Greek culture
Vern Peterman · Oct 24, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 17
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262314281606

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

And so now we're looking at this time from Alexander the Great into the time when the Jews ruled themselves for about a century. And so this is, I put the Greek Empire and then with an S because Alexander the Great went and created this empire with no thought at all what's going to happen next. I mean really he had no thought at all what's going to happen next. So as soon as he died the whole thing broke apart into smaller empires that eventually lost it to the Roman Empire and to the Parthians.

So, what did Alexander the Great do as he made a target? He says, whatever is now Persian is going to be mine. That's exactly what he did, and he did it fast. So what you see here, there's the Persian Empire, and he went shortly thereafter and just took over it.

The setup was that all these little green squares you see, The Greeks had already gone throughout the Mediterranean and some of the associated waterways and set up little colonies. And they had regular shipping routes, so they were already doing a lot of buying and selling of goods and transporting of goods. So there was a lot of connections in different places that set things up to begin with. The Persians, as you remember, had the idea of support the present culture, even send people back. but of course require payment. Gotta have that. But other than that, they supported things. Alexander the Great, however, his tutor was Aristotle. And he just had this idea of, well, there's nothing better than Greek. There's nothing better than being Greek. So, infuse the Greek culture everywhere you go. That was his philosophy. So now you get into the Greek Empire.

The Jews who had a somewhat friendly introduction to Alexander the Great, were encouraged to move down to Alexandria, because he started better than a half dozen Alexandrias, but this is the one in Egypt. They said, move down to Egypt and we'll make it good for you. And so he had a lot of them move down there. He brought in the Greek language, And then he unified the language.

There was cutting down a lot of the local dialects, kind of saying, OK, this is the way we're going to talk. Isn't that interesting? All right, from now on, you talk like this. Don't use that odd dialect. And then finally, to simplify it, in some cases, cutting out some of the odd quirks so that the language was a little more direct and simple.

So here's the military progression. He starts off in Greece, goes through what we know as Turkey, heads down through Israel. At Israel, he gets met there, not with armies waiting, but with the high priest saying, here in the book of Daniel, it says you are coming. Welcome. How about that? The book of Daniel said, you're coming. And Jotawa was the high priest. Showed Alexander the Great, says, see, here it is. Here's where it says you're coming.

And so I was taken as a positive reception. And so he treated them well. So then that's when he said, OK, move down to Alexandria. Here's Alexandria. It's the home of Pharos, which is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And so they had an ally in Alexander the Great. And Alexander the Great had an ally in the Jews that moved down to Alexandria in northern Egypt. So Alexander the Great survived battle after battle. Eventually alcoholism and a mosquito took him out. You know, swords and spears and catapults and fire and stones and a mosquito and a bottle is what took him out. Isn't that interesting? Then four of his generals took over and got the rest of it.

Then the Jews quickly lost their familiarity since now they've been infused with this Greek. They couldn't even read their scriptures. So they very quickly within a couple generations had a demand. We want Greek Old Testament. So then you get what's called the Septuagint. Septuagint simply means the 70. 70 scholars who translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and some Aramaic into Greek. It was done about 250 BC. You're going to see varying dates, partly because it took time, and the other because of some uncertainty as to exactly when it took place, but about 250.

So here's this Greek Empire. Here is when Alexander the Great began things, and here is when the Jews said, we want our scriptures in Greek. Of course, to some Jews, that was just incomprehensible. The Jews' traditions were that God gave us Hebrew. How dare you put this in Greek? That was a vile thing to do according to some. But if you don't speak Hebrew, what good does it do? So, some places it's a little bit too Greek. That is, it's not just a Greek translation, but it seems like they skewed it to keep the Greeks happy.

So some of the Jews didn't like it and they actually ended up having to redo it or pick other versions later. One of them was Daniel. They don't use the original version of Daniel. None of them accepted that because it had some things interpreted in it that they didn't like at all. Some of the books were replaced, particularly Daniel was the one that very directly and immediately was replaced. The Greek Old Testament was not completely uniform. There were differences. in things like spelling and grammar from one location to another, just like we have dialects.

