Friday, 4/15/16
No one could have been as much against Christianity as Saul
was, and no one could be more for Christianity than Paul was.
Same man!
The intensity of his feelings against and then for
Christianity both marked him as a true Greek. We cannot overestimate the role
that the typically Greek mind played in our beliefs. When Jesus quoted the Old
Testament he used not the Hebrew but the Greek wording of it.
Every book of the New Testament was not only written in the
Greek language, but it also expressed the Greek way of thinking and feeling.
That mind set was fixed by Socrates four centuries before
Christ. At a time when the whole world was worshipping idols, Socrates firmly stated
that the prime duty in life for each of us was to seek the truth. For him, God
and Truth were the same thing. He accepted a death verdict rather that
acknowledge the existence of the gods of ancient Greece.
When John wrote his Gospel at the end of the First Century most
of the non-Christian Greek population believed only in something like our
Mother Nature. Their name for it was simply “the Word.” So when John opened his
Gospel with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God” he was
agreeing with those Greeks. He was saying that God pervades the whole world.
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