Hellenization

It's not operating in a vacuum.

As we said earlier, the cities of the East are Hellenized.

The parts where they're in the Roman Empire, there's big Jewish diasporas throughout the Roman Empire.

In Rome and in Greek culture and in other cultures in the Near East, the idea of being divine or being the son of a god is a very, very common trope.

He's going to the young.

Basically knowing that if we can increase the Hellenization, right, the Greekifying of the young people, then soon, soon they will abandon the practice of the covenant.

They'll abandon the practice of the faithfulness to the God of Israel, to the God.

And so Jason keeps introducing these things as well as quadrennial games.

What's true here dovetails into the Gospels.

Plato, though, in the broader Hellenized culture seems to play a more providential role, which we've alluded to, but I kind of want to push into it, where we're not just simply saying like, look, he got a lot right or he got really close to stuff and therefore it's somewhat helpful.

The actual argument, at least that we make on the podcast, I think you make as well, is that, no, no, no, Plato and then Plato being philosophy, this larger Hellenized culture, actually very much tilled the soil for the coming of Jesus Christ that created a culture that created the fullness and which our Lord then becomes incarnate, that we could actually receive him.

And again, you've mentioned things like the Septuagint, the Old Testament canon, the first canons written in Greek.

Our New Testament is written in Greek.

Because the reason I wanted to mention the New Testament prior to mentioning St. Augustine is because this is not a synthesis that St. Augustine created.

This is actually something he's inheriting from the New Testament that he later is able to give a certain kind of metaphysical structure to that allows us to have greater clarity on the relationship between the ideas the hierarchy of creation, the hierarchy of being in God.

But this is very much something that he's inheriting from a gospel that has a Hellenized imprint on it that really it cannot be divorced from.

The Romans referred to it as Palestine.

But in their efforts to control that particular area, you have Jews, it was forced Hellenization.

One of the greatest things that is celebrated in terms of liberation in Israel still today is a festival called Hanukkah.

Most of the people just think of it as, oh, you know, that's the Jewish alternative to Christmas.

ruled really for almost a hundred years until Rome came in and said, hey, let's just take this over.

And there was a lot of internal weaknesses.

But But it was out of some of that reaction to Hellenization after Alexander the Great and some of his successors that Judaism really, that we see in the first century, really sort of starts forming in the way of setting up extra laws, extra requirements not found in the Old Testament.

And one of the things that I think your viewers probably have maybe heard of but not really been familiar with is the fact that Jews of the first century not only focused on the Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, what they would have called just the Scriptures, the Law and the Prophets, but they also focused on what they called the Oral Torah.

When Alexander the Great died, he split up his empire among four of his generals, and later... poor little Israel or Judea found itself stuck between the Ptolemies of Egypt in the south and the Seleucids in the north.

And one of the Seleucid monarchs, Antiochus Epiphanes, wanted to see that everyone in his realm was Hellenized, meaning spoke the Greek language, practiced Greek culture, and most especially practiced Greek religion.

And the account of the Maccabees appears in the books of the Apocrypha, so first Maccabees, second, third, fourth, in the Apocrypha, widely regarded as important history, philosophy, may not necessarily be Holy Scripture.

But you read some of the opening chapters of 1 Maccabees and you see how the Seleucid made it illegal for Jews to observe the seven-day Sabbath, the festivals, kosher eating, and most especially circumcision.

He is included in the king list, made by the aforementioned historian, Menitho, and presented as a pharaoh who had a very short reign between Khafre and Menkaure.

We know almost nothing else about him, and since Baccharus is a Hellenized name and is not his original Egyptian one, scholars have speculated that he may have been Prince Baccha, a son of Jadephra who could have briefly become pharaoh under the name Baccharai.

Some have even gone further and claimed that the unfinished pyramid at Zayat el-Aran, which is really just a shaft dug in a natural base of bedrock, would have been his, if not for his premature death.

All of this is plausible, but then again, so is the possibility that Baccharus never existed and Manetho was simply wrong.