If you try to spell the word theater, how is it spelled? Some places, particularly British influence, will end with an R-E, right? English spelling in most of America, we say E-R. If you try to spell behavior, Is it I-O-R or I-O-U-R? So we have differences too. And the same thing you would find in the Greek Old Testament, that there would be differences from one location to another depending on which you say, hey, wait a minute, this is right the way we do it here, right? So there would be variance depending on where you're located.

And now, then there's the migration of Jews, which we brought up when we were talking about the Ephesians and Colossians series here. Here's Babylon, where a lot of the Jews had been moved under Nebuchadnezzar, stayed there under the Persians. Now that one of Alexander's generals had taken over and even passed away, a subsequent ruler says, hey, it'd be really good if we had a bunch of Jews over here. I don't know why he decided that. So he said, we'll give you 10 years, no taxes if you'll move here. So 2,000 families approximately took him up and said, sure, we'll move there.

So they moved over into the area around Ephesus and Colossae in that general area. That's one of the reasons why you see the Jewish issues brought up in the books of Ephesians and Colossians. It's because of this. And by that time, these 2,000 Jewish families had been in Ephesus and Colossae for over 250 years. All right. Then by 200 BC, think of it this way.

You got Jews spread all over the place. Most Jews, at least twice as many, lived outside of Israel. In the area up around Ephesus and Colossae, over around Babylon, and over in Alexandria. Between those three areas, they had at least twice as many Jews there as in Israel itself. So we tend to think of Jews, Israel. But truth is they were scattered far more in many other places. Some people, it depends on which, you know, historian you look at, some will say as many as four times as many Jews outside of Israel. So lots of them spread in different places.

Okay. Jews in Alexandria and Western Asia Minor spoke and read Greek as their primary language. He asked them, you know, okay, what language do you prefer to speak in and write in? Greek. Okay. Now, Jews in Babylon held the mixtures of Greek and Aramaic. So now you've got the Greek and Aramaic skew on things. Jews in Israel spoke Aramaic as their first language, with some able to communicate in Greek and Hebrew.

So you've got some variation, don't you? So if you say, what language did the Jews speak? You've got to ask where, right? And ask where? Some place they would say something in the language that in another area the Jews couldn't even talk to. Does that explain why the different dialects in Acts chapter 2? All these Jews coming from all over the place and they didn't speak the same language. Different languages. Alright.

Now by 200 BC the Old Testament from Exodus on expressed repeated warnings for the Jews not to be influenced by their Gentile neighbors, but by this time they've been radically influenced by their Gentile neighbors. Most Jews were in Gentile lands, all of them with some level of Greek influence. The influence upon them was strongly Greek. That is, anything from some level of Greek to lots of Greek. Lots of Greek.

The Greek religion, the Greeks were polytheistic. They had, as we studied, you know, Ephesus, Colossae, you know, those places. Ephesus, so far as we've found any record, they've tabulated 50 different gods that they have been able to get some kind of record of. 50 different gods in Ephesus. Elements of the Greek culture moved into magic. astrology, occultism, and eastern mysticism.

And the Greek religions often mix with foreign religions. Here's this Jewish magical text from Egypt written in Greek. So isn't this interesting? Here's in Egypt, Alexandria most likely, written in Greek by Jews. So a real mixture, huh? See the mixture? And very pagan. This doesn't have anything to do with the Bible. It's all just magical stuff. Lots of Greek Lots of Greek influence, and yet these people are Jews. Okay, Greek philosophy. A number of Jews were profoundly impressed by the Greek philosophy. Here's a statue of Plato there. The Jews had already taken on logical argument. You remember in reading throughout the New Testament, the Jews would come up to Jesus and they'd ask him various questions, try to get him to to get them stuck on something.

They love to sit there and argue about things. But their questions are all about the law. The Greeks didn't care so much about the law, but they also liked to argue. So there was a commonality there. So what happened is the Jews would say, okay, we'll argue about the law and something else too. We'll bring in the Greek philosophy. So there were mixtures, mixtures of the two. And so the Greeks and the Jews did have that Kind of love for argument in common. So the difference is what they argued over about. Okay.

