Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

We've been going through the different cultures, started with Egyptian culture and then Assyrian, Babylonian, last week Persian, this week Greek culture. And several very interesting things about this Greek culture aspect. One is that, is there any mention of the Greek empires or the Greek empire in the Old Testament? There is nothing recorded in terms of history because it happened between the Testaments. We talked last week about how Persia was the last empire in the Old Testament era and then it extended into the time between the Testaments. In the case of the Greek Empire, It all took place between the testaments so there's nothing historically.

There is prophetically mentioned in the book of Daniel about the Greek culture and as a matter of fact what's very interesting is when Alexander the Great came into Israel rather than finding an army ready to fight them off, Josephus recorded that Jadwa the high priest said to Alexander, we were expecting you, based on the book of Daniel. So real interesting. And so Alexander the Great had a fairly friendly relationship with the Jews in Israel, and a friendly reception as opposed to the usual battles.

So anyway, we'll be taking a look at that. So here's the Greek Empires right after the Persian Empire and continuing until the Jews had a period of fairly independent rule at the end of that Greek Empire period. And we'll talk about that pretty soon. The target for Alexander the Great was the Persian Empire. Here is this very aggressive, very controlling, very driving young man. And he basically was pressing to take over what had been the Persian Empire.

That's kind of a way to summarize it. So I think you had this in last week's material. But what you have, and this is on the last couple of, top of the second to the last page of your color handouts in the back. So we've covered this previously and stepped our way through it. We had the Egyptian Empire there, and the Jews were held as captive slaves in Egypt for 430 years. Then we have the Assyrian Empire. Many Jews were exiled, and Samaritans were a mixture of Jews and Gentiles. Because what did the Assyrians do?

They scrambled populations. Let's take this one and put it over here, and take this one and put it over here. And by mixing them up, their hope was to avoid then any rebellions by having the people so scrambled they couldn't even talk to each other. Then the Babylonians came in. They had a relocation philosophy, but it was bring everybody close to Babylon. So that was a little different than the Assyrians who just scrambled people.

It's the philosophy of have your friends close and your enemies closer. So that's the approach that the Babylonians took. Here is Assyria and Babylon. We put the red box around it because as a philosophy of empire, and in many other respects, they were the most similar of all these empires.

Next, Persia that we looked at last week, and the Persians were the ones who had the Jews returning to Israel in several waves, actually supporting their going back to rebuild the temple and to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem. And then, the Greek empires.

Their philosophy was to infuse the Greek culture and language everywhere. Alexander the Great had taken what had been a number of dialects and fused them into one language and made some changes to make the language more simple and consistent. And so that is what we call New Testament Greek. The term was koina or common Greek.

And now he relocated some people, but he did so at least with the Jews, not by forcing anything, but by request. Would you move here? And we also find that later on, and we'll look at that in detail, later on some Jews elsewhere as well, but again it was an encouragement, not something done at the end of a spear.

Now, here's the military progression. This again is on page one of your color supplement at the back. So here's the military progression. It shows the arrows where Alexander the Great came across here, went through Ephesus and down along the coast and went inland. So you see the sequence here.

And so when he came into Tyre, That was where the people of Tyre had an island that they went to to escape Alexander the Great. And he said, OK. And he took what was on the mainland and scraped it off the earth and pushed it out and made the island no longer an island. And it isn't an island even today. So that's how he ended the Tyrian standoff.

So anyway, going through there and he even went into what is now Afghanistan. So he went that far. Now, here is another map that you've got on there and something that's often overlooked. The Greeks and the Phoenicians, because this map contains both, but we've highlighted the Greeks.

The Greeks and the Phoenicians had a network of shipping and trade. And they went around the Mediterranean with this trade and even up into the Black Sea. And so the Greeks even had trading way up in this area. And the Phoenicians even went up to southern Britain. So quite a trading system, and that trading system went on for centuries. And that was a part of the Greek culture longstanding.

