The Effects of Hellenism on the New Testament World

“Hellenism” refers broadly to the influence of Greek culture, which was prominent in the Roman Empire (or in what is sometimes referred to as the Greco-Roman world). During the New Testament period Jewish people throughout the world were said to be “Hellenized” because they had been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the culture of Greece and Rome.

Hellenistic influences included simple cultural matters. For example, many Jewish people of the time, including Jesus and his disciples, had adopted the Greek practice of reclining at table to eat (i.e., they ate lying down, on floor cushions). Of course, the degree of Hellenism varied; in some instances it was embraced, while in others it was resisted. One extreme example of Hellenistic influence is recounted by the Jewish Roman historian Josephus, who says that in some cities young Jewish men paid to have surgical operations performed on their penises so that when seen exercising naked at the gymnasium, they would appear to be uncircumcised—apparently, circumcision was unfashionable, and the Jewish males did not want to be ridiculed by the gentiles.

At the opposite extreme, some Jews virulently resisted anything that smacked of Hellenism and sought to isolate themselves from the secular world, denouncing seemingly innocent social practices as instances of pagan infection.

Hellenistic influences were evident in Palestine, but they were even more prominent in the “Diaspora.”This term (meaning “dispersion”) refers to Jews living outside the traditional homeland of Palestine. Some Diaspora Jews were descendants of Jewish people who had not returned from the Babylonian exile. Many others were Jews who discovered that the Pax Romana allowed them to emigrate and live freely elsewhere. They did so, and for a variety of reasons: business opportunities, education, or a simple desire to see more of the world. But because Diaspora Jews often were far from Jerusalem (indeed, many never saw the city), the temple system lost some of its relevance and meaning for them. Diaspora Jews tended to look to synagogues rather than to the temple for their religious needs, with the result that, over time, rabbis became more important than priests and obedience to Torah took precedence over the offering of sacrifices (which was allowed only in Jerusalem).

The effects of Hellenism were also felt in another very practical way

Hebrew ceased to be the primary language of the Jewish people. It was all but forgotten in the Diaspora, and it tended to be used only in religious services in Palestine itself. The common language for Jesus and other Palestinian Jews was Aramaic.

Thus in Palestine Aramaic paraphrases of Scripture called “Targums” were widely used. Outside of Palestine the common language for Diaspora Jews was Greek, the language in which all books of the New Testament would be written. Indeed, long before the time of Jesus, during the third century BCE, the Jewish Scriptures had been translated into Greek. This Greek translation of the Jewish Bible is called the “Septuagint” (the word means “seventy,” and a common abbreviation for the Septuagint is “LXX,” the Roman numeral for seventy). Why this name? According to legend, the translation was done by seventy (or seventy-two) scholars

who, working independently, produced seventy (or seventy-two) identical translations. The Septuagint was widely used throughout the Diaspora and also appears to have been used in many parts of Palestine. Notably, most New Testament authors quote from the Septuagint rather than translating from the Hebrew Bible when they make reference to something said in Scripture.

The Septuagint contained fifteen additional books written in Greek in the years after the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians generally call the “Old Testament”). These extra books are often called the “Apocrypha” by Protestant Christians, though eleven of them are classed as “deuterocanonical writings” by Roman Catholics. Their status as Scripture was disputed among Jews at the time of Jesus, as it is among Christians today. In the New Testament the Apocrypha is never cited as Scripture, but Paul and other authors do appear to have read some of these books and to regard their teaching favorably. Hellenism also brought a pervasive increase of religious syncretism. As populations mixed, religious ideas were exchanged. For example, some Jewish people came to believe in immortality of the soul, the idea from Greek philosophy that each person has a soul that continues to live after his or her body dies. There is material in the Jewish Scriptures that could be read in support of such a view, though it had not been understood that way previously. Other tendencies in Jewish religion were amplified and modified through religious syncretism. Here we take a brief look at three.

Wisdom Theology

Wisdom theology became more popular than ever before. The wisdom tradition of Israel focused less on divinely revealed truth (prophets declaring a word of the Lord that often went contrary to human thinking) and more on common sense (truth that is gained through general insight into life and the human condition). There is a good deal of wisdom material in the Jewish Scriptures (in books such as Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes), and the Hellenistic Jews may have found a theology based on this material consonant with life in a secular, more philosophically oriented world. In the New Testament the influence of wisdom theology is evident in the teachings of Jesus (see Matt. 5–7) and in the writings of some of his followers (see especially the Letter of James).

