First Preaching Tour of Galilee

146:1.1The small city of Rim­mon had once been ded­i­cated to the wor­ship of a Baby­lo­nian god of the air, Ram­man. Many of the ear­lier Baby­lo­nian and later Zoroas­trian teach­ings were still em­braced in the be­liefs of the Rim­monites; there­fore did Je­sus and the twenty-four de­vote much of their time to the task of mak­ing plain the dif­fer­ence be­tween these older be­liefs and the new gospel of the king­dom. Pe­ter here preached one of the great ser­mons of his early ca­reer on “Aaron and the Golden Calf.”

146:1.2Al­though many of the cit­i­zens of Rim­mon be­came be­liev­ers in Je­sus’ teach­ings, they made great trou­ble for their breth­ren in later years. It is dif­fi­cult to con­vert na­ture wor­shipers to the full fel­low­ship of the ado­ra­tion of a spir­i­tual ideal dur­ing the short space of a sin­gle life­time.

146:1.3Many of the bet­ter of the Baby­lo­nian and Per­sian ideas of light and dark­ness, good and evil, time and eter­nity, were later in­cor­po­rated in the doc­trines of so-called Chris­tian­ity, and their in­clu­sion ren­dered the Chris­tian teach­ings more im­me­di­ately ac­cept­able to the peo­ples of the Near East. In like man­ner, the in­clu­sion of many of Plato’s the­o­ries of the ideal spirit or in­vis­i­ble pat­terns of all things vis­i­ble and ma­te­rial, as later adapted by Philo to the He­brew the­ol­ogy, made Paul’s Chris­tian teach­ings more easy of ac­cep­tance by the west­ern Greeks.

146:1.4It was at Rim­mon that To­dan first heard the gospel of the king­dom, and he later car­ried this mes­sage into Mes­o­po­ta­mia and far be­yond. He was among the first to preach the good news to those who dwelt be­yond the Eu­phrates.