Mysteries from the East

Chapter Four
A COCK FOR ASCLEPIUS: ‘RELIGION’ AND ‘CULTURE’ IN PAUL’S WORLD
2. Religion and Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean World of Paul’s Day
(II) The Religious World of Ancient Greece

The word ‘Greece’ itself needs some definition – or rather, a warning about the comparative lack of it. By Paul’s day the entire extended Middle East, from Greece proper all the way east to the Indus River and south through Egypt, had come under the influence of Greek language and culture through the extraordinary conquests of Alexander the Great. (Greek culture, for that matter, had extended westwards as well, to Sicily and southern Italy, though these did not form part of Alexander’s empire.) But even before then the word ‘Greek’ needs qualification. Historically speaking, Greek culture can be traced back to the much earlier Minoan and Mycenean civilizations, and though the lines of derivation are blurred it is highly likely that some key features of what we now think of as classical Greek culture and religion (particularly that of the fifth and fourth centuries BC) can be traced back that far. Geographically, the Greeks saw themselves as a single, though differentiated, culture on either side of the Aegean Sea. Today’s Greek mainland and the Aegean islands formed an important part of this wider ‘Greece’, but the Asia Minor seaboard, from the Black Sea in the north right down to the coastal area of the south-west, was also ethnically, culturally and religiously Greek. All of Paul’s life and work, including his arrival in Rome, took place within a world rooted in and still shaped by Greek culture...