Now the Greek language impact. He distributed the language, the Greek language, over the eastern Mediterranean And although he pressed it on into farther east, east of the Mediterranean, that kind of went back and it was the area around the eastern Mediterranean that retained the Greek language that he had spread.

Question? Did he come from Greece? Is he a Grecian or whatever? Yes. That's where he was born? Yeah. Quick question on that same issue. Yeah. He's commonly known as Alexander the Macedonian. Yeah. Yes. It was still infused with the Greek culture. Yeah.

He also unified the language, minimizing the influence of dialects. He basically said, militarily, this is how we're going to talk. This is how we're going to talk. And so he spread it and distributed it, but he also modified the language in terms of not this dialect, not that one, and made things more uniform. What's that?

Yes. Yeah, Alexander also simplified the language, leading to shorter, more easily understood sentences. So he actually went through and changed the language deliberately in order to make it simpler and more direct. So he did all those things. So you can look at the verbs there. He distributed, unified, and simplified. Those are the things that he did with the language there.

The Jews had this friendly introduction, as we talked about before, to Alexander the Great, and so he came to them and he said, would you please move a number of your people to this new city I'm going to build called Alexandria, right? Oh, I wonder where he got that name. So he had everybody that he could move to that area, and so the Jewish quarter of Alexandria was on the east end, which is of course closest to Israel and Jerusalem, right? And this is the Pharos in Alexandria, which is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Now it's the end of Alexander the Great and the disintegration of his empire. Alexander the Great survived battle after battle, eventually succumbed to alcoholism, finally disease, possibly malaria from the description of the symptoms. So here's a guy that's driving and pushing and going into battle again and again and again and again and finally gets killed by a bottle and a mosquito. Really kind of amazing. He did himself in.

Four of his generals each took a portion of the empire. The way it worked out is here's Alexander the Great on his deathbed, and after all this aggressive push to drive and drive and drive to take over the Persian Empire, they said, you know, who takes over from here? And he says, the strongest. And so you have the generals. essentially divide up, carve up the Empire and so those are their names and the locations. Now one of the things that happened is remember Alexander the Great came in and said you all are going to learn Greek and you're going to speak it this way and that's what you will do.

Well here are the Jews in Alexandria and Within a generation, they said, we don't know how to read Hebrew. We don't know how to read our scriptures anymore. We need the Old Testament in Greek. So that's called the Septuagint. The Septuagint is implying that they had these 70 some odd scholars here. And so that's the source of the term. And so they worked on this Greek translation of the Old Testament, done in Alexandria about 250 BC. And you will find some different dates for that time. And that one reason is because it wasn't done overnight, right? It's going to take some time. So you'll find some variation in the date, but that's about when it was. So here you have the Greek Empire, and you have At this point, here's Alexander the Great introducing the new Greek language as it's going to be spoken, here at the beginning of that time, and then about in here.

By that time, you have Jews that no longer know how to read their Hebrew Old Testament, and so now they need it in Greek. So in some places, the text revealed a bias toward Greek culture. It wasn't just Greek language, but now Greek culture was involved in the translation.

And even to some points where instead of being a translation, it was a commentary. So some of the Jews would look at that and say, I didn't write. So as a result, some books were replaced by other Greek versions afterwards. For example, Daniel was one that was highly modified. And so that was one of them that they pitched out and said, no, we're not going to go for that. And they replaced it.

There were also regional variants. In other words, as they started copying that, and though they translated it in Alexandria, there were other places where Jews were located and spoke Greek. And so as they would take it to a different place, they would sometimes have, you know, changes in words, just like not necessarily Major, but yeah, more style, kind of like we would have theater. Is it ER or RE, right, at the end? So that kind of thing. So there actually be regional variations.

And here's one of the impacts from about 220 BC to around 220 BC, 2,000 Jewish families made the move from around Babylon at the encouragement of the Greek government there over to the area around Ephesus. And the way that they did this was unlike with the Assyrians and Babylonians, where they said, you will move. What they did is they say, if you will move, we'll give you 10 years, no taxes. So they relocated them with that kind of encouragement. Ten year tax exemption and 2,000 families, where do I sign?

