Hellenists

The Hellenists were those that had adopted Greek Culture. There was one exception - the Jews. Though most of them rejected Hellenism itself, Greek philosophy fell on fertile soil. Though the Jews in the main did resist the Greek philosophies, they mastered the Greek philosophers. The Jews absorbed everything intellectual which the Greeks had to offer. To everything intellectual they borrowed, they added a Jewish touch. The Greeks then took these retouched ideas back from the Jews. The Greeks emerged in a Jewish-made mantle of Christianity. Jewish Hellenism - the utterance of Oriental thought in Greek language, and the interchange of Asiatic and Greek conceptions was the result of Alexander's conquests, and of the policy which directed them.. especially Alexandria. Hellenizers were Jews who embraced the Greek way of life.. Their leader Jason .

A trend of primary importance was towards the penetration of Judaism by Hellenism. the Jews were widely scattered in the Mediterranean world. Here they fell under the influence of the Greek thought which was so potent in that region. Religion was to the Jews the source of their law, their state, and their hope: to let it melt away in the swelling river of Hellenism would, they thought be national suicide. In the New Testament, then, Grecians or Hellenists were foreign Jews who spoke Greek, which the conquests of Alexander had made the language of the educated throughout the civilized world, and also the language of the masses in the great centers of commerce. Some would include also under the name Hellenists, proselytes of Greek birth.

The Hellenistic system was so widely diffused as to form an excellent preparation for a world religion. It was strong enough to give the new faith a good start, yet too weak to restrain its growth or to smother its free spirit in a mass of Judaic details and reduce it to the position of an advanced Judaism. The steadfast adhesion of the Hellenistic system to the historic faith, with its comparative freedom from Pharisaic narrowness, well qualified it to be the nurse of a new religion which was to be an expanded but not enfeebled development of the old. "Know thyself" runs through this whole culture: Thales utters it: Hippocrates formulates it: The Delphic Oracle has it written over the gates of the Temple: Socrates repeats it. The essential element in this regimen of self-knowledge is leisure and patience; and that applies to both the bodily and spiritual conditions of man. But in practice this meant that only a limited group, the free citizens - or at least the wealthy- could live a fully human life.

Hellenistic states was the belief that the ruler was a god. This idea, throughout the near east, was common; in Egypt the pharaoh was a god, in Babylonia the ruler was the spokesman of the gods.. The idea of god-king was foreign to the Greeks.. but the philosophical Greek, always rational, could not easily bring himself to share this belief, to view his ruler as Near Eastern peoples regarded him. Later the idea of god-ruler did gain strength among the Greeks of the west. And then Jesus came.
[326, 327, 330, 345, 23, 15, BD, 401, 403]



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