How about pilgrimages to Jerusalem? Most Jews lived outside of Israel. Remember we said it was at least twice as many Jews lived outside Israel. It meant that most of the Jews around the ancient world, if they're going to have some observance, are going to have to travel to Jerusalem. And there's no jets. There's no trains. You can't get in your car. There's no setting it, you know, on the speed control and letting it zoom. Not with your camels.

So you're going to take a while. And probably traveling from someplace like Philippi over to Jerusalem, a couple months each way. So if you're going to take a trip, this isn't something you're going to do all the time. But a lot of them would do it. But it meant pilgrimages became a part of the culture. If you're a Jew and you're taking your Judaism seriously, you're going to do some pilgrimages. You're going to make some long trips. Long trips into Jerusalem.

But what would that do? Here you've got all these people traveling from all these different places into Jerusalem. What are they going to do? They're going to interchange cultures. Some guy's going to come from Ephesus. He's a Jew. He comes into Jerusalem and he's going to bring in some of the Greek culture there. Somebody's going to come in from Babylon and they're going to bring in the culture from there. Somebody's going to come in from Egypt and they're going to bring in the culture from there. Back and forth. And then they go back to their lands and exchange. So there's constant interchange and the meeting place was Jerusalem. See that? Okay. Yeah. The increased influence of the synagogue. By the way, does anybody know anybody that's a serious Jew? A Jew that takes their Judaism seriously? You Houston know somebody that took their Judaism seriously?

Yeah. What were some of the things you noticed about them? Okay. I spent more time with her than I did with him. So I've had some contact in the past with Iranian Jews and remember that's from the time of the Persian Empire because they started in Babylon and then got taken over to Iran under Persia. So here's somebody from the Persian Empire migration and yet coming to the United States here centuries later, millennia later. So I've known a couple of different Iranian Jews who took their Jewish faith very seriously. And what's interesting is here they are bringing that faith seriously.

But you mentioned synagogue. Synagogue is a Greek word. Isn't it interesting? So during this time when there was all this Greek influence and people have to travel really far, you don't travel that often because it's such a big deal. You get interruptions in business and you just have to take months and months to do it. It's expensive. You just can't do it all the time. So what do you do? You go to the synagogue every week. And what do you do?

You call the name of the place that are gathered together, not by a Jewish name, but a Greek name. Well, I'm really Jewish. I go to a synagogue with a Greek name. So it's really interesting that they ended up, you know, they used to lead together. Sin is like the sun words that we have talked about as we study the book of Ephesus. Another thing that happened, is the Jews were required... Let me back up.

Do you remember that at one point in time some of the Jews came to Peter and they asked him, does your master pay the temple tax? Are you familiar with that? Does your master pay the temple tax? And so Peter goes to Jesus and says, boy, what do you want to do with this? And so Jesus asks him, do the sons of the king Do they pay a tax?"

Peter says, no. Well, but just so we don't offend them, let's pay it anyway. And so it tells Peter, you know, go and catch this fish and pull the coin out of its mouth and then that'll solve it. By the way, that fish, there's a fish that likes to eat bright shiny things called a tauch that lives there. Okay.

Anyway, so here's this temple tax and it is called out in Exodus, so it isn't a subsequent tradition. since you've got to pay this half shekel. And what we do have various records of, because the Jews in all these distant areas would gather up this temple tax money, and because it was expensive and hard to carry this big massive stuff in silver, they would frequently convert it to gold, more valuable, and try to take it that way. And the local officials would fight their taking the money to Jerusalem because it was a constant drain on the local economy. Because there's all these Jews, substantial portion of the population, even if it's a minor amount, taking this money out of the economy and it just goes one way. So the local officials, the pagan officials, non-Jewish, were constantly battling trying to keep the Jews from shipping the money because it just went out of the economy and went to Jerusalem. Okay, now the Apocrypha. You have on the back of your sheet kind of a summary on the Apocrypha.

Here's a copy of it, if you're interested. It's a set of books that were written, almost all of them in Greek originally, and a lot of them are either supplemental to an existing Jewish book, for example, some of them were supplements to Daniel, to the book of Daniel, or they were written to sound like they were based by some biblical character. As if Solomon wrote this, all those centuries and centuries after Solomon. So here's Solomon writing something in Greek?