So they made the move and as a result you ended up having another cluster of Jews then in the area around Ephesus, in those cities. So then, what you end up having is between Babylon, the area around Ephesus, and in Alexandria, between those three areas and surrounding areas, you end up having, by New Testament times, two-thirds or more of the Jews lived outside of Israel. So most of them lived elsewhere. So here's the and I think you've got this on your last page there. Yes, Pat?

One of the things that they would do is to get people spread apart somewhat like the Assyrians and Babylonians did. Get people in another area and you don't end up having quite so much trouble because they're scattered in different locations. Because look at the move they made. The Jews were here, and they moved them all the way to the far end, the far western end of the empire. So that gets them pretty far apart. And so they didn't just have them move next door, they had them move quite a distance.

It's just a little easier if you don't have them so concentrated. Well, the reality is that Jews, aside from these major moves, the Jews drifted in all kinds of directions over time. And you had Jews drifting down into Africa, you had Jews drifting farther to the east, you had Jews drifting in other areas. These are just some of the main concentrations by certain events. But the reality is the Jews wandered and scattered in a lot of different places.

So Jews in Alexandria and Western Asia Minor spoke and read Greek as their primary language, and that was part of the reason for encouraging the making of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. Jews in Babylon held the mixtures of Greek and Aramaic. And Jews in Israel spoke Aramaic as their first language, with many also able to communicate in Greek and or Hebrew in writing and in speech. Then the Old Testament from Exodus on expresses repeated warnings for the Jews not to be influenced by their Gentile neighbors. But with most Jews in Gentile lands, all of them with some level of Greek influence, the influence upon them was strongly Greek. Now, think about this. Do we have more Jewish or Greek influence in our culture? Yeah, the truth is we've got some of both. But here is a for instance.

The Greeks focused on how does something look? How does something sound? So, for example, the Greeks would make statues, which of course the Jews would be reluctant to do. Why? Because that's a graven image, that's right. But the Greeks, they had no problem making statues, and they would look at beauty of form and aesthetics. How does it look? That matters a lot.

Among the Jews, they wouldn't make statues, but what they would do is when the Jews would write something, for example in Revelation, they would write things saying, here's what the symbol means, but not care so much about what does that look like when you get done describing it, because they're looking at what does it mean. Same thing with their poetry. They rhyme the meanings, not the sounds. But we, in our culture, have inherited what? Rhyming of sounds, not meanings.

So we actually have more Greek influence there. So the other thing here was, let's see, The Greeks were polytheistic, with elements of Greek culture moving into magic, astrology, occultism, and Eastern mysticism. The Greeks traveled all over the place, and there was, starting around this time also, the Silk Road trade, that is trade from the farther east, and so you had early influences of Buddhism and Hinduism coming in. And the Greek religions often mix with foreign religions, including some of those from the farther east. But one of the things we can find, for example, if you go to Philippi, not only Greek temples, but Egyptian temples. So the Egyptian religion had spread into other areas.

Here is a Jewish magical text from Egypt written in Greek. So here are the Jews absorbing this magic from the Greek and Egyptian influence written in Greek. A number of Jews were profoundly impressed by Greek philosophy and so Plato would be an example of One of the guys who lived around just before and during the early New Testament times. The Jews had already taken on logical argument about issues of Mosaic Law and of course a lot of those logical argument and questionings and debates, that's what we see in the New Testament.

And so here are the Pharisees and the Sadducees coming to Jesus with questions and trying to get him to take sides and trick him into giving an answer that would get him in trouble, things of that sort. The Greek philosophy was an extension of the same practice into other areas of logic and speculation.

