... 263 "Paul was a Jew with a Greek cultural background which he had possibly begun to acquire when a boy in Tarsus and which was certainly reinforced by repeated contact with the Graeco-Roman world; this influence is obvious not only in his logical method but also in his language and style. He sometimes quotes Greek writers, 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12; Acts 17:28, and was familiar ...
... became a cultural system of the mind, this system would after a time exhaust its possibilities and human life would settle down into a groove, satisfied and non-evolutive, as happened in the Graeco-Roman world or in China or elsewhere where the mental intellect became the predominant power of life. If this arrest were avoided either by the multiplication of different cultures—different peoples acting ...
... for as the city-life of Greece had originally created, so the city-life of Italy recovered, renewed and gave in a new form to our modern times the art, literature, thought and science of the Graeco-Roman world. Elsewhere, the city-unit revived only in the shape of the free or half-free municipalities of mediaeval France, Flanders and Germany; and these were at no time an obstacle to unification, but ...
... possibilities, is, to say the least of it, premature and, if satisfied, will surely end in a check to human progress, a comfortably Page 299 organised stagnancy such as overtook the Graeco-Roman world after the establishment of the Roman Empire. The call of the State to the individual to immolate himself on its altar and to give up his free activities into an organised collective activity ...
... kingdom will be proclaimed to the whole world as a witness to all the nations. And then the end will come." 109 The JB annotates "the whole world": "The 'inhabited world' (oikoumene), i.e. the Graeco-Roman world. All the Jews of the empire are destined to hear the good news before punishment comes to Israel. Cf. Rm. 10:18. The earliest 'witness' will be directed against the faithlessness of Judaism ...
... mutation of society and of thought in the same relief; but we can recognise two great cycles of change, one of the ancient races leading from the primitive ages to the cultured society of the Graeco-Roman world, the other from the semi-barbarism of feudal Christendom to the intellectual, materialistic and civilised society of modern times. In the East, on the contrary, the great revolutions have ...
... the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness.. ." 226 The reference is specifically to what both the Jews and the pagans (the non-Jews as a group, the Gentiles, the Graeco-Roman world in which Paul preached) would think of a proclaimed Saviour nailed to the cross. William Barclay 227 reminds us of the Graeco-Roman world's view of crucifixion: "The most cruel and the vilest ...
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