I don't think so. But the bottom line is, that's what the apocryphe is. It was never accepted as a part of the scriptures until about the middle 1500s, at least 1546 or thereabouts. The Roman Catholics adopted it as a part of the scripture. It was included in the King James Bible original printings up until about the late 1700s. And most English Bibles included it as a kind of a separate section.

Anyway, feel free to take a look at that if you're interested. And you have a kind of a summary of what was written when in that sheet on the back there. Anyway, basically, lots of lots of Greek influence to see, you know, Greek words, Greek titles, Greek influence written largely in Greek and written during this period of the influence of the Greek culture.

All right, here's the half shekel. Remember, we mentioned the half shekel money and they were concerned about this temple money draining the local economies. Now, this is the half shekel coin that was the first coin to be accepted. It was minted in Tyre, which is of course not a Jewish city, so it's called a Tyrian shekel. minted entire, you have a sort of a rough copy on your hand out there. What do you notice about this that seems a little odd for something Jewish?

What do you see? Pardon? Yeah, it's actually too early for the Roman emperor. But but yeah, in other words, you got that kind of thing. What's that? Well, the bird isn't necessarily a problem, other than the fact that it's a meat-eating bird. That could be a problem.

Okay, what else seems odd for a coin to be accepted as a temple tax? What seems strange to you? What are the letters that you see on the bird side of the coin? What's the language? It's capital letters of Greek What you see there is it's it's to carry it over in the English tyr That's tire and it's telling us from tire So first of all to accept it for payment of Jewish temple tax. Here's the coin the first one to be accepted Because it because I didn't accept, you know any other coins, but here's the first one and it's got Greek lettering and it's minted in a Gentile land.

What else is wrong? What do you see on the left side, on the face of the coin? Face of a person. What's wrong with that? Graven image. That's the problem. So what you see is For the Jews to have accepted this requires a substantial compromise. They've got something in Greek lettering, minted in a pagan land, probably by pagans, with a graven image on the front. By the way, here's Jesus, and he's asked, should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? What does Jesus do? Pardon? Yeah, but how does he go about answering the question? What's the first thing he asks?

Yeah, whose image is on the coin? Before that he says, show me a coin. You give me the coin. Okay, so he's saying, you guys pull it out of your possession. There's the coin. Now you tell me whose image is on it. And so basically he's getting them to admit, you yourselves have a pagan coin and you have a graven image on the face of the coin. and the graven image is the face of an emperor who claims to be a deity. You can see how his question was stinging. His question was stinging if they took the Old Testament seriously. But this just shows the level of compromise that's taken place in order to allow this. Centuries had gone by, and now finally, okay, we've got this face there.

Typically, the Jewish coins would show things like a menorah. things like that, that was okay as a Jewish symbol, but it's not like an image, a body or something. Dave, you wanted to ask a question? Both. The graven image, the graven image and accepting that it was a graven image as an allowable token for the temple tax, this was a first.

And it took, it took, you know, basically this is two centuries after Alexander the Great. And it took that time for it to be that, you know, kind of an accommodation where they'll finally accept it. And so you can see sort of a compromise taking place.

So by the time that Jesus is asking the question, show me the coin. He didn't have one. And you answer the question whose face is on it. You tell me. He's asking them questions. The very words coming out of their mouth is condemning them. Yes. They look primarily at a person's image, but they also look at any animal that might be looked on as an idol.

To them, the menorah was acceptable because it was not a person and it was something that they all knew as Jews was not an idol. If it was some animal or something that they would accept as an idol, then that would not be considered something allowable by any serious Jew. They didn't want anything that looked like the graven image, which amounted to idolatry. And that would be either typically a person or an animal would be the most common thing they'd be concerned about.

Well, and that's a problem. A lot of times these birds were used as symbols of this is our symbol of power or something like that, just like we have birds on a lot of our coinages and dollar bills and things like that that don't necessarily think of it as deity. Things were, by this time, coming to that, but still the grave and image issue was a serious one, and especially when still, you get into the Roman emperors, they still made definite claim to the emperor's deity.

Philo of Alexandria, he was a Jew living in the Jewish colony of Alexandria about 20 BC to 54 and you're going to see different dates because those just historians still arguing over exactly which dates so about that time but He integrated Greek allegorical interpretation of the Greek myths into interpretation of the Old Testament. The Greeks were skeptical of their myths Greeks like Plato was one who openly said, I don't think those are, you know, real history.