Most Jews lived outside of Israel, away from the temple, so a lot of Jews made pilgrimages. And a lot of times, that took a lot of time. In those days, you were probably doing pretty good to make about 20 miles in a day, all totaled. And so if you're coming from, say, Ephesus to Jerusalem, that's a long trip. That's a long trip.

So they would come in and do their pilgrimages to Jerusalem. They would oftentimes also have people collecting the temple tax from these other areas and bringing them down to Jerusalem. So if, for example, someone would say, well, I'm not going to Jerusalem this year, but this guy is, and so I'll give him the temple tax and he can take it in. These pilgrimages not only brought distant Jews into contact with the Jewish culture of Israel, but they also introduced mixtures of cultures, obviously with substantial Greek influence.

So you've got all this pilgrimage, and you go back and forth, and that's why, for example, in Acts chapter 2, people were from all over the place, right? There were people from Rome, there were people from Babylon, there were people from Egypt there on the day of Pentecost. most of those having some kind of Greek influence.

Here's another one. Synagogue. That's not a Jewish word. Synagogue is a Greek word. And yet that's what the Jews call it. Why would they come up with this name Synagogue? It's because of all the Greek influence. So much so that that ends up being what the Jews themselves call their gathering place.

This is the synagogue. The other thing is if everybody's long ways away from the temple, and going to the temple isn't going to happen that often, then let's meet some other building, right? And so they would have, with the more distant locations away from Israel, people invented these synagogues and would meet in the synagogues, because that was something you could do regularly, but going to Jerusalem, that was tough to pull off. Even to the point where Jerusalem itself had synagogues, because they brought in that cultural background, right? The word synagogues from a Greek word, synagoge, which means to lead together. lead together, or together lead is the sequence there.

Ah yes, and so here are Jews trying to gather their temple tax and take it into Jerusalem with the people that are going down for a pilgrimage, right? And as they were gathering these funds for the temple tax, The local officials said, no, no, and they tried to prevent it. So the Jews were, we have a record where the Jews would get stopped from taking the temple tax because that's taking money out of the local economy, right? And so you'd have the local officials trying to stop it and the Jews trying to do it, you know, as secretly as they can. and get it all done. And so you had this battle between the local officials who didn't want the money flowing out of their economy and going to Jerusalem and the Jews who wanted to make sure that they followed the law and paid the temple tax.

Another thing that happened during this time and as a result of the Greek influence is the Apocrypha. collection of, I'll say, variously regarded Jewish writings, typically written in Greek, reflecting this Hellenistic influence. Anybody read through the Apocrypha? Read through some portion of it?

There's all sorts of different things, like Maccabees, it's not without some kind of spiritual comment, but Maccabees is largely an historical set of documents, 1st and 2nd Maccabees. Yes? There's a lot that's questionable and the Jews really never accepted the Apocrypha as part of their documents and the church didn't either until many centuries later. Yes?

So was the Apocrypha copied and translated with scribes or did they use Greek Basically, the Hebrew scribes didn't have any real use for this, but they were largely written in Greek. There was a lot of Greek influence. You can see it as you read through it. Some of it gets even mythological. But again, lots of Greek influence. The Hebrew scribes in Israel wouldn't have much use for it. But others, particularly those in surrounding areas with a lot of the Greek influence outside of Jerusalem, they would be the ones who would take more interest in it.

Yeah. So there must have been a lot of errors in when they copied this, because it describes where we want to have the system to make sure that... Yeah, there wasn't the copying rigidity that there was with the Hebrew Old Testament. Here's another thing.

Here is the half shekel, which in 126 BC, they began to accept as payment for the temple tax. Reason being, the temple tax was required to be paid in a certain amount, right? Well, they didn't make that coin that the Book of Exodus calls for anymore. So you couldn't get it. And so this was actually twice the value of the one that spelled out in Exodus.

So two people would go together and do this. Now, what do you see on the face and on the back of the coin? A graven image. So this was a compromise that the Jews had to make in order to pay the temple tax with this coin. So here was a coin produced in a pagan area. This is Tyre, right? Produced in Tyre. And so here's this coin produced in a pagan area with graven images front and back that was in violation of the law, right?

