Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
From my reading I get the impression that Jesus was a semi-literate Galilean who didn't speak Greek. Hellenism would have seemed foreign to him.
|
Maybe. But my reading reveals that he was surrounded with Hellenistic culture. At the time Galilee was under rule of Herod Antipas, who was Hellenizing his area of rule. Maybe Jesus rejected it, but he grew up in it. He sure wasn't as outspoken about it as he was against the scribes and Pharisees.
Quote:
Originally Posted by z
Where does Toynbee say that Hellenism was only exterior and use the compost metaphor?
|
Well .... if some kind-hearted Christian like person would loan me a Kindle version of his history, it sure would save me all the time, work, and effort to research it again, in this big hardbound copy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by z
But yes, as the churches became more and more gentile, the traditional hebraic background of the church in thought and teaching began to be submerged in Hellenistic thought forms. Israel's preoccupation with history and eschatology was gradually overlaid with more static concepts of Greek categorical thought.
|
Was that because the Hellenic seed was planted in Galilee?
Quote:
Originally Posted by z
These Greek concepts aided the church in its adjustment to the delay of the second coming. But their characteristic division of the human person into soul and body led to extremes of asceticism, libertinism and gnosticism, therefore created ethical and ordinal problems for those vying for control. The orthodox solution combined authoritarianism in the Roman tradition with dogma based on Greek philosophical categories.
|
This is an amazing insight. History shows this to be true. The Roman structure eventually became the structure of the church.