They must be allegory. And so the Greeks, a lot of them began to slip into skepticism. Philo grabbed hold of that. And he said, Greek philosophy is wonderful and embrace the allegorical interpretation and carried that over into Judaism. He looked at the Old Testament, the writings of Moses and said, well, these must be allegory too.

What's interesting is look at the time 20 BC to 54 AD. He lived in Alexandria. If Joseph and Mary, when they took Jesus out of Israel into Egypt for a while, may have been there in Alexandria at the same time as Philo. Yeah. Among Christians, Origin is the one who really espoused that publicly He died about I think 254 ad And so the transition happens like this the Greeks were the ones and we're talking Plato was the one who really introduced the idea that these myths Greek myths were allegories by the time of philo who was living around the year zero and It wasn't the actual year zero, but the dividing line between A.D. and B.C. who lived at that time. By that time, then you see a Jew accepting the idea that our sacred writings are allegorical. Then by the first half of the third century, in other words, the early 200s A.D., you see Christians beginning to accept the idea that our writings are allegorical. And so you see the progression from the Greeks, starting with Plato, and then into the Jews, and then finally, still in Alexandria, Origen, espousing this idea.

Is that? Yeah. It's interesting that it's 250 years. I like that one. Yeah, it's interesting. Craig's question is important because his teaching was literal interpretation, which is what we ascribe to and aspire to understand here. To him, that was immature. The only understanding that was spiritually mature was allegorical, so you had to allegorize everything. Nothing that was understood literally was worth anything spiritually. That was the understanding.

And what's happened is the church carried that on into the Middle Ages, and even now, churches have varying degrees of allegorical interpretation as part of the church standard doctrine. And it's carried over, basically, from Greek skepticism. So there's the influence of the Greeks, even now. Not just in the Greek New Testament, but even in how we interpret the Bible. It's been carried over into our culture. the orthodox churches, Roman Catholic Church, by orthodox I mean like Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, and tagging, there's about 20 some odd orthodox churches.

They all accept allegorical interpretation at some level, fairly substantially. Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodists, those also carry on some degree of allegorical interpretation as standard, not of everything, but as at least a portion of scripture. So anyway, there's Philo, and as soon as they started printing things, one of the things they did is they printed Philo's writings. So here's an old one of Philo's works.

Okay, here's the influence of the Greek culture upon the New Testament. I want to take a look at that. This is just an opening of Philippians in Greek. It's a little different from what we find in these little Greek inner linears, the reason being no spaces between the letters, all the letters in caps, and some of the letters look a little bit surprising. I won't go into it, but for example, what looks like a capital C was their way of writing a capital Sigma, an S. So Paulos ends with what looks like a C. OK, here's the New Testament documents.

So there's evidence of Latin, Aramaic, Persian. We talked about that last week. For example, the word paradise actually is a Persian origin. And occasionally, other foreign languages in the New Testament, the entire text was apparently originally written in Greek. You will find some people arguing that some of it was written originally in Aramaic. But that doesn't seem to be well accepted. By New Testament times, Greek was spoken and understood in most of the eastern half of the Mediterranean and had some degree of prominence even in the Roman Empire, even the emperor himself speaking and writing Greek.

Not all the time, but the ability to do so. What was it we mentioned sometime past? Using a Greek play on words, Augustus said of Herod, it's better to be his pig than his son. Better to be his hoose than his hooyahs. Then, let's talk about food. Matthew 8, Mark 5, and Luke 8 record an event in which Christ allowed demons to enter pigs' swine.

Such animals were unclean. We know that from Leviticus. You may not know the list of all the unclean animals, but almost everybody knows that pigs aren't kosher. They would not have been allowed by Mosaic Law. So here's these chapters in the first three Gospels, and what do you find the herders hurting? Pigs, okay? Now, Jesus is casting out this demon right along the edge of the Sea of Galilee.

