tarsus, along and Alexandria, grow
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  Speaker 1: as one or three great university cities of the speaking
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  Speaker 1: East of just particularly famous for it stoic argument into
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  Speaker 1: this Greco Roman intellectual hub. A Jewish boy was born
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  Speaker 1: somewhere around the year five of the Common Era into
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  Speaker 1: the tribe of Benjamin. He inherited two things from his
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  Speaker 1: father that would shape every step of his life. The
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  Speaker 1: first was a strict Pharasaic devotion to the Mosaic law.
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  Speaker 1: The second was Roman citizenship by birth, a privilege so
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  Speaker 1: rare among first century Jews of the Eastern provinces that
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  Speaker 1: it would later save his life on Ay three separate occasions,
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  Speaker 1: and eventually carry him before Caesar himself. The boy was
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  Speaker 1: sent to Jerusalem for advanced rabbinic training in the school
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  Speaker 1: of Gomaliel, grandson of the great Hillel and the most
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  Speaker 1: respected teacher of Pharisaic Judaism in his generation. The missioner
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  Speaker 1: Tractate Sota remembers Gamaliel as the man whose death meant
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  Speaker 1: that the glory of the law ceased from that class.
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  Speaker 1: From living emerged a young Pharisee. We must fear that
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  Speaker 1: conviction and remarkable rhetorical gifts. In Acts, Chapter twenty two,
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  Speaker 1: verse three, Paul himself summarizes his early formation this way, I.
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  Speaker 2: Am a Jew born in.
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  Speaker 1: Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. I
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  Speaker 1: studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law
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  Speaker 1: of our ancestors. Saul's first appearance in the New Testament
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  Speaker 1: is not as a teacher or a preacher. It is
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  Speaker 1: as a witness to a lynching.
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  Speaker 2: A Hellenistic Jewish seacon names for the Word of the Lord,
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  Speaker 2: had been preaching a vision of the resurrected Messiah. Judgment
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  Speaker 2: Side there Josh Synogaus.
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  Speaker 1: He said he him, the found him guilty of blackbrain,
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  Speaker 1: the sacred aside the city to be stone.
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  Speaker 2: The text in Acts, chapter seven, words fifty eight mentions
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  Speaker 2: induced in Bossing, a detail that will reverberate through the
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  Speaker 2: rest of scripture, and dragged him out of the city
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  Speaker 2: and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their
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  Speaker 2: coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.
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  Speaker 2: The word translated young man can stretch in age from
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  Speaker 2: twenty to forty in Greek usage. He was old enough
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  Speaker 2: to consent to the killing, and the next chapter tells
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  Speaker 2: us he did. From that day forward, Watauss made will
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  Speaker 2: crush the followers of Jesus before they spread further.
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  Speaker 1: He hauled men and women out of their homes. He
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  Speaker 1: authorized arrests, he approved executioners. And he was on his
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  Speaker 1: way to do more of the same in Damascus when
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  Speaker 1: the risen Christ confronted him on the road. What happened
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  Speaker 1: in the three days that followed is one of the
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  Speaker 1: most precisely documented spiritual events in ancient literature. Saul was
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  Speaker 1: led blind into the city and lodged on the street
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  Speaker 1: still called Strait today in Old Damascus, a Jewish believer
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  Speaker 1: named Annanias for hero Is sent in a vision to
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  Speaker 1: lay hands.
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  Speaker 2: On him your light. The skins, as.
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  Speaker 1: Luke describes them, fell from his eyes. He was baptized,
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  Speaker 1: and then, surprising every reader who expected him to march
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  Speaker 1: straight to Jerusalem, Saul disappeared in Galatians chapter one, verses
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  Speaker 1: fifteen to seventeen, writing twenty years later, to defend the
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  Speaker 1: divine origin of his calling. Paul fills in the gap
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  Speaker 1: that acts leaved silent. But when God, who set me
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  Speaker 1: apart from my mother's womb and called me by.
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  Speaker 2: His grace, was pleased to reveal his son in me
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  Speaker 2: so that I might preaching and I show the gentiles, my.
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  Speaker 1: Immediate response was not to consult any human being. I
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  Speaker 1: did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who
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  Speaker 1: were apostles before I was. But I went into Arabia.
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  Speaker 1: Later I returned to Damascus. Three years in Arabia, probably
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  Speaker 1: the Nabotian kingdom east and south of Damascus. Three years
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  Speaker 1: of silence, of relearning the scriptures with new eyes, of
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  Speaker 1: preparing for what would become a thirty year sprint across
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  Speaker 1: the Roman world.
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  Speaker 2: When he finally returned into Damascus David and began preaching
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  Speaker 2: over knights that Jesus was the son of gods.
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  Speaker 1: The locals in goog authorities decided that the safest cooks
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  Speaker 1: was to kill friends, lowered him at night through an
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  Speaker 1: opening in the city wall in a basket. He arrived
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  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem as a marked man, whom the apostles still feared.
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  Speaker 1: Only Barnabas, a levite from Cyprus, vouched for him publicly.
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  Speaker 1: Even then, Saul's preaching provoked an assassination plot, and the
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  Speaker 1: brothers shipped him quietly back to Tarsus, where he disappears
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  Speaker 1: from the narrative for nearly a decade. He resurfaces in
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  Speaker 1: a city called Antioch on the Orontes.
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  Speaker 2: Antioch was the third.
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  Speaker 1: Largest city of the Roman Empires, after Rome and Alexandria, the.
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  Speaker 2: Caital of the Province of Syria, at a cosmopolitan height
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  Speaker 2: of Greeks, Dune and Syrians, where the Gospels into Gentlem community.
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  Speaker 2: The Jerusalem Church sent Barnabas to investigate. Barnabas, watching the
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  Speaker 2: work explode beyond his capacity to disciple alone, traveled four
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  Speaker 2: hundred kilometers up to Tarsus, found Saul and brought him back.
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  Speaker 1: They taught together in Antioch for an entire year, and
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  Speaker 1: the historian Luke notes a detail that would change religious
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  Speaker 1: vocabulary forever.
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  Speaker 2: Acts Chapter eleven.
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  Speaker 1: Verse twenty six records the disciples were called Christians first
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  Speaker 1: at Antioch. It was a Roman imperial label formed by
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  Speaker 1: adding the Latin suffix aanus to the Greek title Christos,
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  Speaker 1: meaning partisans of Christ. It was probably meant as mockery.
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  Speaker 1: It stuck, and then, sometime around the year forty six,
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  Speaker 1: in a prayer meeting of teachers and prophets in that
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  Speaker 1: Antiochine church, let the Holy Spirit gave the word that
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  Speaker 1: would launch the first missionary journey. Acts Chapter thirteen, verse two.