And so you can imagine, here's Jesus when he gets asked about, you know, should I pay taxes to Caesar? What does Jesus do? He says, hey, you guys, show me the coin out of your pocket, right? Show me the coin. What does the coin have on it? Caesar's image, right? So they were in violation and carrying that coin around.

And so you had the images and then of course the lettering on that was also in Greek. But this is 126 BC. This is well after the time of the Greek empires, but Still the Greek language and influence was there, and the Jews had accommodated this compromise. Philo of Alexandria was a Jew living in the Jewish colony in Alexandria, which is the east end of Alexandria there. He integrated Greek allegorical interpretation of Greekness into the interpretation of the Old Testament. So instead of things saying what they say and taking them directly, everything was allegorized.

For instance, Genesis 2.24, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. And we think, okay, I understand what that means. The allegorized version of that is so different you could hardly recognize it. He took this, you know, a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined to his wife is some change in philosophies that's taking place, right?

The influence of the Greek culture on the New Testament now. There's evidence of Latin, Aramaic, Persian, and occasionally other foreign languages in the New Testament. The entire text was apparently originally written in Greek and then translated into other languages. 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 western part of the Roman Empire and in Parthia to the east.

When Herod the Great, who we keep telling you was not that great, when Herod the Great was put into power, he was an extremely jealous man and was not afraid to be very cruel. He had one of his sons put to death. because he was afraid that his son was moving in on his power. So Caesar, who was Augustus Caesar at that time, Augustus Caesar made a play on words in Greek, though he was in Rome, made a play on words in Greek where he said, it is better to be Herod's pig than his son. the two words sounding real similar. So even there where Latin was the regular language had enough Greek influence that Caesar knew to make a play on words in Greek.

Then we get Matthew 8, Mark 5, and Luke 8 record an event in which Christ allowed demons to enter pigs. But what are those doing in Israel? Hmm, okay. Here's more influence from the Greek culture being, you know, pressed in there. Such animals run clean and do not have been allowed by the Mosaic law. Now we have another, written after the other Gospels, likely in Ephesus, the Gospel of John is the only one of the four which mentions the Greek language and the Greeks. so particularly focuses on that.

John 7.35, the Jews then said to one another, and he is not intending to go into the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks, is he?

John 12.20 and 19.20 also make mention of the Greeks and the Greek influence there. Synagogues, even in Israel, And even in Jerusalem, by some estimates, there were some 300 or 400 synagogues in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. So even though the temple was there, this synagogue culture, which had started elsewhere where people couldn't get to the temple, moved in even to Israel. And in fact, it was the synagogues not only where they hold their services there, But they would also hold their courts there and where there would be fines and even whippings. We won't do that at Holly Hills.

You'll be glad to know. Here at the order of Pontius Pilate, the sign posted on the cross was written in Hebrew, or possibly Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. And so you have that Luke records the Latin, John has the Greek, and Matthew has the reference there to Hebrew. So based on the content, that's what those signs would have looked like.

Out of the about 260 places where the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament, the English quote in the New Testament doesn't follow the English passage in the Old Testament exactly, and you may have noticed that. You ever look up, oh, this is quoting Isaiah or something like that, and you read it in the New Testament, you read the translation of Isaiah, and you say, well, that doesn't quite match. And the reason is, Most of the New Testament quotes of the Old Testament are from the Greek Old Testament with two translations to get into English, and this explains most of the observed variations. That is, if I'm quoting the Old Testament, the first translation I'm going to do is from Hebrew into the Greek, right? And then by the time I translate that then again into English, I've got additional opportunity for change.