It should be a very Jewish country. And we read later in the account that the pigs numbered in about 2,000. What are you doing having 2,000 pigs? That's a lot of pigs. 2,000 pigs in a Jewish land. Something's going on here. What had happened is, again, it's the pagan influence, isn't it? We've got all these Jews, but you've got lots of pagan influence. You have some reason that you could say there'd be justification. We've got some Greeks around here. We've got some Romans around here, and we've got to feed those people, right?

Yeah? You think it was a Jewish pig herder? They're not supposed to touch them, right? Not even supposed to touch their carcass. Now, 2,000 animals. What happened to those 2,000 pigs? They just wander off in the hills? What happened when they got the demons in them? They went into the Sea of Galilee. Can you imagine the ecological mess that 2,000 dead pigs is going to cause?

Oh man, what a mess. And smelly. Ugh. And who's going to clean this up? Do you know that the Mosaic Law, these same laws, they don't even touch the carcass? So you're not going to get Jews that are going to read the law and abide by it. They're going to pull it out of the water. So you've just got a mess. Or you've got Jews that are radically violating the Mosaic Law.

Greek influence. Greek influence. Probably some Roman by this time. Here's the Gospel of John and the Greeks. It was written after the others, likely in Ephesus. The Gospel of John is the only one, let's see, I said the only one of the hour, I'm sure what I meant there, only one of the Gospels that's mentioned the Greek language and the Greeks. Not sure what I was saying there, so might want to just blot that out. The only one of the Gospels which mentions the Greek language and the Greeks.

John 7.35, for example, the Jews then said to one another, He is not intending to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks, is he? I might mention, Joanne, that that might be relevant to your study in Matthew. She's with a group that's studying through the book of Matthew. And of course, one of the questions is, is Jesus' ministry, is he talking exclusively to Jews or not?

Of course, he says explicitly, I'm only sent to the Jews. He sends the disciples only to the Jews. Here in John, they're thinking, you know, he couldn't possibly be going to the Greeks. So they didn't expect that he would be going to the Greeks. It's only a further mention in John 12 and 19 there about the Greeks.

Synagogues, even in Israel, now you've got the place where the temple is, they've still got synagogues. So this phenomenon that had really taken place because they were far spread from Jerusalem, where you had a temple. Because really, there's nothing in the Old Testament to tell them to build synagogues, is there? Now, you have in Israel, synagogues, and you call them by a Greek name.

How about that? So there's been lots of this kind of infiltration back, bringing this pattern that was established out in the Greek lands back into Israel, even. We're going to have meetings in a place that the Old Testament doesn't tell us we're even supposed to have, and we're going to give it a Greek name. Lots of Greek influence.

See that? Here's the synagogue at Tapernaum. Just to be historically correct, this wasn't built until just after the New Testament was completed. But it's one that's in fairly good shape, and you can go visit it. Okay. It says there, for example, Jesus taught in the synagogue at Nazareth. So there was one there as well. Nazareth, by the way, was not a well-regarded town. Roman military records record that it was just a garbage town. So just a little podunk place. Here is the sign on Jesus' cross. At the order of Pontius Pilate, the sign posted on the cross was written in Hebrew, which may have been Aramaic.

The word for distinguishing between the two was not abundantly clear, so scholars can argue that until their faces turn blue. And then Latin and Greek. So this is the way it would have looked here. You'll see the Latin on the top, and then you'll see the Greek, and then you'll see the Hebrew or possibly Aramaic. That's in Hebrew what's shown there. Bottom line is, here's deep in Jerusalem, right outside the environment of Jerusalem, You want to get the Greek up there on the sign to be included because that's a significant language that everybody would know. So Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.

Now, when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, how many of you have looked up something in the New Testament and somebody will give a cross-reference or maybe some Bibles will do it in all capital letters, and you look at the Old Testament quote and you say, that isn't quite the same. You notice that? There's about 260 places where the New Testament quotes either quote or close paraphrase the Old Testament. And one of the reasons for the difference is this, that since they were writing in Greek and they figure, okay, I'm going to quote the Old Testament, it was far easier to just take the Greek Old Testament and quote from that. than it was to take the Hebrew and translate it fresh. So what you're having is when you're looking at your Hebrew Bible, you're seeing a translation from Hebrew to English. When you're looking at the quote of that in the New Testament, it's a quote from Hebrew to Greek to English. So you've got two levels of translation that you're reading through. That explains some of the reason why the New Testament quote doesn't match exactly.