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  Speaker 1: While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy
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  Speaker 1: Spirit said, set apart for me, Barnabas and soul, and
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  Speaker 1: made the work to which I have called them. They
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  Speaker 1: laid hands on the two go in p Church, sending
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  Speaker 1: me the Lord prit. The man who had once ridden
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  Speaker 1: north toward Damascus to Christians back to Jerusalem in chains,
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  Speaker 1: was about soon ride west towards the rest of the
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  Speaker 1: world with a very different cargo. The harbor at Seleucia Pieria,
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  Speaker 1: sixteen miles down the Orontes from Antioch was the working
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  Speaker 1: port of Roman Syria. From its stone keys, grain ships
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  Speaker 1: moved south to Egypt and west to Italy, and pilgrims,
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  Speaker 1: traders and now missions took ship for the Mediterranean. Lord
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  Speaker 1: favours our voyage. Sometime in the spring of the year
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  Speaker 1: forty six, three men walked the gangplank of a coasting
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  Speaker 1: vessel bound for Cyprus. Barnabas the senior partner, saul Is protege,
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  Speaker 1: and a young man named John Mark, Barnabas's cousin, brought
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  Speaker 1: along as a junior assistant. The crushing was about one
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  Speaker 1: hundred and thirty miles men. The destination was Salamis on
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  Speaker 1: the eastern coast, the home synagogue community of Barnabas himself,
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  Speaker 1: who had been born on the island. The Jewish synagogues
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  Speaker 1: of Salamis. It is a difficult then traveled the entire
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  Speaker 1: length of the island is with us roughly one hundred
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  Speaker 1: miles until they reached Paphos on the western coast. Paphos
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  Speaker 1: was the seat of the Roman Proconsul of Cyprus, and
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  Speaker 1: the proconsul that year. People of Rome to ancient in
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  Speaker 1: strict plead by the woods so leged in the stole
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  Speaker 1: then coast of the command and the identified at Presidian
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  Speaker 1: Antioch attest to a senatorial family of Sergei Pauley with
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  Speaker 1: the states that extended deep into Asia. Minor Sergius paulas
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  Speaker 1: Luke tells us, was intelligence who had heard about this
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  Speaker 1: strange Jewish gospel.
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  Speaker 2: The merchant wanted to know more stolen, but a.
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  Speaker 1: Sorcerer attached to his court, a Jewish false prophet whose
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  Speaker 1: name in Aramaic was bar Jesus and in Greek Elemus,
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  Speaker 1: tried then against the missionaries this sorcery the encounter of
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  Speaker 1: Bombag in Confrontation Acts, chapter thirteen.
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  Speaker 2: The heark recalled the pivot they are not my own.
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  Speaker 2: Then Saul, but was also called Paul.
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  Speaker 1: Filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elemus and said,
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  Speaker 1: by the one child of the Devil, I think.
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  Speaker 2: Is right magician.
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  Speaker 1: In the same Elemis went blind. The proconsul believed, and
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  Speaker 1: from that moment on Luke stops calling the apostle Saul
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  Speaker 1: and starts calling him Paul. The Hebrew name belonged to
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  Speaker 1: the Pharisee who had chased Christians. The Roman name would
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  Speaker 1: belong to the missionary who would chase the Gentiles from Paphos.
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  Speaker 1: The company sailed north across the open latter toward the
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  Speaker 1: southern coast of Asia Minor and Guaia. Hafergi mate dou
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  Speaker 1: Fiat Borstion disembarked at Perega in Pamphylia. There abruptly and
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  Speaker 1: without an explanation, John Mark left the team and returned
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  Speaker 1: to Jerusalem. The text gives no reason. The fallout would
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  Speaker 1: not surface for years, but it would eventually split Paul
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  Speaker 1: and Barnabas.
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  Speaker 2: The two senior missionaries.
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  Speaker 1: Climbed inland alone, ascending the Roman via Sebaste, through the
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  Speaker 1: Taurus Mountains and onto the high plateau of central Anatonia.
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  Speaker 2: Their target was Pisidian.
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  Speaker 1: Antioch, a Roman colonial city established by Augustus, garrisoned with
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  Speaker 1: veterans and now governed under the very Sergei Pauli, whose
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  Speaker 1: estates the proconsul on Cyprus had inherited in the Pisidian
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  Speaker 1: Anti mesnagore On a Sabbath mod or preached to.
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  Speaker 2: From a complete missionary recorded in the New Testament tick he.
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  Speaker 1: Retold the entire arc of Israelite history from the patriarchs
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  Speaker 1: to David, then transitioned to Jesus of Nazareth as the
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  Speaker 1: resurrected son of David dead, and raised the fillment of
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  Speaker 1: every prophetic line. Do not let the noise the next
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  Speaker 1: worsap drown out that the city gathered to hear him.
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  Speaker 1: The Jewish leadership, watching the synagogue overflowed by gentile pagans
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  Speaker 1: hungry for the message, organized the backlash. The promises made
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  Speaker 1: to our barnabas turn in un quoted Isaiah. Here the
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  Speaker 1: word of Chapter thirteen, verses forty six and forty seven.
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  Speaker 1: We had to speak the word of God to you first,
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  Speaker 1: since you rejected for God and do not consider yourself
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  Speaker 1: worthy of yours. We now term the gentiles, for this
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  Speaker 1: is what the Lord has commanded us. I have made
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  Speaker 1: you a light for the gentiles, that you may bring
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  Speaker 1: salvation to the ends of the earth. They were thrown
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  Speaker 1: out of the city. They walked east along the highway
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  Speaker 1: to Iconium modern Conya, the ancient capital of Lacaeonia.
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  Speaker 2: The same pattern repeated.
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  Speaker 1: The synagogue the message conversions of violent reaction. They escaped
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  Speaker 1: a plant stoning and pushed forty miles south to Listra.
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  Speaker 1: Listra was a tiny outpost compared to the cities. They
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  Speaker 1: had left the.
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  Speaker 2: Roman Veteran colony, in a region where great lords, the
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  Speaker 2: trade language and Chao work was still spoken on the streets.
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  Speaker 2: Rise brother.
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  Speaker 1: There, Paul healed a man of cradling by hand. The crowd,
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  Speaker 1: startled by the miracle, decided that the gods had visited
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  Speaker 1: them in human form. The Roman poet of Veed, in
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  Speaker 1: his Metamorphosies, preserves a local legend that the Lycaonian region
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  Speaker 1: had once entertained Zeus and Hermes, disguised as travelers who
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  Speaker 1: had punished an inhospitable village.
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  Speaker 2: And rewarded an old couple.
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  Speaker 1: Named Bolts and Philammon. The Listrans faced with two strangers
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  Speaker 1: healing replace.
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  Speaker 2: They called Babas my brother. His wisdom shall guide you
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  Speaker 2: because he was the speaker. The priests and oxen and
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  Speaker 2: guards to sacrifice to them.
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  Speaker 1: And.
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  Speaker 2: We are only met to stop turn from these works.
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  Speaker 2: Jewish opponents from Antioch and Iconium arrived in Listra. They
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  Speaker 2: turned we will wanted to worship the demand into a
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  Speaker 2: mob that wanted to stone them. Paul was dragged out
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  Speaker 2: of the city, pummeled with rocks, and left for dead.
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  Speaker 2: The disciples gathered around his body and he stood up
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  Speaker 2: and walked back into the city. The next morning, he
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  Speaker 2: and Barnabas left for Derby, sixty miles further east, brother
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  Speaker 2: and many disciples. Then they made a decision that defines
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  Speaker 2: what kind of mission Paul would run for the rest
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  Speaker 2: of his life.
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  Speaker 1: Instead of returning to Antioch the short way by the
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  Speaker 1: road back through the Solutionian Gates, they turned around and
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  Speaker 1: walked back through every single city He had just tried
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  Speaker 1: to kill them the Pisidian Antioch, that you may strengthen
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  Speaker 1: the new disciples and be strength, appointing the elders for
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  Speaker 1: each church, instructing them on what was coming worthy of
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  Speaker 1: the court from ghost visits in all stupent fourteen gentlemen,
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  Speaker 1: Verse twenty two is one of the soberest sentences in
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  Speaker 1: the New Testament. We must go through many hardships to
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  Speaker 1: enter the Kingdom of God. They sailed back to Antioch
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  Speaker 1: from Atalia and reported to the Sending Church everything God
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  Speaker 1: had done. The first missionary journey had lasted roughly two years.
