Alexander the Great

And all of that ended because it was over.

That experiment, which began, I mean, I don't know, in some ways you could say it began with Alexander the Great because they were Greek speaking, but certainly began, you know, with the Roman Republic.

It was over.

Now, when I lived in Syria, studying Arabic, I encountered this expression, Arum Orthodox, the Roman Orthodox.

If that's not the custom to write those dates, it is invalid.

The custom is to either write the date since creation, or the date since Alexander the Great came to power, That is the normal date in all documents.

If you wrote to a government that has jurisdiction in your country, it is valid.

If someone says, write and sign and get to my wife, it is delayed for many days or years.

I mean, my gosh, we'll get to the Maccabean Revolt.

Well, what's that about? Well, the Maccabean Revolt's about the Jews being Hellenized after Alexander the Great, which we'll be touching on today, becoming Hellenized.

This is where we get the Septuagint, and adopting Greek philosophy, right? And in this Hellenization process, begin to incorporate Greek ideas.

This is where we get Philo of Alexandria with his understanding of Logos in the Old Testament.

That's what I was talking about with this transference of their identity from Israelites and the different tribes and Hebrews to being all called Jews.

So Cyrus permits return in 539 BC.

And then you get Alexander the Great, and this is one of the things that I'm going to cover today that I would imagine most people don't fully appreciate is the Greekification of the Jews after Alexander the Great.

This is what we get, Hellenized Jews.

Now, some of you are going, Pastor, are we in church or are we in history class? We're in church.

it's important that you understand this because a lot of people think that when we come to church we get rid of regular thinking and we just we do religious thinking we do spiritual thinking and we don't follow anything else you need to understand something that what we're going to look at here the gospel of john is a historically reliable document you know what that means That means if you've ever walked around and heard somebody say something about Alexander the Great, you know why we talk about Alexander the Great like he actually existed? Because we have some historically reliable things that we can look at.

There are other people that have been written down in the past that we look at that we say, well, we don't know that they existed.

We're not sure.

But we know Alexander the Great.

We know Julius Caesar.

Now, we don't know exactly everything that they did, but we have some things written down.

Or put another way, Hamlet never gets a headache, but the rest of us do.

I suspect that we want to imagine we choose our fate, that human history is largely the story of human choice, Like, perhaps that's why rumors swirled that Alexander the Great died of poisoning, even though he almost certainly died of typhoid or malaria.

We simply don't want a world where even the world's most successful emperor can be felled by mere infection.

And yet that is the world we live in, a world where disease shapes history in profound ways, but also a world where history shapes disease.

I see.

It's about Alexander the Great? Yeah, the story of Eumenes, a secretary-in-general to Alexander the Great.

I wonder if he was able to keep his promise of making it interesting the whole way through.

For 20 years.

Pick ancient Roman times.

Give me Alexander the Great conquering lands.

That'd be awesome.

That would be sweet.

next year.

This is the home of Alexander Magnus, isn't it?

Yeah.

So yeah, who knows?