Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are working our way toward a little tiny book of the Bible at the very end of the New Testament called Philemon. The book seems so stinking simple. It's clearly a book written in a different time with different sets of rules and circumstances that seem kind of foreign to us. But then when you read it, it's very personal. And you can see the relational dynamics, the business dynamics, the institutional dynamics, the moral dynamics and the pressures that are in play. Well, that doesn't feel so foreign at all when you read it. It feels very human and it feels a lot like the lives we live today and the tensions we deal with today. And it all just happens so quickly. It's only 25 verses long. But to really wring all the juice out of that little book of Philemon, there's a lot of history and Bible setup that we gotta do. And we got started on that last week. Last week we threw a decent amount of energy at how Rome, the Roman Empire that was in charge of everything at the time the letter of Philemon was written. We talked about how Rome came to be. Now Philemon was probably written, I don't know, what do I have it listed as here? I just I just wrote a book about this, and I think it just went to final manuscript form. Where did I put it? Looks like I put it around 62 AD in my little book. I should probably stand by that because it's you know a book, and I they put ink on paper, and that feels pretty binding. I've got Philemon being written in the early 60s AD, but the Roman Empire is something that had been in the making for six, seven hundred more years by the time Philemon ever happens. So it's this institutional governmental juggernaut. And we spent a lot of time last week getting the broad strokes of where Rome came from. Rome doesn't even appear in the first half of the Bible called the Old Testament, and then there's a gap of time of the 400 years and change between the Old Testament and the New Testament, where Philemon is. And Rome during that time, I mean, it just gets huge and it kind of takes over everything. And so last week we talked a little bit about how that happened with Rome, and we've got more Rome talk to come down the road. Well, at the same time that the Rome thing was happening, there is another culture, another people group that is morphing and evolving and wielding huge influence as well. And we just started to touch on them a little bit at the end of the last episode. And those are the Greeks, or those cultures descended from the Greeks. Now, Rome, for the longest time, it was either a you know a pretty good-sized kingdom out on the Italian peninsula, way, way, way, way, way back in the day, hundreds of years before Jesus. Or for the longest time, it was a republic governed by a set of laws and sort of representational government with, you know, sort of two houses of governance, an upper house and a lower house, and term limits, and a lot of things that would be familiar to you for whatever country you're from, and however you do law and politics and constitutions and stuff like that. It's probably going to look at least a little bit Roman. But Greece was way different. It was a bunch of little micro-kingdoms, a bunch of little city-states they're called, polises. So whenever you see a town, like in the United States, we have a lot of towns that end in polis, so like Minneapolis, Annapolis, that's all a nod back to that ideal of the democratic, self-sustaining great city of Athens or Sparta or Ephesus or Thebes. The Greeks were really good at thinking and they were really good at democracy, among other things. And I say good at democracy, I mean that in an ancient context and by ancient standards. It wasn't like a one-person, one vote thing like what we idealize today, but still it was terribly progressive for back in the day. Some historians would argue that the golden age of Greece was right around the time of the end of the Old Testament. Now, Greece doesn't come up a lot in the Old Testament. It kind of gets a little nod here and there, but they're not big important characters who were on screen. Some people think that the Philistines might have been descended from Greek culture on the big long skinny island of Crete or maybe some other Greek islands. It could be, but even if those ancient enemies of the Jews who came from the sea were the Greeks, we don't ever hear them explicitly called that. So the Greeks, they don't come up a lot in the Old Testament, but they're right behind the scenes. And during the 400s BC, there's this flowering of the Greek mind that happens. And probably the most famous metaphorical family of Greek thought is the one that starts with Socrates in Athens. Socrates, you know, he was condemned by the leaders of the city for being an agitator of the youth, but he was great at asking questions and he thought deeply about abstract realities manifesting in real-world ethics and morality. He was very interested in what is good and how you know the difference between that and things that aren't. He and his students had a sneaking suspicion that there was some kind of order baked into the world. And his greatest student was a guy named Plato. You've heard of Plato, even if you don't remember anything from philosophy class. Plato was a guy who thought a ton about the relationship between the unseen world and the physical world and how the physical world might in some way be made up of manifestations of things we don't see. And he