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  Speaker 1: It had birthed at least for churches in the Roman
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  Speaker 1: provinces of Pamphylia, Galicia, and Pisidia, and it had set
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  Speaker 1: off the first major theological crisis of the Christian movement.
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  Speaker 1: Some Jewish Christian teachers from Judea arrived in Antioch, insisting
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  Speaker 1: that the Gentile converts were not properly saved unless there
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  Speaker 1: was circumcised cannot and accepted the lawful not man. Paul
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  Speaker 1: and Barnabas, who had just finished preaching grace alone to
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  Speaker 1: dozens of Gentile congregations, refused. The dispute could not be
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  Speaker 1: resolved locally, so the Church so that the Jewish lies
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  Speaker 1: down to Jerusalem to lay the case before the apostles
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  Speaker 1: and elders.
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  Speaker 2: The meeting that follow law recorded in the Master chapter fifteen,
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  Speaker 2: became the first ecumenical nitial of the Christian authority.
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  Speaker 1: Peter rose first and reminded the gathering of his own
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  Speaker 1: experience with Cornelius. Paul and Barnabas described what they had
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  Speaker 1: seen God among the gent talks of the law James,
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  Speaker 1: by the the judgment had the Jerusalem Church held accountable,
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  Speaker 1: for which the Council framed and Acts Chapter fifteen, verse
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  Speaker 1: twenty eight with extraordinary care. It seemed good to the
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  Speaker 1: Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with
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  Speaker 1: anything beyond the following requirements. The gentile churches were not
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  Speaker 1: under Mosaic law. Salvation was by grace through faith in
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  Speaker 1: the crucified and risen Christ full stop. The decision was
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  Speaker 1: sent in writing to Antioch by the hand of two delegates,
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  Speaker 1: Judas Balsabas and Silas Paul. When he reflected on this
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  Speaker 1: council later in Galatians chapter two is remember josh Tribes. James, Peter,
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  Speaker 1: and John had given Coven Barnabus the right hand of
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  Speaker 1: fellowship agreement and confirmed their mission to the uncircumcised. The
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  Speaker 1: first journey was over. The theological battle for the Gentile
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  Speaker 1: mission was for the moment one. The Antioch Church barely
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  Speaker 1: settled the dispute over gentile circumcision when Paul proposed a
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  Speaker 1: five trip to revisit the churches he and Barnabas had
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  Speaker 1: founded on the first journey. Barnabus agreed and wanted to
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  Speaker 1: bring John Marc along again, using Paul the young The
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  Speaker 1: young man who had abandoned the team at Perga had not,
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  Speaker 1: in Paul's estimation, earned a second chance. The disagreement was
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  Speaker 1: sharp enough to break the partnership that had carried Christianity
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  Speaker 1: across the Eastern Mediterranean for the past several years Barnabas
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  Speaker 1: took john Mark and sailed for Cyprus. Paul chose a
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  Speaker 1: new partner, Silas, the same delicate Jerusalem had sent with
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  Speaker 1: the Council letter, and headed overland through Syria and Silitia,
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  Speaker 1: strengthening the churches as he went. Roughly d decade later,
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  Speaker 1: Paul would write affectionately about John Mark in his letters
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  Speaker 1: to the colossums and to Timothy, suggesting the breach eventually healed,
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  Speaker 1: but for now the two original missionaries were on different ships,
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  Speaker 1: never to travel together again. Paul climbed back through the
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  Speaker 1: Solition gates and into South Galatian, retracing the route of
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  Speaker 1: the first journey in reverse. At Listra, he picked up
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  Speaker 1: a third companion. Timothy was a young disciple, the son
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  Speaker 1: of a Jewish believing mother named Eunice and a Greek
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  Speaker 1: father we held spoken of by the brothers in Listra
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  Speaker 1: and Icona. Paul circumcised him before bringing him on the road,
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  Speaker 1: not as a matter of salvation, the council had just
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  Speaker 1: settled that, but as a matter of practical access to
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  Speaker 1: the synagogues, where Paul still preached first in every city.
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  Speaker 1: Then the team turned northwest toward unknown territory twice the
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  Speaker 1: Holy Spirit closed doors. They tried to preach in the
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  Speaker 1: Roman province of Asia and were forbidden. They tried to
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  Speaker 1: enter Bithynia along the Black Sea and were stopped again.
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  Speaker 1: They drifted northwest until they reached the coast at Troas,
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  Speaker 1: the ancient city overlooking the Aegean, a few miles from
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  Speaker 1: the ruins of Homeric Troy. There in the night, Paul
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  Speaker 1: had the vision recorded in Acts Chapter sixteen, verse nine,
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  Speaker 1: during the night come over to mass vision of a
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  Speaker 1: man Hecedonia standing and begging him come over to Macedonia
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  Speaker 1: and help us. In the very next sentence, Luke's narrative
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  Speaker 1: shifts pronouns he had been writing about they. He now
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  Speaker 1: writes about we. The doctor from Antioch, the future author
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  Speaker 1: of the Gospel that bears his name, had joined the team,
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  Speaker 1: almost certainly had tro Us. The four of them booked
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  Speaker 1: passage across the northern Aegean and landed at Neapolis, ten
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  Speaker 1: miles from a Roman colonial city named Philippi. Philippi was
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  Speaker 1: no ordinary town. Octavian had refounded it after the Battle
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: of Philippi in forty two BC, where he and marc
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius. He settled veterans there and
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: granted the city the legal status of Ius Italico, the
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: highest privilege of provincial colony could hold, treating the city
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: legally as if its soil were Italian soil. Roman law applied.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Roman magistrates served the Via Ignatia, Rome's great military highway
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: from Byzantium to the Adriatic straight through. Philippi did not
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: have a synagogue large enough to register in the town,
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: but it had a place of prayer by the river
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: outside the gate, where a sabbath a small group of
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Jewish women gathered. One of them was a businesswoman from
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Thiatera named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. The dye
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: industry of Thiatera is attested in three separate inscriptions of
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: the period. The lord opened her heart to Paul's message,
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: she was baptized, with her household.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: Then insistent denisions sludge in her humble abode.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: The trouble in Philippi began with a slave girl who
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: had a spirit of divination and earned a substantial income
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: for her own favor telling fortunes. She followed Paul through
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: the streets, shouting that he and his companions were servants
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: of the Most High God. Paul, irritated, finally turned and
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: cast the spirit out. The owners, watching their income evaporate, tragged.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: Porting Silas before the Roman magistrates and accused them disturbing
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: the peace in promoting non row Us. The decree of
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: the Senate. The magistrates, by the authority, invested in Us,
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: beaten with ronnounce judge, and thrown into the.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: Inner cell of the city prison. About midnight, with their
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: feet locked in stops and their backs rolled from the beating,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Paul and Silas were singing hymns the other prisoners listen.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: An earthquake shook the foundations of the prison and opened
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: every door. The jailer, awakened to find the cells unlocked,
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: drew his sword to kill himself. Paul shouted across the dark,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: to stop.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: Whatever you want, I will get.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: The jailer fell at their feet and light he must
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: do to be saved. Believe the Paul gave the christ
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: is recorded. He will be set to sixteen US thirty one,
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: and your believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: be saved. You and your household. The jailer washed their wounds.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: They baptized him and his family before dawn. By morning,
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: the magistrates had realized they had publicly flogged uncondemned Roman citizens,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: a serious crime under the lex Julia, we are prison,
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: and arrived at the prison personally to apologize. Years later,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: writing from a Roman prison back to this very congregation,
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: Paul would describe the relationship in Philippians chapter one, verse
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: five as your partnership in the Gospel from the first
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: day until now, the church born from a riverside conversation,
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: a casting out, and an earthquake would never stop sending
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: him support from Philippi, the four missionaries traveled west on
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: the Via Ignatia, about one hundred miles to Thessalonica, the