Tom? Yeah, somewhat, but this is one of those instances where anytime you have a change from one language to the next and you make word choices, right? Then you have the, even with somebody being as careful as they can, you have the opportunity for there to be a little bit of drift in the words that come out. And it's because of the character of language, you know, we have words that mean something. And when you just try to do a simple translation, it doesn't come across quite the same way. What makes it even more interesting is that kids are just learning about the concept of language. And in a lot of ways, it's a mini-experiment over a shorter period of time, over what could happen over a period of hundreds of years and beyond. Now here's another one.

Letter to the Ephesians, the book of Hebrews and the book of Revelation, when quoting the Old Testament, often do so from a variant of it that originated from the area around Ephesus. Very interesting. It's like the E-R-R-E example that I gave with the spelling of the word theater. In America we would say it's ER, in Britain it's RE. That kind of variation where there's just a letter switch, a letter swap, not a huge difference otherwise. But those kinds of variations show up specifically in Ephesians and that would make sense, wouldn't it? It's writing to the Ephesians in a version that's from Ephesus.

Yeah, that makes sense. But then also what's interesting is the book of Hebrews is when it quotes the Old Testament is quoting that same version of the Greek Old Testament that was around Ephesus. A couple of things really curious to me. One is that the other is that Hebrews repeatedly uses shipping nautical terms. And Ephesus is what, a port city, right? So a couple of different things come together to say, yeah, Hebrews was probably written in and around Ephesus or written to that church. Yeah?

What do you think the percentage of people, the masses so to speak, that could read back then? Ah, quite a bit of variation in that because in Among the Jews, actually, literacy was pretty high. You would also tend to find more literacy in higher population areas. So the answer is there's quite a variation, but as a generalization, the Jews were more literate. As a generalization, more urban areas tended to be more literate. to speak, and they had awe in what he said.

So they had been listening prior to the people in the synagogue, the Jews, who were reiterating these texts, the meaning of these texts. And so then here comes Jesus, who now is telling them the same story, but in a different way, with more emphasis on what God really wanted them to hear. Because they couldn't read the Latin text. So it's a similar situation back there, where they really couldn't read because they didn't understand what was written. Think of it, here's the beginning of the book of Revelation, where it says, Blessed is he who reads and hears. And he who reads is in singular, and hears is plural.

Even though the New Testament was written by Jews, with the exception of Dr. Luke, Dr. Luke was of Greek background, from the book of Acts on Greek cultural influences beside the language are evident in every book in some degree. Paul's traveling companions were often Greeks. Dr. Luke, who was likely trained at the Greek medical school of Philippi, would of course be one, wrote over a quarter of the New Testament. Timothy, Greek father, Jewish mother, right? So there's that influence. And Titus, who was likely full Greek. So you have a lot of traveling companions and associates who are completely or partly Greek.

So here you have, here's the Greek Empire. ending at least for Israel in its dominance in 166. That was when the Jews said, we've had enough. The two Greek empires next to Israel fought over Israel and went back and forth about a dozen times. And finally, the Jews just said, that's enough. problem came because the leader of the Eastern Greek Empire was forcing the Jews to do pagan rituals. And they said, no, we're not going there.

New Testament Greek continued to be spoken and written till about 300 AD, being displaced by Latin and other languages after that time. One of the things that's an interesting pattern is that the language that was initiated by an empire tended to last centuries after the empire was done. It's the same thing, here's Assyria who brought in Aramaic and by New Testament times here the Jews are many of them speaking Aramaic, right? And here is Greek distributed by Alexander the Great, basically by force, and it continued six centuries after the time that had been started, even centuries after the empire itself had all been replaced. And then you find even Latin, which started to take over even when Rome had long since fallen apart. Latin was still a prominent and dominant language.

So it's an interesting pattern of history. You had people able to write and to speak in the New Testament for centuries after the New Testament time and they could read it and write it as a native language and not have to study it as a second language. Alright, so next we'll take a look at the Roman culture, and then actually what we'll do is we'll step back and look at the Jewish culture after that time. Questions? Comments? Stan? Yeah? So actually then, Alexander the Great is kind of the last one man who took over the Yeah, Alexander the Great was really unique in that regard in that, I mean, he was the guy that pulled it off. And it was all about him.

