Volume One HISTORY, CULTURE, AND RELIGION OF THE HELLENISTIC AGE

The countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea form the cradle of Christianity. To the east lay the centers of older cultures and empires: the Nile valley of Egypt; the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, which were once the centers of Sumer, Akkad, Assur, and Babylon; Syria, Israel, and the Phoenician coast; and An- atolia with the Hittite and the Lydian empires. Further to the west, the Minoan culture that was centered on the island of Crete had long since been buried in the flood and under the ashes of the explosion of the Thera volcano (ca. 1470 BCE), leaving various Greek city-states as its heirs. What is usually called the "Classi- cal" period, that is, the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, was characterized by rivalry between the Greek states and the Persian empire. It was this rivalry that ulti- mately, through the conquests of Alexander the Great, sparked the creation of the new culture of Hellenism. Through the Hellenization of Rome this culture ex- panded to include the western Mediterranean. Christianity did not develop as a representative of merely one old local culture and religion, such as Israel's, but instead as part of the universal culture of the Hellenistic-Roman world. The dominant element of this new culture was Greek. The Greeks provided the unifying language, to which even Aramaic, the lan- guage of the formerly Persian east, and Latin, the language of the new political and military masters, had to take second and third place. Greek philosophy, art, architecture, science, and economic structures formed the bonds that held the various peoples and nations of the Roman empire together as parts of one single world, encompassing Mesopotamia and Syria in the east as well as Spain and Gaul in the west, Egypt and Africa in the south as well as Germany and Britain in the north. As the Christian missionaries carried their message throughout this world, they arrived as heralds of a Hellenistic religion. The process that created this new culture, called "Hellenization," drew on different and often contradictory elements. National and ethnic interests of partic- ular peoples sometimes clashed with the universalizing power of Hellenism. The cities were the backbone of this new world culture. Largely emancipated from local and ethnic peculiarities, they became links in a chain binding together the most important cultural, economic, and religious activities of the entire region. Yet the individual city (polis) remained a potent symbol of Utopian ideals. Although Stoic philosophers could talk about the entire inhabited world as the city of gods and human beings, each city still had to solve a variety of social, moral, and religious problems that were imposed upon it by worldwide economic and political developments. New religious and philosophical movements devel- oped fresh ideals about the liberation of all human beings from traditional bonds, xxxiv Introduction to the New Testament talked about the equality of slaves, and debated the notion of the emancipation of women. However, such ideals were often at odds with the established structures, which remained largely patriarchal and stayed closely tied to the institutions that guaranteed economic and social survival, especially for the large urban middle classes. It was precisely in the Greek or Hellenized cities of the Roman Empire, and particularly in the structures of the urban middle class, that early Christianity's potential as a new world religion took shape. The social and religious formation of early Christian communities can only be understood within the context of this process. The early Christian writings that are still extant, including the literature of the New Testament, reflect this process in many ways. A historically oriented Introduction to the New Testament thus must begin with a consideration of the Hellenistic Age in order to clarify the dynamics of the world in which this new religion sought to find its own identity.