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: capital of the Roman Province of Macedonia. In Thessalonica, these
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: scrip reached three suburbs in the synagogue, arguing from the
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: scriptures that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: the dead. The increase and prominent women were persuaded, we
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: are the un believing in Jewish leadership, jealous of the response.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Marketplace. You open this door, you aiding where.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: The missionary magic to us and dragged Jason.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: Before the city, brought here Luke.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: Uses a striking technical word for those officials in Acts
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: Chapter seventeen, verse six Politics. The local magistrates of certain
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Macedonian cities. Critics of Acts long claimed Luke had invented
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: this term. Then in the nineteenth century, sixteen Macedonian inscriptions
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: surfaced confirming the title in exactly that period and place
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: the same lives preserve the accusation through the Christian justice,
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: These men who have caused trouble all over the world
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: have now come here. The brothers smuggled Paul and Silas
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: out of the city by night. They arrived at Berea,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: sixty miles southwest.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: Where the local Jewish community wel welcome brother with a
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: postular arcudot. Stop praising please, Acts Chapter nineteen, verse eleven
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: recorded adict the earlier.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Now, the Burian dukes were of more noble character than
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: eagerness and examined the scriptures every day to see if
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: what Paul the council said was true. Many believed, But
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: when the agitators from Thessalonica heard Paul was preaching in Berea,
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: they came after him there too. The brothers escorted him
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: to the coast and put him on a ship for Athens,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: asking Silas and Timothy to remain behind and join him. Later,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: Paul boarded alone for the city of Socrates and Plato.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Athens in the first century was no long with the
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: political capital it had been five hundred years earlier when
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Pericles ran the Delian League from its acropolis. Rome had
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: stripped Athens of empire and rebuilt the city as a
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: kind of living museum and philosophical campus, where consequence of Aristotle, Epicurus,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: and looked never still operate.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: And understand all the Romans. To absorber we must seek.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: The temples were everywhere. When Paul arrived alone, having sent
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: word ahead for Silas and Timothy to follow as quickly
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: as possible, he walked through that forest of altars and was,
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: as Luke says, with a memorable verbe, greatly distressed.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Look to descript what.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: He always did, he went to the synagogust and the
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: jew and the.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: God fearing Greeks. Then he went to the God the
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: form of the marketplace at the foot of the acropolis,
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: and reasoned with whoever was must govern the soul.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: Among the listeners who taught that virtue was the only good,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: and that the universe was governed by rational divine fire
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: and Epicureans, who taught that the gods existed but did
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: not interfere, and that the goal of life was the
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: pursuit of tranquil Cosmos. Order listened to preach Jesus desurrection,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: and they led him up the small rocky outcrop just
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: below the acropolis called the Areopagus, the suit of the
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: city's religious court. When new ideas were licensed or rejected,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: the speech that followed in cross cultural apologetics passed. Paul
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: did not open with Moses and the prophets, as he
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: did in synagogues. He opened with what he had observed
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: walking the street, but the city does not dwell. In
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Verse twenty three records his words, for as I wore
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship,
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: I even found an altar with this inscription to an
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: unknown God.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: To have an altar inscribe to anything you worship, what
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: therefore your worship is unknown.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: I am giving to proclating to you. From the inscription,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: he moved to the doctrine of creation, the unity of
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: the human race, the providence of God, and finally a
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: quotation from the Cretan poet Epimenides, preserved in the same
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: address Acts, chapter seventeen, verse twenty eight. For in Him
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: we live and move and have our being. It was
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: the only sermon in Acts that begins on pagan ground,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: and never once cites the Hebrew scriptures by chapter and verse.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: The God who may reached the resurrection from the dead,
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: he thought, and.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: Laughed, Come friends, there is nothing for us to hear
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: him again blind.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: A few league before, a member of the Areopagus court
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: named Dionysius and a woman named Damas Temple left Athens,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: not crushed but recalibrating. He traveled fifty miles west to Corinth,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: the wealthy commercial hub at the narrow isthmus connecting central
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Greece to the Peloponnese. Corinth controlled two ports, Lequium on
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: the Adriatic side and Sentry on the Aegean, and merchants
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: paid handsomely to drag their cargo across the four mile
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: de Old Curson rather than risk the long sea voyage
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: around the peloponnes. The city had a reputation. In the
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: shipment to Corinthianize had entered the Greek language as a
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: verb meaning to live promiscuously. Paul, by his own account
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: in his later first letter to this city, came in
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: weakness and fear, and much trembling. He took a job
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: to sup port himself.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: He met a couple who would become his closest collaborators
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: for the rest of his ministry.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: Both Aquila and Priscilla Jewish tentmakers, recently expelled from Rome.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: The expulsion is independently confirmed the Roman historians were Tonius,
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: writing seventy years later in his Life of the Almo,
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: the Emperor Clunoso expelled the Jews from Rome because they
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: were continually causing disturbances of the instigation of Crestus. Most
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: scholars read Crestus as a garbled reference to Christ and
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: the disdaining the.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: Roman hynagogues.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: The ancient chronographers date the expulsion to roughly the year
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: forty nine. Aquila and Priscilla had been swept up in it.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: They opened their workshop and their home to poor.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: The gospital preached every se in the Corinthian Synagogue, arguing
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: that Jesus was the most high.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: When the synagogue leadership turned on him, we next door
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: come inside, literally journey into the house of he got
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: a fear gentile named Titius Justus, whose home shared a
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: wall with the synagogue. The synagogue ruler himself, Crispus, became
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: to leave you with his household, and of the many
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Corinthians follow And then, at a moment when the opposition
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: was building towards something dangerous, the Lord appeared to Paul
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: in a night vision, Acts Chapter eighteen, verses nine and ten.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Preserve what he heard. Do not be afraid, keep on speaking,
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: do not be silent, for I am with you, and
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: no one is going to attack and harm you, because
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: I have many people in this city, Paul stayed. It
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: was during these eighteen months in Corinth that Silas and
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: Timothy finally rejoined him, bringing news from the churches in Macedonia.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Timothy had visited.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: Thessalonica troubly and reported that the delite As were standing
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: firm look but.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Were anxious about Christians who had died before the return
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: of Christ. Would they miss the resurrection? Paul wrote a letter,
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: the earliest of his writings, that we still possess to
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: answer the question. First, Thessalonians composed in Corinth around the
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: year fifty or fifty one.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: A few months.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: Later, when a forged letter circulating in Paul's name began
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: telling the Thessalonians that the day of the Lord had
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: already come. He wrote a second letter to correct the confusion.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: Say to Thessalonians, the first two books of what we
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: now call the Pauline Corpus were written from a workshop
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: in Corinth, addressed to young church in Macedonia, high missionary, still.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: Working with his half the gospel.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: The crisis in Corinth came, as it always did, from
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: the synagogue authorities. Do they accuse his transgressed the full law,