From the Septuagint, right. There were also, as I mentioned, some variations in the Septuagint, different Greek versions. Let's see, do I mention it here? Let me take a look ahead and see if I've mentioned it. Yes, here. The letter to the Ephesians, the book of Hebrews, and the book of Revelation, for example, when quoting the Old Testament, often do so from a variant of it originating from the area of Ephesus.

And so what they find is, okay, here's this variant of the Greek Old Testament originating from the area around Ephesus. And what we find is here, interesting, Paul uses that one variant to quote from most often, or very typically, when he quotes from the Old Testament in the book of Ephesians. So very interesting. It's like Paul makes this very direct connection. He says, this is the version they'll be reading from, that's what I'll quote from. So it quotes exactly from that with all little dialectical differences like to use a comparison or spelling of theater You know er re or behavior?

IOR IOU are so all those differences there Okay And then even though the New Testament was written by what I Jews with the exception of dr. Luke any other exceptions to the New Testament you can think of? Might have been written by somebody other than a Jew? I'm not aware of any. I'm just wondering if you can think of any.

But Dr. Luke is the main definite Gentile that we know of. From the book of Acts on, the dominant influence of the Greek culture is evident in every book. Not just the language, but Greek culture you find significant influence. Many of Paul's traveling companions were of Greek background. You find Dr. Luke, who is, of course, case in point, traveled with Paul numerous places.

We see Luke writing in some parts of Acts, we, us, first person. So he's writing as a witness right there. Possibly transferred to a Greek medical school in Philippi. That's something that's more inferred, not something there's specific evidence of. Timothy, now Timothy had Jewish mother and grandmother. Paul makes mention of that. What about his father? Pardon? Probably Greek.

Paul circumcised Timothy, right? If Timothy's father had been Jewish, of any seriousness at all, he'd have said, go ahead and get him circumcised. He may have even objected to him being circumcised. because of a Greek background. Titus was one who, as far as we know, was fully Greek. So if you look at various ones, you'll find a spectrum in there. You'll find some that are Greek, half Greek, and occasionally some other Jews. Paul makes mention of those. Here's the timeline.

New Testament Greek continued to be spoken and written until about 300 AD. Finally, it was displaced by Latin. One of the phenomena that's real interesting is that the language of an empire tended to outlast the empire by centuries. And the language of the current empire was often not dominant until the empire was on its last legs. Very interesting phenomenon. And this was the case. Greek then eventually ended up narrowing itself and the other languages, particularly Latin, just taking over and Greek becoming a more narrow language specific to the Greek people rather than something everybody spoke. But it took centuries, basically 600 years after Alexander before it finally kind of reduced itself down to that point. Okay.

Just to let people know, I'm putting together a kind of a resource sheet. and so that you'll have, you know, here's some internet sites, books. I've tried to introduce some books and occasional internet sites, but I know that'll kind of drive you crazy and later on you may want to get something. So anyway, I've got something that I'm preparing. It's sort of halfway done, but before the end I'll have a sheet and then you can make use of it. I'll include it on the CD, so those of you who use, you know, the internet and CDs instead of typing in all these crazy links that you can use the Word file and click on the link directly from Word and then get the resource that way a little more efficiently than typing in all these things. Nonetheless, there will also be a listing of different books, and I've tried to bring them in a little at a time so you can see some of them and see whether it's a fit, whether it's something you'd be interested in. So anyway, I don't intend to just have these, but we'll have the resource list, we'll have a CD of everything we've covered in the the elective. And feel free at any time to ask me about books or if you have a question about a link or you don't have internet, give a holler. I'll do what I can to help you get connected up. Okay?

And next time, Roman culture. We'll be covering Roman culture and then Jewish culture and then other biblical cultures. And that'll finish up kind of the culture section. Other biblical cultures would be things like the Philistines, would be, who are the Amorites? And you got all these Amorites and Perizzites and Hittites and Termites and everything else, right? So anyway, we'll be looking at a lot of these other miscellaneous cultures as well and getting some background on them. All right. Questions? How do we do here? Yeah. Yeah.

