Paul was raised in a Hellenistic society in Tarsus and was fluent in both Greek and Koine Greek. He likely received a university-level education exposed to Greek learning. Paul demonstrated mastery of Greek literary techniques and occasionally cited Greek authors in his writings, indicating he was familiar with Hellenistic schools of rhetoric. The document then provides background on the development of ancient Greek civilization and the rise of city-states. It discusses some of the major Greek philosophers who influenced Paul, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as the schools of thought they represented.

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The Good Life and Hard Times of the Apostle Paul
Lesson 3 Greeks (Revised)1
Paul and His Grecian Cultural Environment. 2
Paul had been raised in a Hellenistic (Greek thought, influence and customs)
society in Tarsus. [Acts 21 notes] that Paul spoke fluent Greek [formal, as
opposed to Koine] to the Roman military captain, Lysias, to stop a crowd
from lynching him. . . . Barclay [says:] "The captain was amazed to hear the
accents of cultured Greek coming from this man (Paul) whom the crowd
were out to lynch." Paul was also fluent in Koine Greek, a Greek tongue
commonly spoken in his native city of Tarsus, as well as being fluent in
ClassicalGreek, which indicated that he had been exposed to Greek learning at the university
level. Montague [states] concerning Paul's use of "Classical" Greek and his possible exposure to
the university or philosophical schools in his training:
His mastery of the Greek literary technique of the diatribe and his occasional citation of
Greek authors (Aratus in Acts 17:18; Meander in 1 Cor. 15:23; Epimenides in Tit 1:1) are
considered by some as evidence that he frequented the Hellenistic schools of rhetoric.
When we say “Ancient Greece,” we speak of the time from 800 BC to 500 BC.
During this time, there was no “Greece,” there were
only scattered small farming villages. As they grew
larger, these villages began to evolve building walls
and a marketplace (an agora) and a community
meeting place. They developed governments and
organized their citizens according to some sort of
set of laws. They raised armies and collected taxes.
And every one of these city-states (known as poleis)
was said to be protected by a particular god or
goddess, to whom the citizens of the polis owed a
great deal of reverence, respect, and sacrifice.
(Athens’s deity was Athena, for example; so was Sparta’s.)
1 Edited and Redacted by John R. Wible.No claimto originality of content is made by the Edi tor/Redactor unless
otherwise specified.
2 Prof. Wallacecontinues.

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Ancient Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but most of all it was the age in
which the polis, or city-state, was invented. The polis became the defining feature of Greek
political life for hundreds of years.
By about the seventh century B.C., the city-states had developed a number of common
characteristics. They all had economies that were based on agriculture, not trade: For this
reason, land was every city-state’s most valuable resource. Most had overthrown their
hereditary kings and were ruled by a small number of wealthy aristocrats who monopolized
political power and the best farm land.
Aristotle said that because “the poor with their wives and children were enslaved to the rich
and had no political rights, there was conflict between the nobles and the people for a long
time.”
What might be the solution? What happened when Abraham and Lot were confronted with the
same problem?
Read Genesis 13:1-9.
13 So Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev, with his wife and everything he had, and
Lot went with him. 2 Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold.
3 From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place
between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier 4 and where he had first built an
altar. There Abram called on the name of the Lord.
5 Now Lot, who was moving about with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents. 6 But
the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were
so great that they were not able to stay together. 7 And quarreling arose between
Abram’s herders and Lot’s. The Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land at
that time.
8 So Abram said to Lot, “Let’s not have any quarreling between you and me, or between
your herders and mine, for we are close relatives. 9 Is not the whole land before you?
Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go
to the left.”
Since land was the most important source of wealth it was obviously in
finite supply. The pressure of population growth pushed many men
away from their home poleis and into sparsely populated areas around
Greece and the Aegean. Between 750 B.C. and 600 B.C., Greek colonies
sprang up from the Mediterranean to Asia Minor, from North Africa to
the coast of the Black Sea. By the end of the seventh century B.C.,
there were more than 1,500 colonial poleis.