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: wrote to pro concert governed, teaching people to push the
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: contramode of the law.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: The proconsul that year was a man named Lucius Junius
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: Gallio Anianus, brother of the philosopher Seneca. An inscription discovered
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: at Delphi in nineteen o five, a fragment of a
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: letter from the Emperor Claudius, fixes Gallio's term as proconsul
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: of Aciah precisely to AD fifty one and fifty two.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: That single inscription is the most important external chronological anchor
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: for the entire life of Paul. From Gallio backward.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: And forward, every other date in Paul's biography can be
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: plotted with reasonable accuracy. Gallio heard the accusation and refused
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: to judicate, telling.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: Me the Jewish accusers was an internal water of Jewish religion.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: I am finished Roman's audience. I drove them from this judgment,
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: has rendered, removed the judgements seat itself.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: The Baymer has been excavated in the ruins of old
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: Corinth and is still standing a stone platform on the
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: south side of the Agora where Paul stood. Acquitted, Paul
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: stayed a while longer, then sailed for Ephesus with Aquila
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: and Priscilla. Left them there and continued on to Cesar
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: Rear and up to Jerusalem, completing the second journey. By
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: the time he returned to Antioch, he had crossed two continents,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: founded churches in Macedonia and a Caiah, written two letters
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: that would become scripture, and survived the legal scrutiny of
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: a Roman proconsul. The next journey, already on his mind,
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: would carry him back to Ephesus for the longest sustained
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: mission of his life. Paul stayed in Antioch for some
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: time and then set out again, traveling through the regions
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening every disciple in every village
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: he had founded on the previous two journeys. Then he
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: descended from the Anatolian highlands toward the Aegean coast and
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: the city he had been fought to bypass on the
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: second journey. Ephesus was the third largest city of the
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire after Rome and Alexandria, the capital of the
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: senatorial province of Asia, a port and cross road city
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: that controlled commerce between the Aegean and the trade routes
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: leading inland through Phrygia and Galicia. It was also the
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: religious capital of the Greek world. The Temple of Artemis
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: at Ephesus, four times the size of the Parthenon, with
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty seven marble columns each over fifty
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: feet high, was one of the seven Wonders of the
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: ancient world. The poet Antipater of Sidon, who compiled the
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: original list of the wonders, so when he saw it
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: that the Olympian gods themselves must have lost their splendor
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: by comparison. While Paul was still on the road, a
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: Jewish scholar from Alexandria named Apollos had arrived in Ephesus,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: but that was eloquent.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: Did reversed in the burning with zeal from what he
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: had received Jesus.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: But what he had received was incomplete. He knew only
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: the baptism of Johnt Baptist.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: Priscilla and a Creed had left in the city on
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: the previous with Osenegog.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: He kindly took him into their home long and explained
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the way of God more accurately. Apollos went on to
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: a Kiah with letters of recommendation and became one of
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: the most effective teachers in the a in a Corinthian church.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: When Paul finally arrived in.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: Ephesus, he counted on the same be transformed about a
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: dune disciples who had been baptized into guides baptism, but
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: had never even heard of the Holy Spirit. Acts Chapter nineteen,
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: verse two records the question Paul opened with, did you
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: receive upon the Holy Spirit when you believed may Fate laid.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Hands on them, baptized them as Jesus and the Spirit
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: came on them with prophetic and tongue speaking signs.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: We are here to proclaimed to preach in the Ephesian
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: Synagogue that his pastors, when the predictable.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Rosesh knows that he rented a public lecture hall belonging
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: to a teacher named Tyrannus, and taught their daily The
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: Western text of Acts adds the vivid detail that he
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: taught from the fifth hour to the ten en schue
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: Siu and cho from about eleven in the morning to
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: four in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day,
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: when the Mediterranean world rested and the hall would have
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: been free. He kept that schedule for two years. Acts
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: Chapter nineteen, verse ten summarizes the result. This went on
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: for two years, so that all the Jews and Greeks
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: who lived in the province of Asia heard the word
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: of the Lord. It was during this Ephesian period that
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: the seven churches addressed in Revelation two and three Smyrna, Pergamum, Thaterra, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicia,
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: and Ephesus itself were almost certainly planted by Paul's co
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: workers fanning out from his Ephijian base. God did extraordinary
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: miracles through him. Sweat cloths and work aprons that had
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: touched Paul's bondy were carried to the sick and the demonized,
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: and the diseases lifted.
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: The contrast between what was happening in Plum's classroom, how
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: long as being attempted in the streets of pagan Ephesus
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: eventually produced one of the strangest scenes in Acts.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: A Jewish chief priest named Skiva had seven sons who
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: worked as itinerant exorcists. Watching Paul's success with the formula
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the Name of Jesus, they decided to add it to
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: their own incantations. They tried it on a violent demon
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: possessed man, invoking Jesus, who creatures?
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: But who are?
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: Chapter nineteen, verse fifteen preserved the demon's reply, one of
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: the most terrifying lines in the New Testament, Jesus, I
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: know in I know about are, but who are you?
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: The man leapt on them and gave the seven sons
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: such a beating that they led the house naked.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: Aromaan dis watch us closely tonight. The story spread through
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: ephaces near and a peculiar fear fell on the city.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: Many who had practiced sorcery. The so called Efisia Gramata,
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: the Ephesian magical letters and incantations, referenced by Plutarch and
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: other ancient authors as among the most aprized in the
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: Greco Roman world, didn't stalk Chao and Tonton brought their
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: books and burned them publicly. Luke, with the eye of
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: a financial historian, gives the receipt and acts chapter nineteen,
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: verse nineteen. The value of the destroyed manuscripts came to
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: fifty thousand drachmas, the equivalent of fifty thousand days of
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: labour for the average worker. A small library went up
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: in smoke, and the gospel grew mightily and prevailed. Toward
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: the end of Paul's stay, the silversmiths of Ephesus realized
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: they had a problem. The cult of Artemis kept the
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: local economy afloat. Pilgrims poured into the city year round
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: for the Artemission festival, and one of the staple souvenirs
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: was a small silver shrine model of the goddess in
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: her temple. As Paul's gospel pulled customers away, the demand
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: for the shrines fell. A silversmith named Demetrius gathered by
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: trade guild. We shall frame the issue in the religiousters
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: they have blaspemed. The god crowd sees two.
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: Week ponds traveling companions.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: Gaius and Aristarchus, and rushed them into the Great Theater
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: of Ephesus, the same theater that still stands today, carved
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: into the slope of Mount Peon with twenty five thousand seats.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: Two hours, the entire city stood in that stone bowl,
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: enchanted as Acts. Chapter nineteen, verse twenty eight records greatest
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: Artemis of the Ephesians. Paul wanted to address the crowd,
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: the discount comfort and even some of the oaks. The
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: last provincial magistrates refused to let him enter. The crisis
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: was finally diffused by the city clerk.
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: Appointed officialists, who pointed a temple of the missionaries built
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: by the hands of the temp but inspired by that
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: fiend the Goddess, and then the pro consul could be
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: summoned by the high anyone had.