I mean, he started multiple Alexandrias, you know. on the one hand, but on the other hand, unlike these other empires, he had no plan for succession. That was just not even in his thought. Right, but prior to him, we had Nebuchadnezzar, who was one individual who really made a profound influence on Babylon. We had Cyrus, we had Darius, and you know, these were more single individuals.

Yeah. So when you think about history, If you think about Hitler and Mussolini and some of these other guys, we think of that as being so bad and evil and just ridiculous to think that one man could make that big of a difference. But when you really look at it, you can't take over the world. I mean, this was the prior history to the way things happened, right?

I mean, there was one man in the class. In the end, we can identify individuals who had a role. I would say Alexander the Great was unique in terms of his driving this thing, but having no plan or thought for what's next. Very interesting to have someone so focused on taking over.

And what's next? Oh, I don't know. Yes. So young, he probably didn't plan to die that young. He had married her back in his pregnancy at that time. Yeah. But he never planned to die that young. So he probably hadn't planned it. Yeah. He just hadn't thought that far ahead. Even the what if scenario, he'd never really given any thought to that.

Kind of amazing. Other thoughts, questions? Well, obviously he was being led by God, because I usually said in Daniel that the Lord would bring out the human right now. I think one of the things, you know, Christians can get really wound up about, like, different political situations and world conditions and things of that sort. And I think one of the things to look at is, you know, history from a human standpoint, I mean, it seems like a bunch of random mess. But the reality is that God is managing history. He's managing history towards an end. Even the statement of the New Testament, at the right time God sent his son. So God is selecting times for major events. Here's Alexander the Great.

Was he a believer at all? No. Not so much. And yet, what we find, the language that he went and spread is the language of the New Testament. And it made it easier for that His efforts made it easier for that Greek New Testament to go in more and more places where it was understood.

And you had the right meanings for the message. Yes, yeah. It goes to other languages. It was a language well constructed for the kind of message. Here is Jesus on the cross, and the part that's translated, it is finished. Just one Greek word. in the perfect tense. It's paid, and the perfect tense means it's a completed past action, ongoing results in the future, implying permanence. And he said that with one word. Tetelestai. That's all it took. And he said all that with just one word. That's powerful. Yes.

I think one of the things as we look at these empires It's valuable for us to study the character of the empire and what did they do and how did that impact different things. It helps us understand scripture better. It helps us understand, you know, why did things happen the way they did.

And, you know, here's Alexander the Great, had no sympathies at all for the Christian teaching. Matter of fact, he had no idea that there was going to be such a thing. And yet he laid the groundwork for that to be communicated over a very wide area and to be well understood. So yeah, potent.

Yes. One of the reasons he did what he did with the Greek language, it was a matter of necessity because he went on through all of these countries and he picked up mercenaries or military people to serve with him that they had to be able to understand. Well that that would have been one of the reasons for doing that the other thing is is that there was a There was a sense that actually continued into the Roman Empire. There was a sense that the Greek culture and philosophy Were exemplary were excellent the best yes, and and that's that's essentially what I Was picked up by even some of the Jews even Christians the Christians in North Africa By the end of the second century and into the third century were saying the two things were inspired by God Scripture and Greek philosophy Now it was it was that mindset that that also contributed to, yeah, you'll learn this language because it's associated with the Greek philosophy and that's just the best of the best. Right? That was the attitude. Yes. Yes, you will read Plato's Republican such as that. So, yeah. Okay, let's pray.

Thank you. As we look at this, it gives us perspective that the things that to us appear random or even points of concern in what is happening in the world around us. This reassures us that in fact, while certainly evil things are going on and things that we would not prefer to have happen are happening. You are the Lord of history and you will work all things together for good and you will cause a history to move in a direction such that everything will be summed up in Christ. Thank you for the assurance that we can have from that. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.