Dualism

Dualism came to the fore as a more prominent aspect of religious perspective. Dualism reflects the tendency to separate phenomena into sharply opposed categories, with little room for anything in between. For instance, a dualistic perspective tends to objectify “good” and “evil” as realities within nature. The Jewish religion had originally resisted extreme dualism, emphasizing that all people and nations have both good and evil tendencies. In the New Testament world, however, we find that it has become common to think that there are “good people” and “evil people” in the world (cf. Matt. 5:45; 13:38), and that there are also good

spirits (angels) and evil spirits (demons). Furthermore, traditional Jewish religion had attributed virtually all power to what was good, to what derived from the all-powerful and righteous God, who ruled over all. The dualistic impulse granted far more power to Satan. Thus in the New Testament we discover that Christians influenced by Hellenistic Judaism have become so dualistic that they actually refer to Satan as “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4; cf. Luke 4:6; John 14:30; 1 John 5:19).

Apocalypticism

Apocalypticism combined a radical dualistic outlook (clear distinction between good and evil) with a deterministic view of history (the idea that everything is proceeding according to a divine plan). The apocalyptic perspective typically was twofold: (1) a pessimistic forecast for the world at large—things will go from bad to worse; and (2) an optimistic outlook for a favored remnant, those who would be rescued out of the evil world through some act of divine intervention (which was always believed to be imminent). Thus a limit was placed on the power of evil, but it was primarily a temporal limit: Satan may rule the world for now, but not for long! Apocalypticism as a dimension of Jewish religion emerged during the Babylonian exile (see the book of Zechariah) and may have been influenced by Persian religion, which was extremely dualistic.

In any case, it came to full expression during the Hellenistic period (see the book of Daniel) and flourished during the Roman period. In Jesus’s day apocalypticism tended to be embraced by Jews as a reaction against Roman imperialism and its cultural by-product, Hellenism. In the New Testament apocalypticism is most conspicuous in the book of Revelation, but it underscores many other writings as well (e.g., Matt. 24–25; Mark 13; Luke 21:5–36; 1 Thess. 4:13–5:11; 2 Thess. 2:1–12; 2 Pet. 3:1–18).

Preservation of Jewish Identity

The influence of Hellenism may have been far-reaching in the world of Second Temple Judaism, but few Jews wanted to lose their national and cultural identity completely. Certain traditions—circumcision, Sabbath observance, holidays and festivals—became markers that would remin the people who they were and inhibit total immersion into Greco-Roman society. On a day-to-day basis the key markers of such identity may have been the various “purity codes” that the Jewish people had developed.

Such codes were typically derived from Torah, and they often articulated public, observable ways in which Jewish people would live differently than most of the population. Of course, all societies have culturally determined values regarding what they deem “clean” and “unclean.” In the modern Western world most people shampoo their hair on a regular basis, not to prevent disease but because they think that oily hair is gross or dirty. But globally and historically, there have been many people (including all those we read about in the Bible) who have thought oily hair is simply natural, the way hair is supposed to be. Such ideas reflect the standards of particular societies, values that might be deeply held (and vigorously defended) but that are not universal.

Likewise, the Jewish people at the time of Jesus (like many Jewish people today) had strong ideas about what was clean or unclean, but, as identity markers, these ideas had become integral to their religion. Eating pork or lobster was not just gross or disgusting; it was something that God had directed them not to do. Furthermore, the primary reason why God had directed them not to eat pork or lobster was not because doing so would be immoral or intrinsically evil; rather, abstention from such foods set them apart from other peoples of the world.

In a positive vein, the Jewish concept declared certain things to be holy or sacred: Jerusalem was a holy city (see Matt. 27:53), the temple was a holy building, and the Sabbath was a holy day. Negatively, there were many things that could render a person unclean, such as contact with a corpse or with various bodily fluids.

Lepers were unclean, as were women during menstruation and men who had recently had a sexual discharge (including nocturnal emissions). It is important to note that being unclean or encountering uncleanness was not necessarily a bad or shameful thing; often the point was simply to notice what made one unclean and to perform certain purification rituals in recognition of this. For a modern (though flawed) analogy, we might consider the act of changing a baby’s diaper: no one in our modern world would think that this is a bad or shameful thing to do, but most people probably would wash their hands after doing it.

One thing that we do not know is how seriously everyone took the purity codes. Some Jews might have ignored them or observed them selectively and sporadically, but many (often the ones we hear about) took ritual purity very seriously and found the codes to be not the least bit oppressive. The Jews of the New Testament era did not go through life with a paranoid aversion to avoiding pollution at all costs, nor did they suffer from perpetually low self-esteem due to an inability to remain ritually clean at all times. They simply avoided what was avoidable, noted what was not, and performed purification rites as part of their regular spiritual discipline. This was a deeply meaningful part of religious life for many Jewish people in both Palestine and the Diaspora.