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: A legitimate guelley. He dismissed the assembly. The riot ended
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: sometime during this period, probably in the spring. Before the riot,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: Paul had written a letter back to corinth in response
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: to troubling reports about divisions and immorality in the church. There.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: He gave his planned route in First Corinthians, Chapter sixteen,
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: verses eight and nine. But I will stay on at
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great door for effective work
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: has opened to me opposed.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: We must leave now.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Both halves of that sentence had now come true. The
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: door had opened wider than anywhere else he had been.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: The opposition had filled a twenty five thousand seat theater.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: It was time to leave. When the riot in Ephesus
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: had finally subsided, Paul gathered the disciples, said his goodbyes,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: and traveled north into Macedonia. The route was the Via Ignatia,
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: in reverse, through the same cities he had founded on
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: the second journey, Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea. Along the way,
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: he wrote a second letter to the Corinthian Church, his
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: most personal letter, defending his apostleship against rival teachers who
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: had infiltrated the Corinthian congregation while he was in Ephesus
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: and had been undermining his credibility. He poured into that
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: letter the catalog of his sufferings, beatings, shipwrecks, days adrift, hunger, sleeplessness,
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: not to boast, but to expose how shallow his rival's
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: credentials were by comparison. He pushed south into Greece and
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: spent three months in Corinth itself, lodging probably with Gius,
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: the Corinthian.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: Be with whom he names as.
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: His host in the letter. He wrote next, the wealthy
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: city gave him the resources to compose the most theologically
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: dense treatise of his career, The Letter to the Romans.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: Romans was not addressed to a church Paul had planted.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: He had never been to Rome. The letter was a
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: missionary funding document, a formal introduction laying out the Gospel
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: as Paul understood it, in the hope that the Roman
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: believers would help send him on to Spain. He named
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: his current preoccupation in Romans, Chapter fifteen, Verses twenty five
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: and twenty six. Now, however, I am on my way
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: to Jerusalem in the servers of the Lord's people there,
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: for Macedonia and Akiah were pleased to make a contribution
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: for the poor among the Lord's people in Jerusalem. That
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: contribution of financial gift, collected over years from Gentile churches
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: across two continents to relieve the impoverished believers in Judea,
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: was Paul's most ambitious project after the Gentile mission itself.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: The historian F. F. Bruce called it a sociological experiment
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: in Christian unity, designed to bind together the two halves
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: of the church that the Council of Jerusalem had only
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: theoretically reconciled, must strike the life that a change of gain.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: Instead of sailing directly across the Aegean, he doubled back
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: through Macedonia, and a delegation of seven men, the representatives
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: of the contributing churches carrying the collection the gods, gathered
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: to escort him. They sailed from Philippi. After passover, crossed
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: a Troas, and waited there a week. On the last night,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: in the upper room of a three story house, by
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: the latch burning and.
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: The air thick, and the darkness not preached until.
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: Midnight, a young man named Euticus, sitting in an open window,
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: first slew him and dropped three stories to the contract below.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: The disciples ran down and found him dead. Paul descended
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: after them, afraid, threw himself on the body, embraced it here,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: and stood up, announcing that the boy was allowed to us.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: They went back upstairs, and Paul broke bread ate and
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: kept talking until daybreak. When the morning sun came up,
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: he walked to the harbor. The ship coasted along the
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: western south and at Melitas, thirty miles down from Ephesus,
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: Paul sent for the elders of the Ephesian Church. He
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: had decided not to enter Ephesus itself, the city he
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: had spent three years building, because he was racing to
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: reach Jerusalem by Pentecost and could not afford the time
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: the visit would consume. The elders walked the thirty miles.
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: This speech he delivered to them on the beach of Melitas,
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: that is the only sustained address in and his forgiven
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: gifts to Christian boships, and recorded it in detail.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: He reviewed his three years among the comforted, his tears,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: his integrity and not coveting silver or gold or anyone's clothing,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: his refusal to draw a salary. He warned them that
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: wolves would arise from within the eldership itself to devour
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: the flock. And he framed his own life with a
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: sentence that has anchored Christian missionaries for two thousand years.
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: Acts Chapter twenty, verse twenty four. However, I consider my
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: life worth nothing to me. My only aim is to
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: has given me, the task of testifying to the good
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: news of God's grace. He closed by quoting a saying
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: of Jesus that the Gospels do not preserve, recorded only
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: here in Acts, Chapter twenty, verse thirty five. Oh, it
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: is more blessed to give than to receive.
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: Let Your presence descend them. He knelt down on the
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: beach and prayed, said they were me loudly, embraced him,
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: kissed him, and grieved most over his prediction that they
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: would never see his face again.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: They walked him to the ship. The voyage south traced
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: the eastern Mediterranean coastline, Costs roads Patar, where they transferred
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: to a larger ship bound for Phoenicia, then Cyprus on
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: the horizon, then Tire and sign upon the local decide
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: his glory shall fill. The Spirit was speaking through prophets
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: for the kingdom.
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: Of the port city.
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: The disciples and failed not to foot into at Caesarea Maritima,
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: Herod the Great's engineered marvel of a port with its
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: artificial harbor of underwater concrete blocks that Roman.
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: Engineers had pioneered There.
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: Stayed in the home of Philip Evans Travels, one of
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: the original seven Deacons you host chapter six, a prophet
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: named Agabus, whom Luke had introduced earlier in the narrative
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: came down from Judea, tied his own hands and feet
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: with it, and announced that the Holy Spirit had revealed
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: exactly this fate awaiting Paul in Jerusalem. The disciples, the horse.
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: Traveling companions gregged him not to go. I must follow
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: the Paul's.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: Reply in Acts, chapter twenty one.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: Verse thirteen.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: We must stand like a man who had crossed an
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: inner threshold with us and could not turn darkness.
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: Why are you weeping and breaking? My Lord is our strength.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: I am ready not only to be wipe away every
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: the Lord Jesus. Luke records that they fell silent. The
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: verse that follows in chapter twenty one, verse fourteen captures
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: the resolution of an entire community to a calling. None
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: of them could deflect. When he would not be dissuaded,
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: we gave up and said the Lord's will be done.
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: They arrived in Jerusalem the next week and presented the
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: collection to James and the elders of the Jerusalem.
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: To Paul the meeting, You're glad you have come.
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: The crisis began the day after Us when Jewish pilgrims
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: from the province of Asia recognized and the temple courts
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: and accissed him of bringing a gentile companion past the
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: court of the Gentiles into the inner courts. An inscription
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: warning gentiles, on pain of death against entering the inner
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: sanctuary has been recovered, dating to exactly this sacred place.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: The accusation was false, a blasphem riot it ignited was real.
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: Cohort station on the Antonio Fortress, a Gloria Rome had
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: to send a tribune and soldiers.
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: The steps not strain came before the mob beat him
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: to death.
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: Let the third missionary journey ended in chains. The Roman
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: commander pulling Paul out of the temple courtyard that day
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: was a tribune named Claudius Lysias, in command of the
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: cohort garrisoned in the Antonia Fortress. The Antonio was Herod's
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: Stone fortress, named for marc Antony, built into the northwest
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: corner of the Temple mount with stairs leading directly down
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: into the outer courts, so that troops could descend at
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: the first sign of trouble during festivals. Lysius assumed Paul
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: was an ejection that who had recently led a band
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: of assassins into the desert.
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: Paul o Mesphthras, asking you mission to address the crimson.