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Each of these poleis was an independent city-state. In this way, the colonies of the Ancient
period were different from other colonies we are familiar with: The people who lived there
were not ruled by or bound to the city-states from which they came. The new poleis were self-
governing and self-sufficient.
Q: What has just happened? God has used man’s nature to “scatter seeds.”
Q: What does Paul say about these “seeds?” Read 1 Corinthians 3:5-7.
5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came
to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos
watered it, but God has been making it grow. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the
one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.
In a few minutes we’ll see who “waters” these seeds of Greek colonies. We’ve seen the growth
of Greek society, the growth of the village into a polis, and the planting of the poleis in the
whole Aegean Area. What about the growth in Greek Thought?
As we said last week, we’re going through all this set up to see how God is unfolding history to
accomplish His purposes using His ways. It’s a lot like the white board covered with sticky notes.
God already has painted the picture on the board, now He is removing the notes one at a time
to reveal Himself, His purposes and His ways.
Read Hebrews 1:1-2.
1 In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in
various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he
appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.
Now read Revelation 15:2-4.
2 And I saw what looked like a sea of glass glowing with fire and, standing beside the sea,
those who had been victorious over the beast and its image and over the number of its
name. They held harps given them by God 3 and sang the song of God’s servant Moses
and of the Lamb:
“Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways,
King of the nations.
4 Who will not fear you, Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All
nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.”
Pastor Alan likes to quote Professor Thom Wolf concerning the dawn of religion. According to
Dr. Wolf, in the beginning, everybody knew there was God. But man soon realized that he was
different from God – not worthy to be around God. So, man realized that something separated
him from God.

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We know that “something” was man’s sin, but early man didn’t know this. He just knew that he
was separated. Over the years, this separation grow farther and farther until man lost touch
completely with God.
This was a problem. Pastor Alan says that everyone asks the same questions:
• Who am I?
• Who is God?
• What went wrong to separate us? and
• How do we fix this?
Again, we know that we can’t fix it but God can – and did on Calvary. We know this because
“the Bible tells me so.” However, in the time period of the ancient Greek – and Persians – and
Chinese – and Indians and Meso-Americans, God had not yet revealed this. That leaves ancient
man and in this case, the Ancient Greeks to come up with their own solutions to the problems.
Polytheistic Greek religion encompassed a myriad of gods, each representing a certain facet of
the human condition, and even abstract ideas such as justice and wisdom could have their own
personification.
The most important gods, though, were the Olympian gods led by Zeus. These were Athena,
Apollo, Poseidon, Hermes, Hera, Aphrodite, Demeter, Ares, Artemis, Hades, Hephaistos, and
Dionysus. These gods were believed to reside on Mt. Olympus and would have been recognized
across Greece, albeit, with some local variations and perhaps particular attributes and
associations.
In the Greek imagination, literature, and art, the gods were given human bodies and characters
- both good and bad - and just as ordinary men and women, they married, had children (often
through illicit affairs), fought, and in the stories of Greek mythology they directly intervened in
human affairs.
These traditions were first recounted only orally as there was no sacred text in Greek religion
and later, attempts were made to put in writing this oral tradition, notably by Hesiod in his
Theogony and more indirectly in the works of Homer.
The Greek polytheistic religion probably reached its zenith in about the 8th century BC with the
works of the blind poet Homer. Until about the 3rd century BC, these were prevailing among
the Greek-Speaking people. However around the 3rd century BC. The people began to wonder
what the gods were doing and if they were in fact “gods” all. While the Greek pantheon of gods
existed on into the 3rd century AD, the Greek religion lost much of its fire in the times just
before the birth of Christ.

