Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church history.

On this episode, we were exploring roads in history.

Now, we need to understand how we're spelling it.

This is not R-O-A-D-S, as in traveling down roads.

This is the R-O-A-D-S, as in traveling down roads. This is the island of Rhodes.

This island is like a trip through history in one stop.

It has ruins from the Greco-Roman period and from the medieval period and from the Ottoman

period.

Rhodes itself began life as an ancient Greek city,

and then it was Roman, and then it was Byzantine, and then it was Catholic with the Knights

of St. John, and then it was Ottoman, and then it was Italian, and then after World War II,

it was given back to Greece. Well, if you were there

when it was a Greek city in the 200s BC, and you pulled into its very busy harbor, you would

have been awed by one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. There stood the Colossus of Rhodes. It was over 100 feet tall, and it stood for

54 years. Then along came an earthquake and toppled it. It snapped right off at the knees,

but the ruins laid there for 800 years. In fact, in the first century A.D., the historian Pliny the Elder

visited the island of Rhodes, and he wrote about the fascinating statue and the size of these

ruins. He remarked about how a man could barely get his arms around one of the fingers of the Colossus of Rhodes.

Well, in the first century, this island was also visited by the Apostle Paul.

In Acts 21, we read that when we had parted from them, and of course, that's a reference

to being at Miletus with the Ephesian elders.

Once they had parted from there, they set sail.

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