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: We are able to proclaim to you the spoken arabag.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: The mob fell sigh, my brethren, he told to win
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: his life, store upon us Tartus and the Damascus road.
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: Forward the call to the Gentiles, the word gentiles. The
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: mob exploded again. Lycius hauled Paul into the fortress, ordered
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: him flocked for interrogation, and only I am a Roman
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: that the bow demand of their rights was a Roman citizen.
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: The next afternoon mens arranged, and he lived was.
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: Being childish him. The year evolved into.
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: A between Pharacees and Statucees, them over the resurrection. That night,
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: Paul received another of the strategic visions that had punctuated
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: his life since Damascus Acts. Chapter twenty three, Verse eleven
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: records what the Lord told him, standing beside him in
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: the cell. Take courage, as you have testified about me
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome. It
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: was a promise that would carry him through the next
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: four years. The next morning pulled Prophets, the only family
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: member who appeared on the entire New Testament narrative word
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: to the immediately a plot forty men had bound themselves
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: under oath by neither to eat nor to drink until
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: they had kwilled.
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: Poor Oath acted immediately by the gods that night with
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: an escort.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: Of two hundred infantry, seventy cavalry and two hundred spearmen,
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: nearly half the available cohort. Paul was hustled out the
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: gates and rushed seventy miles north to Caesarea, beyond the
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: reach of Jerusalem's mob and Sanhedrin alike. For the next
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: two years he sat in custody at Caesarea under the
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: procurator Antonius.
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: Felix.
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Tacitus in his history's book five, called Felix a man
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: who wielded the power of a king with the temperament
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: of a slave. Setonius added that he.
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: Had married very queens princess. He had taken Drusilla, the
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: youngest daughter of Henda Grippath first husband, not as a criminal.
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: Paul Pritters shared to Felix, and Drusille promised by right
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: to our father, self control and becoming judgment, and Felixt
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: was afraid take him away and sent Paul back to
• 57:09
  Speaker 2: his cell.
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: He kept Paul there for two years, hoping for a
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: bribe that never came. When Felix was finally recalled to
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: Rome to face accusations of misgovernment, his successor, Cortius Festus,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: inherited the case file. Festus, eager to start his term
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: on good terms with Jerusalem, asked whether Paul would consent
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: to be trying to seize dead Roman waited on that
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: road exercised the right that had been kept in reserve
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: since the day he was beaten with rods in Philippi
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Lex eleven records the former legal phrase that ended the proceeding.
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: I planned to testify before God, skemferred with his counsel
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: answer to Caesar. He would go the should say.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: The local king, Herod Agrippa, the second great grandson of
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: Herod the Great, arrived in caesar Rear on a state
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: visit with his sister.
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Beneath this Festor silence open the king's expertise on Jewish
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: religious questions might draft to coherent chart. I stand here.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: That you will lead her into one of the most
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: polyemies of the Christian god.
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: God. Because of the spread testimony trial.
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: Be Festus interrupted him to call him that Paul, that
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: he was fortunate to be able to make my defense.
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: Then your man to a gripper, and I admit me
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: to the king, and believe that the Hebrew promise made
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: by God and to chapter twenty six, verse twenty eight,
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: preserves a gripper's reply, do you think that in such
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: Agrippa later told Festus Dulcator that the allegiance East had
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: not appealed to see exists. The appeal was now binding.
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: Paul was going to Rome. In late September of probably
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: the year fifty nine, Paul, Luke and Aristaugust were handed
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: over to a Roman centurion of the Augustin cohort named Julius.
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: They sailed up the Phoenetian coast to Sidon. That north
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: passed Cyprus to Myra in Lysia, where Julius transferred his
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: prisoners to a grain freighter from Alexandria loaded bounds for Italy.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: Roman shipping operated under a custom called mayor Klausen closed
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: Sea that suspended all Mediterranean voyages between mid November and
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: early March because of the storm season. The Alexandrian freighter
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: was already late. They beat their way west against contrary
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: winds and finally took shelter at a small bay on
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: the southern coast of Crete.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 2: Called fair Havens.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: Paul warned the centurion and the captain that the season
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: was finished.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: The centurion deferred to or you will.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: Have They tried to push another forty miles west to
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: a better protected harbor named Phoenix. A wind out of
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: the northeast called by the sailors the Eurycleidon fell on
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: the ship from the mountains of Crete and drove them
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: helpless into the open Mediterranean. For fourteen days. They ran
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: before the storm under bare poles.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 2: Jettisoning the card over the side, finally more away.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: The ship's tackle, with no sun or stars visible to
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: navigate by. On the night before they ran aground, with
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: the crew about to abandon ship, and the time of
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: tribulation hand and gave him the promise that he repeated
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: to im two hundred till seventy six souls on under
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: board at chapter twenty seven, verses twenty three twenty four
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: record his works. Last night, an angel of the Gods,
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: to whom I belong and whom I serve, stood beside
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: me and said, do not be afraid, Paul, you must
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: stand trial before Caesar and God has gurgeously given you
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: the lives of all who sail with you. But dawn
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: they sighted unfamiliar land, ran the ship aground on a sandbar,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: and the servant broke the stern apart. Every dissenter reached
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: the beach a line they had landed on Malta. The
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: most careful modern reconstruction of the voyage by the Scottish
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: nautical scholar James Smith, in his eighteen forty eight study
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: The Voyage and Shipwreck of Saint Paul, examined every wind direction,
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: every distance, and every nautical term Luke used and concluded
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: that the narrative is the precise lock of an ancient
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: voyage written by an eye witness. They wintered three months
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: on Malta. Paul was britten by a viper while gathering firewood.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: And shook it off without effect. He healed the father
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: of the.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: Chief magistrate of the I healed you a man, Luke
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: calls Publius of recurring fever and dysentery. When the Mayra
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: Clausum opened in February, an Alexandrian ship that had wintered
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: there carried them on through Syracuse, Regium and Puteoli, where
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: the Roman believers had heard he was coming, and met
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: him forty miles down the Appian Way at the Forum
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: of a Grace of the lauretas christ With Paul wept
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: when he saw them. In Rome, he was placed under
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: what Roman law called custodia militaris micinchith military custody, chained
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: at the wrist to a rotating praetorian guard, but allowed
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: to live in his own rented quarters and receive visitors freely.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: He stayed two years that way. The Book of Acts
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: ends without describing the trial, on a sentence that Luke
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: seems to have chosen as the emotional summary of three
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: decades of mission Acts Chapter twenty eight, Verses thirty and
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: thirty one. For two whole years, Paul stayed there in
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: his own rented principalities and welcomed all.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: Who came to see him. He proclaimed, the king am
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: not ashamed of the God's trt because it is the
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: Jesus Christ and salvation to everyone bullie and without hindrance.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: During those two years chained to the imperial bodyguard, he
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: wrote four letters whose theology has carried the Church for
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: two thousand years. Ephesians on the Cosmic Christ Colossians on
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: the supremacy of Christ over all rival philosophies, Philammon on
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: the Gospel, reconciliation of a runaway slave, and Philippians on
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: Joy in chains of the praetorians cycling through his apartment,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: he wrote in Philippians, Chapter one, verse thirteen. As a result,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: to everyone else, that I am in chains for Christ.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: The man whose appeal had carried him to the heart
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: of the empire was even changed to its soldiers, evangelizing
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: the body of Melament, crisis to Caesar, and the Book.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: Of Acts six two eighty.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: With Paul for still under house arrests, still preaching, still writing.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: Luke does not tell us how the story finished. He