The learning of Hebrew tended to be more exclusively to like the scribes and the Pharisees and the ones who were really serious about focusing on that. The everyday language in Israel by New Testament times was actually Aramaic. still carrying over the Aramaic language. Remember how we said that got introduced by the Assyrians? So we went through the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and now the Romans, and you're still speaking Assyrian. The Aramaic. Real interesting. So in Israel, Aramaic would have been the common language that they would have spoken. Oh, Jewish people today. Well, it's real interesting.

What happened is, we covered it a couple weeks ago, how the Lord, way back in Deuteronomy, spelled out what was going to happen to these people. You'll be scattered, you'll be all among the nations, and you'll be few, you'll be out of your land, but God will bring you back. And remember, we showed a population chart of just booming Jewish population in Israel, even before Israel became a nation again. They started a kind of a conference of Jews that met every few years just talking about, you know, rebuilding our nation. And this was back in the 1800s. And so this all got started. There's a whole story, and I don't even have time to go into it, but how the Jewish nation came about.

And when it finally did, and after World War II, when they established the Jewish nation, It was something at that time that they were saying, okay, we're putting our country back together again, what language are we going to speak? And there was a determination at that point in time, we're going to speak Hebrew. Because we have to be able to talk to one another and we can't just speak English and Greek and Russian and all this stuff. So what language is everybody going to learn?

Hebrew. So it's real interesting with some adaptation, what they are learning today in the schools in Israel allows them to read the Old Testament directly. Isn't that amazing? I see it as part of the Lord's preparation for a time when they will see the pages of the Old Testament and say, there's our Messiah.

But it's a time yet to come. Because while they are prepared in that way, language-wise, in their hearts, they're far from it. But the Lord will work in them. It will come to pass. Just like their gathering has miraculously occurred. Their restoration as a nation after almost 2,000 years is a miracle. But it's the Lord's doing. It won't happen because human beings determined. It will be because God makes it take place. Other questions? Yes. Yeah, if you look at if you look at like Matthew, I almost certainly would Aramaic Luke's not. Luke would be an exception, being a Greek background. Mark, probably Aramaic, would have been the natural one.

And John was one who, in his earlier years, Aramaic would have been the natural thing, but with the 70 AD event, where basically all the Jews were booted out, continuing the Aramaic was a tough thing to do, and so you simply had to adapt to the Greek. John's Greek, unlike Paul's, is very simple. Fortunately for us, once John would latch on to a word or word pair or phrase, he would use that with profound consistency, because Aramaic was more his natural language. And yet still, marvelous things are apparent, as you see, even in the Greek words that he chose and the Aramaic behind it.

You know, in the beginning was the word, and I think I mentioned before, the Aramaic word for word is the word used throughout the Aramaic version of the Old Testament for God. In the beginning was the God. There's no question that it was intended to be defined. Yes.

Closer to Hebrew. It's actually fairly close to Hebrew. A lot of the Jews found it a fairly easy transition between one and the other. And a lot of the various script that you see marked on stone and things of that sort from Old Testament times, archaeologists encounter, people a lot of times will say, that's Hebrew. No, it's actually Aramaic. Very similar. They're cousins in terms of language types. Yeah. Other questions? Yeah. Dave? Yes. That's right.

In other words, what happened is instead of translating it, and we have the same problem today in our translations, instead of translating it, they interpreted it. So if you write out your interpretation, Let's take it for instance, Jesus said to Peter, you know, and upon this rock, I will build my church. Well, you could interpret that, you know, say from a Catholic standpoint and say, and upon you, Peter, I will build my church. Well, that's not what it says. That's an interpretation.

So they would do that in portions of Daniel and it was not well received. The Jews saw that and just like, you know, instant, you know, anger and fury over what they'd done. So they rejected it and what they did is that version that came out of Ephesus, that's the version of Daniel that they stuck with. So they very quickly replaced that and then some other portions later, but immediately that one was Daniel. They said we can't have this.

Other questions? I think we've run out of time anyway. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for the time we've had here. We thank you that even through all the massive changes and yes, even compromise among the Jews, still you have kept your word and preserved it for us so that we have inspired words that we can count upon and words through which we can see the glory of your son. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.