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We see in this picture the goddess Athena Nike adjusting her sandal. This is
from a frieze around a parapet (retaining wall) in the Temple of Athena
created about 410 BC. The significance of this piece is that it demonstrates
that a goddess needs to adjust her sandal. Perhaps if she needs to adjust her
sandals, maybe she is not a god. While this could easily be passed over as
merely a beautiful work of art, it represents a cultural statement of the
questioning by first the philosophers and then the general population of the
gods themselves.
The “Seven Sages,” named in the paper are commonly thought of as the philosophical
ancestors of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They held to the ancient polytheism and the
pantheon of the gods whereas by the 3rd Century BC, these had come into question.
Coterminous with this Greek questioning of the status of polytheism, in the 3rd century the
watershed Babylonian captivity of the Jews took place. During this captivity, the rise of Judaism
and its more modern form of monotheism began to gain traction and became prevalent to
some extent under the leadership of the Scribe, Ezra as well. During this period in Babylon and
in Jerusalem we had the three great prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Together they are
referred to as the JED. Some theologians believe that during this time, their writings were
propagated from Jerusalem and Babylon throughout the Grecian world and had an influence on
Grecian religion as on other religions of other peoples.
[In considering the contributions of Greek culture into Paul’s thought process, one must take a
snapshot of the greats of Greek thought, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in addition to Zeno and
Stoicism, mentioned supra.] 3
When one thinks of the great Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle come to mind.
They were not the only ones of course. However, with Zeno, they have perhaps the greatest
impact, if not Greek civilization in general, certainly on Paul as representatives of his Greek
influences.
Socrates.
The problem with Socrates (470/469 – 399 BC) is that he never really wrote
anything down. We only know of this thought through the “filter of his great
pupil, Plato.” Plato wrote Dialogues concerning his many conversations with
Socrates. One of Socrates’ principle contributions to Western thought (and
Paul’s) was what has come to be known as the “Socratic method.” This is a
method of teaching that relies on the teacher asking pointed questions of the
pupil with the goal of weeding out implausible answers and thus leading to the
most plausible answer. The modern “Scientific Method” is based on Socratic thought.
3 The followingextended passages arethe Editor’s additions.

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Divine Emissary. Socrates frequently says his ideas are not his own, but his teachers. A later
philosopher, Xenophon said, “He was a teleologist who held that god arranges everything for
the best.”4 Please note the lower case “g” in “god.” “Teleology” is a school of thought that
holds that things exist because they have function.
Socrates was famously tried for the crimes “heresy and corrupting the minds of the youth
(young men) of Athens. In his defense, he stated to the jury that “they are [more] concerned
with their families, careers, and political responsibilities when they ought to be worried about
the ‘welfare of their souls’. He stated that “the gods” had “singled him out as a divine emissary”
to teach virtue as a diving gift rather than something that could be taught and learned.”5 S-
Socrates was also famously “allowed” to drink hemlock at the behest of the unimpressed jury.
Perhaps, for our purposes his greatest influence on the young Paul is his strong belief in the
ethical principal of doing that which was right as opposed to that which was expedient. He may
thus be thought to be one of the earliest ethicists. Though he speaks at times of “god,” it is
unclear whether he was a monotheist. My suggestion is that he was not. In fact, Plato refers to
Socrates as a “divine fatalist.”6
Platonism.
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was Socrates’
greatest pupil. Unlike his mentor, Socrates, he was a
rather prolific writer. Perhaps the most famous quote
concerning Plato as “Alfred North Whitehead once noted:
"the safest general characterization of the European
philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of
footnotes to Plato.”7
Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of
Western religion and spirituality.8 Plato’s influence on Christianity is, like so many things, a
mixture of good and bad. Plato, as did Socrates, had a strong sense of the divine. He believed
very much in two “realities,” that which is seen and that which is unseen. He states of the two,
the real reality is that of the divine. In other words, what is going on in the spiritual real is the
“truly real” world. So far, so good.
However, he makes a clear distinction between the two “realities.” This lead to a philosophy
that has persisted for millennia.” He created the “world of shadows which holds that things that
occur in the physical world are “shadows” of the things that occur in the spiritual world. The
problem with this philosophy is that its natural progression leads to the heresies of asceticism
4 Long, AA. in Ahbel-Rappe, S. and Kamtekar, R. (2009). A Companion to Socrates. John Wiley & Sons. p. 59.
5 Id.
6 Plato,Dialogues.
7 Whitehead, Alfred North (1978).Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.
8 Faucault,Michel, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1 9 8 1 - 8 2.