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: had two volumes, his Gospel and Acts, and he closed
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: at the moment that completed the geographic argument. He had
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: set out to make Jerusalem to Rome, the Gospel, reaching
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: the capital of the Empire. What happened next is a
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: question with three independent answers, all pointing in the same direction.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: The first, sir, is the silence of Acts itself. Luke
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: devoted entire chapters to Paul's trials before Felix Festus and
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: a gripper. If Paul had been executed at the end
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: of the two year house arrest, Luke would almost certainly
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: have said so. The fact that he did not, in
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: the word closes with Puck still preaching freely, is itself
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: an indirect testimony that the trial before Caesar resulted in acquittal.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: Roman law required prosecutors to appear within a fixed period
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: to press their case. If Paul's accusers from Jerusalem had
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: not made the long voyage to Rome to argue the charge,
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: the charge would have lapsed and the prisoner would have
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: been released by default. The second answer is the geography
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: of the pastoral epistles. The three letters Paul wrote to
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: Timothy and Titus contain travel notes that fit nowhere in
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: any of the journeys recorded in Acts. In Titus, chapter one,
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: verse five, Paul tells his colleague the.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 2: Reason I left you increase and equivocurse that you might
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: put in a call was finished and us in every
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: town as I directed you, Acts records no missionary stay
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: on crete.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: Paul mentions in First Timothy that he had traveled into
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: Macedonia after leaving Timothy. In Ephesus and he tells Timothy
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: in tewod Timothy that he had recently been Introas and Miletus,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: and intended to winter in Nicopolis on the Adriatic coastal.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: None of those itineries fit the acts timeline.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: They make sense only if Paul was released from Rome
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: around sixty two or sixty three, traveled east through the
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: Aegean for several years, and was eventually rearrested. The third
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: answer is the testimony of the early Church itself and
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: of Rome, writing to the Corinthian Church around the year
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: ninety five, only thirty years after Paul's death, and from
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: the very city where Paul had been killed, described Paul
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: in his First Letter, chapter five as having reached the
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: limits of the West before his martyrdom to a Roman
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: audience in the late first century, the limits of the
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: West meant Spain. Paul had announced his intention to evangelize
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: Spain in the Letter to the Romans years earlier, naming
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: the journey as the next horizon after Renhipio.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: The Moratorian Fragmus CALEUK, the.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: Oldest surviving canonical list, written around the year one to seventy,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: repeats the same memory Paul had set off from Rome
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: to Spain. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Ecclesiastical History in
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: the early fourth century, summarized the consensus of the earlier
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: sources in Book two, Chapter twenty two. Paul had been
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: released after a first defense in Rome, had resumed his
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: missionary travels, and was re arrested only later in a
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: different political climate. That different political climate had a name.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: On the night of July eighteenth and the year sixty four,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: fire broke out in the wooden shops along the southeastern
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: slope of the Circus Maximus and burned for nine long days.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: When the smoke cleared, ten of Rome's fourteen districts had
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: been reduced to ash. The Emperor Nero was rumored, fairly
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: or unfairly, to have arranged the fire to clear ground
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: for his planned palace complex. To deflect the rumors, he
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: needed a scapegoat. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in his
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: annal's book fifteen to.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 2: Four, records what happened to move at dawn. Nero blamed
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: the Christians sect already detested, for what Tacitus calls their
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: hatred of the human race, and ordered them rounded up.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: They were sewn into animal skins and torn apart by
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: dogs nailed to crosses or coated with pitch and litters
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: torches in Nero's gardens. The Tacitus passage is the earliest
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: non Christian Roman reference to Christ. Tacitus mentions in Passing
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: that the founder of the sect, Christus, had been executed
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Sometime in
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 2: the years that followed the fire, almost certainly between sixty
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: five and sixty seven, Paul was arrested again. The conditions
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: of his second imprisonment are reflected in Seco Timothy. He
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: was no longer in his own rented house. He was
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: in a cold, dark cell, almost certainly the lower chamber
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 2: of the Mammotin prison at the foot of the capitol
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: line hill, where state criminals awaiting execution were held. His
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: friends had scattered. He asked Timothy to bring him a cloak.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 2: He had left introas parchment scrolls he needed for study
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: and mark. The same young man whose desertion in Pamphylia
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 2: had broken his partnership with Barnabas decades earlier. The reconciliation
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: was complete, Luke Paul wrote in two Timothy, Chapter four,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: verse eleven chain.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry. Earlier,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: in the same letter, he had told Timothy why he
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: was writing in such urgency two Timothy, Chapter four, verses
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: six to eight. For I am already being poured out
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: like a drink offering, and the time for my departure
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: is near. I have fought the good fight. I have
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: finished the race. I have kept the faith in store
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: Righteous Judge, will award to me on that day, and
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: not only to me, but also to all who have
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: longed for his appearing. It was his last letter. The
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: execution probably took place in sixty seven on the Ostian Way,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: the Roman road running south from Rome to the harbor
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: at Ostia. As a Roman citizen, Paul was spared crucifixion
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: and beheaded by sword instead. The site of his execution,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: marked from the earliest Christian centuries, is now called trey
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: Fontaine three fountains, for the legend that Paul's head bounced
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: three times after the cut, and a spring rose at
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: each spot. The legend can be put aside. The location cannot.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: The body was buried two miles back along the Ostian
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: Way at a cemetery owned by a Christian woman named Lucina.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: Constantine blent the first basilica over the tomb in the
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: early fourth century, Theodosius the Great in Largeste now the
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: current Basilica of Saint Paul outside The walls covered the
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: site to this day. In two thousand nine, after a
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: six year project authorized by Pope Benedict the sixteenth, a.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 2: Sealed sarcophagus directed beneath the.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: High water never opened in modern times.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: This changes. Everything was probed.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: With a fiber optic camera and a small core sample
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: of bone fragments was removed for carbon fourteen dating. The result,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: announced publicly in June of that year, was definitive. The
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: bones dated to the first or second century. They had
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: been buried at the site. Christian tradition had associated with
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: Paul since before Constantine. The Vatican stopped short of formally
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: declaring the bones to be Paul's, but the dating was
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: consistent with everything the Church had remembered for nineteen centuries.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: The man who had ridden north toward Damascus to drag
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: Christians back to Jerusalem had finished his life beheaded outside
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: the walls of Rome in the persecution of an emperor
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: whose own death by suicide would come less than a
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: year later. Nero's empire fell. Paul's letters did not. Thirteen
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: of them, composed in workshops, in dictation chambers, on shipboard,
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: and in prison cells from Antioch to.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: Rome, became scripture.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: They make up roughly a quarter of the New Testament.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: They have shaped the doctrine of the Church for two
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: thousand years. On grace, on faith, on the death and
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: resurrection of Christ, on the unity of jew and Gentile,
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: on marriage and ministry, on suffering and joy. Paul summarized
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: his own self assessment in One Timothy, chapter one, verse fifteen.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: The words of mice came into the rotation to save sinny.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: Acceptable in your foon. I am the worst, my rock,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: And if the worst could be remade into the apostle
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: who carried the Gospel to the limits of the west,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: no one is beyond the reach of the same grace.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: That is the claim Paul lived and the claim he
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: died defending the road that began with a flash of
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: light at noon outside Damascus ended at sunrise on the
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: Ostian Way. The journey it's set in motion has not
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: ended yet