IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME......An Acient Hope, part 2

I sit here on this Sabbath morning pondering our recent celebration of July 4th and its importance. In a way, Christians place the same kind of relevance to AD 33. Sort of, freedom day, if you will. But as Jesus walked around an occupied and fallen Hebrew nation, a country who’s history was rife with examples of being the conquered, He had prepared for those final 3 ½ years, for His great sacrifice and the culmination of the great prophesies and revelation, by a lifetime, crammed into 30 years of studying the ancients.

Why care? Why not take some specialists word for it, then, individually just start at AD 33? The New Testament is all you need for salvation. Right? Give me a break, you silly Christian! You’ll soon mirror the Jewish nation in bondage!

Look! The New Testament was written in Greek, not King James English. If you want to read what John read, the Old Testament, the Septuagint, you’ll need to understand Greek, or if not, then understand the language’s origin and from where it came before translation. To understand the New Testament, you have to understand that it was created out of great philosophical works, from Homer to Plato and Aristotle.

As I sat and reviewed the pod cast of a discussion Hugh Hewitt had with John Mark Reynolds and David Allen White, about the importance of ancient Truth, I began to realize how parochial my primary Christian education had been, and even more concerned that the portions of Greek philosophy sprinkled into it were vast, taking into account that children in secular education today are not sincerely introduced to “When Athens Met Jerusalem".

You see, when John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, he was sitting in a pagan city called Ephesus, and he was using language created by one of that city’s most famous residents, Heraclitus. You don’t have to care about Heraclitus unless you have grandkids like mine who have viewed the movie Pokohauntus, over and over and over…you get the picture. In the movie, Pokohauntus says, “You can never step in the same river twice”. She is not stating some kind of great North American wisdom. She is quoting Heraclitus. John, witting his poetic and prophetic statement of whom and what he believed the nature of Jesus and God to be, was being inspired by the very words of Heraclitus and his Greek words “en arche”, “in the beginning”, and then “en ho legos”, “was the word” Yes sir! Great Christian philosophy built right there in a pagan city on the words of a Greek philosopher. That does not diminish what John wrote. As David Allan White states it, “He was building on a language that was old and making something new of it, revealing something new to the world. It is as if he dropped an ideological atom bomb on a pagan culture, utterly destroying that culture, and replacing it with a Christian culture".

Those of us who enjoy the fruits of the greatest story ever told, whether by just tagging along, or by being one who has what some call, the fullness of faith, salvation, if you will, need to understand something important. “If you’re going to understand the fullness of time, you must understand the fullness of what the world brought to everything that made that thought possible and what occupied the minds of serious thinkers for a long while”. And that’s all Greek to me! B.C.