had this whole set of ideas about where everything came from and how we understand reality to be. And you might be like, well, that's really heady. Sounds like that probably wasn't very helpful at all. Well, in actuality, Plato had very practical thought in terms of what the implications of all of these lofty ideas were. And his famous student, Aristotle, took that even further than his master and his grandfather master. I don't know what you call somebody who's like two mentor levels before you, but Socrates trained Plato, Plato trained Aristotle, and Aristotle was the personal tutor of Alexander the Great, who you could maybe call a philosopher in his own right. But in the mid-fourth century BC, he became certainly the most influential person of Greek or Greek-ish. He was technically from Macedonia, but it was very Greek in culture. He becomes the most influential person descended from Greek culture. Maybe ever. Maybe he's the most influential person ever outside of Jesus. Alexander the Great changed the world, and it's still changed because of him. And he was a kid when he did it all, but his brain was packed with the lofty ideas of Aristotle and his master Plato and his master Socrates, all born out of the Athenian school. So the Greeks, which aren't really an empire, it's a bunch of independent little states, they all have this simultaneous intellectual, democratic flowering. It's messy and clumsy, it's not nearly as ideal as sometimes gets presented in movies and stuff. There's a lot of infighting and things, but they came together to ward off the invading Persians in the 400s BC. They beat Darius I, the Battle of Marathon, famously. And then they beat his son Xerxes. Xerxes scored a Pyrrhic victory. That means a victory, but where you actually kind of lose. But I mean, you technically won, but really it caused, it just, it was kind of the beginning of the end. He scores a Pyrrhic victory famously over Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, and then scores a straight-up loss against Themistocles and the Athenians just a little bit after that. That pretty much ends the overt hostilities, the mega hostilities between Persia and Greece. And from there on out, really Persia and Greece kind of mingle together and inform each other. When I say Xerxes, that's a Greek name, yet that's how you know the name of that king. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a historian, kind of the father of history, was actually writing from a Persian-controlled area, and one of the Persian's greatest admirals was also from Halicarnassus. So is he Greek? Is he Persian? The whole thing kind of mushes together a whole bunch. But right there in the background of all of this, what is Greek, what is Persian stuff going on is the end of the Old Testament, where the Persians have allowed the Jews to go back and rebuild their temple and reestablish their people in Jerusalem starting in 538 BC. It takes about 20 years and two Persian kings, Cyrus the Great, Darius I. But the Jews rebuild their temple and rededicate it, but they're still not really firmly established. They barely avoid being wiped out during the time of Xerxes and are barely rescued by a secret Jewish queen named Esther and her kinsman Mordecai. So even though the temple's rebuilt and they're back in Jerusalem, that's all very nice. They're not out of the woods yet. Another threat emerges about 20 years after the whole Xerxes, Esther, Mordecai, Haman affair. And this time it is two guys named Ezra and Nehemiah who rise to the challenge and go back and rebuild the people and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and really secure her status as a rebuilt people and a rebuilt public faith and temple, worshiping and sacrificing to God, the God of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament. So that is where the Jewish story wraps up in the Old Testament. The Persia and Greece story wraps up basically with the stalemate I talked about and the exchange of culture and ideas and language. So there you have it. There's your wrap-up point for the Old Testament for the three people groups that we're looking at that mush together to make up the era that is in question during the time of Philemon. At the end of the Old Testament, the Romans, who've gone unmentioned in the Old Testament, are building power. They're a force gaining momentum far out west, but not really in view yet. At the end of the Old Testament, the Greeks have checked the advances of the Persians and are beginning to culturally mingle with the Persians. They're not really on screen yet in the Bible, but boy, are they going to be on screen when it comes to the Jewish people in between the testaments? And then finally, the third people group we're following. The Jews have gone through a terrible calamity. Their temple got destroyed in 586 BC by the Babylonians, but now at the end of the Old Testament, they've been allowed to rebuild. They have a temple, they have walls, they have a sacrificial system, their people have rededicated themselves to the law and the things of God. And then, pow, the Old Testament goes quiet narratively. We've talked about Rome enough for the moment, but next time around, we're going to pull on the thread of what happened to the Greeks and what happened to the Jews in between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It's a juicy story. You won't want to miss it. I'll catch you tomorrow. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.