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and its converse, hedonism. The ascetic believes that since the physical world is not important,
he should ignore it and try his best to get away from it. We see modern ascetismin monasteries
both religious and non-religious.
On the other hand, the hedonist draws the opposite conclusion from the same assumption.
Since the physical world doesn’t matter, one should “eat, drink, and be merry” because in the
spiritual world, it will all be sorted out later.
Unfortunately, both heresies lead to an emphasis on the physical, one a negative one and the
other a positive one. When one overly emphasizes the physical, he forgets the spiritual. What I
have just described is post-modern man who really doesn’t see much of a spiritual reality at all.
Paul confronted Platonism in many of the Grecian-influenced church that he founded or taught.
He found it difficult to “root out” Plato’s ideas because much of them was correct. His job was
to “separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Platonic thought has underlain much church doctrine for centuries. One of the Church’s
greatest thinkers, St. Augustine, was a Platonist. However, there are some striking comparisons
between Platonism and Christian doctrine.
1. God is supreme not, as the Platonists say, subject to the greater “Good.” God is good
and “the Good.” Christianity’s God is infinite and “Omni-supreme” not subject to the
higher, principle of “the Good.” Genesis 1: 1, “In the beginning God . . .” Deut. 6:4,
“Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one;“
2. Christianity teaches that God created all things good, however, man fell spiritually and
took the Creation with him. Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that he had made, and it was
very good . . .” Gen. 3:16-19, “To the woman he said,
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give
birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the
tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the
ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days
of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the
plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you
return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust
you will return.
3. The body was created good and has value, it is not a prison as taught by the Platonists, it
will be perfected, not discarded. This is one misconception that Paul addressed in
1 Thessalonians 4:13-16,
13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who
sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no

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hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that
God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15 According to the
Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming
of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the
Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice
of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise
first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together
with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the
Lord forever. 18 Therefore, encourage one another with these words.
Aristotle.
Plato’s pupil, Aristotle (384 – 322 BC,) was most notably the tutor
of Alexander the Great. This gave him the resources to crate great
libraries and aid in the production of hundreds of books. Since he
was a pupil of Plato, he was raised, philosophically, on Platonic
dualism. However, later in life, his studies changed from Platonism
to empiricism. He believed that all peoples' concepts and all of
their knowledge was ultimately based on perception. Aristotle's
views on natural sciences represent the groundwork underlying
many of his works.9
Aristotle is viewed as the father of logical reasoning. Emanuel Kant
stated in the Critique of Pure Reason that Aristotle's theory of logic completely accounted for
the core of deductive inference. 10 As teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle influenced the
thought of all the conquered provinces with his emphasis on gaining knowledge from
observation of the natural world.
While this view gives a wonderful basis for the scientific method, it de-emphasizes, if not totally
denies, the element of the spiritual in the cosmos. This leads us to rationalism that holds nature
as god rather than God as God. We see this rationalistic idea in the basic documents of our
American heritage.
[An unfortunate extension of Aristotle’s naturalistic views based in truth from that which can be
observed is his view that people of color were naturally destined to be slaves.
9 Jonathan Barnes,"Life and Work" in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (1995),p. 12.
10 Kant, Emanuel, Critique of Pure Reason.

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We will see later that Paul indirectly, some say directly, attacks the truth of this view in
Philemon vv. 15- 18, Galatians 3:27 and 28, Galatians 4:6 and 7 and a number of clearly indirect
allusions. 11 12
“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female.
. .” “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying,
"Abba! Father!" Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir
through God.
Galatians 4:6. 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the
Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since
you are his child, God has made you also an heir.
Paul indirectly, some say directly, attacks the truth of this view in Philemon vv. 15-16 and a
number of clearly indirect allusions. 15 Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a
little while was that you might have him back forever— 16 no longer as a slave, but better
than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a
fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.
In the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence which is frequently omitted from
quotation by political orators, we find this peculiar statement:]13
When in the Course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another,
and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the Laws of
Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that
they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation.14 [Emphasis added.]
We continue with the Greeks next time.
11 “For all of you who were baptized into Christhaveclothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor
Greek, there is neither slavenor free man, there is neither malenor female. . .”
12 “Because you are sons,God has sent forth the Spiritof His Son into our hearts, crying,"Abba! Father!" Therefore
you are no longer a slave,but a son;and if a son, then an heir through God.
13 Editor’s insert.
14 Jefferson, Thomas, Declaration of Independence, Clause1.