Today, for lack of other words, it is Americanization..
but where mathematics, science and technology are concerned.. they seem to be more qualified than "us"..
Then this came about,
Now there’s one thing that the Romans made even more of, than the Greeks had made of, and this the patron-client structure. This is a bit more of a distinctly Roman institution, even a legal institution; but it’s important for understanding both the Roman Empire, as well as early Christianity and its patron-client relations. The household structure of a Roman household was this-the Roman household was constructed like a pyramid, not a triangle. At the top of it is the head of the household, the man, ‘the oldest man of the household.’ Under him is his sons, his daughters, and then at the bottom are his slaves, and here are his freedmen, freed persons. And then also we consider, in some ways, free people who may exist as clients. But legally the word client refers to the freed slaves of the man of the household.
Now where’s the wife in this picture, why isn’t the wife and mother in there? Because legally she’s actually not part of this man’s household. She remains part of the household of her father, and she’s legally under the control of her father probably, or her brothers, if her father is dead; or her grandfather, if her grandfather is still alive. But since life expectancy in the Ancient World was much less than ours, they didn’t have usually several generations in these households. The wife though is legally a part of her own household over here. Why did the Romans do that? That’s very different from the Greeks, very different from other people in the Ancient Mediterranean. Why did they want to make sure that the daughters stayed in the households of their fathers? They did this because they didn’t want the upper-class in Rome, who were the elite, they didn’t want anyone household, or any small group of households, to become too powerful. And if you have women marrying off into other families, and then they leave the household of their fathers, and they are officially and legally in a household with somebody else, that may end up increasing those households that have intermarriage coming in and not so much intermarriage going out. By keeping women under the household of the men of their original family, the upper-class Romans tried to balance these different households in size and importance. They didn’t care about the lower-class really. The lower-class didn’t really count much. What they cared about-because the Roman republic by this time was basically a bunch of every important households, wealthy men and their households, and they were the members of the Senate, they were the knight class, they were the people who ran Rome. So they didn’t want one king to arise, and they didn’t want a small coterie of leaders to arise. They wanted there to be some kind of balance of power among the several major households of Rome, the families of Rome.
Now slaves, when a slave is freed in the Roman Empire, they didn’t become a free man, they became a freed man, and that was legally different. So the status of salve was lowest, freed persons was next highest in Roman Law; and free people were next; but even though they became freed, they were still considered a member of this guy’s household, as his client and his freedman, and they owed certain duties to him. Only in the Roman Empire could slavery actually start being a way that you can move up in society, because you could=if you were a talented slave, your owner might free you. When he freed you, if he was a Roman citizen, you would automatically become a Roman citizen also, and your children would be Roman citizens. And although you were a freedman, which was lower in status than a free person-there were some privileges you couldn’t have-your children would be, if they were born after you’ve been freed, would be free people, not freed. So within a couple of generations, people could move up from being the lowest slaves to two generations of being free Roman citizens. So Roman slavery and the freedom of that was actually one way that a few people in the Ancient World recognized some kind of social mobility, which was very rare in the Roman Empire. This will be very important, because Christians started out as house churches, and their house churches fit sometimes the model of a Greek ekkiesia, ‘the voting body of the Greek citizens, an assembly,’ but sometimes the model of the Roman household; and so this household structure becomes very important.
Here is how that spirit teaching got it's hold in Yahweh's word. Basic structures are part of any kind of Greek city in the Ancient World. And what Alexander and his successors did was they took that basic Greek structure, and they transplanted it all over the Eastern Mediterranean, whether they were in Egypt or Syria or Asia Minor or anyplace else. One can travel right now to Turkey or Syria or Israel or Jordan or Egypt, and one can see excavations of towns, and it’s remarkable how they all look so much alike, because they’re all inspired by this originally Greek model of the city. Alexander and his successors Hellenized the entire eastern Mediterranean, and that meant, every major city would have a certain commonality to it. It would have a certain koine to it; that is, a Greek overlay, over what may be also be there, the original indigenous kind of cultures and languages. Just what was this high priest named Jason thinking, when he built a gymnasium in Jerusalem in 175BC; he also founded a Greek City structure.
The Greek polis, which is simply the Greek word for city, had several institutions that are very important; They all practiced a certain kind of Greek education. The Greek word paideia, means education, but it also means more than simply role learning or memorization or learning to read, like we think. Paideia is the Greek word that means the formation of the young man. Throughout all this it was mainly young men and boys who were educated, girls could be given some education, if their families were wealthy enough, but the cities didn’t really concern themselves so much with girls’ education. Their family might, but the cities concerned themselves with the education of their boys. So paideia referred to the education of the young man, both mentally, but militarily=so one was taught to fight=and culturally; one might be taught other things about culture. One might even have some music training or something like that. The place where this education took place was the gymnasium. Now a gymnasium doesn’t mean what it means in English, it actually comes from the Greek word for naked, gymnos. And the reason it was called ‘the naked place’ is because, of course, young Greek men always exercised in the nude and played sports in the nude. But this also became the place where one would do other kinds of learning. So if one was learning rhetoric, for example, you might practice giving speeches at the gymnasium. But also men in town would just kind of gather there, it was kind of a place where men gathered and they had gone to school at the same place. One would meet your friends, play games; so this would all take place in the gymnasium.
Another institution was what they called the ephebeia. When one was a young boy, one would have studied just reading and writing Homer. When one got to be 16 or 22 around their, one might enter the ephebeia; one would become an ephebe, and that just meant that one was past their sort of early secondary training and now one was being really in training to be a warrior and a citizen. They would march together in a parade in town. They would go on military training perhaps together. They would also engage in sports together, and they would develop a camaraderie because they were expected then to be the fighting force for their city, their city-state. So the ephebeia was this institution that every boy had to go through in order then to be a full citizen of a city.
Their also was these political structures, the first political structure is the demos. Demos just means the “people,” It’s just a Greek word for “the people.” But it actually referred more politically to all of the male citizens, and in Greek cities, by tradition, only men were citizens of a city. But all the men who were citizens had a vote, and the demos referred to that political body of voting men. Now they kept this idea that the demos=that is, the adult citizen males of a city-were a political body. And that’s when, if you had everybody come to the theater for a big debate about something, you could still have people voting in certain things that the city might decide to do, although they couldn’t rule themselves completely by themselves. Then they had a smaller council that might be 50 people. It varied the size, according to the city. The council was called the boule, and that referred to a smaller council of older men, usually, who made decisions that they then would put before the whole the demos the whole voting population. These are the basic structures that are part of a Greek City, and Jason just brought Alexander’s dream to Jerusalem.
Their was a group of former high priests, who have been dislocated and other priestly families withdrawing from Jerusalem, and apparently going out in the desert, and maybe building a community out there, and we find out about them in the twentieth century when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in the late 1940’s. So that may have been another way to respond to this increasing Hellenization in Jerusalem, to just pull away and from a different community.
The Romans, when they came on the scene, in the East, and they gradually became more and more powerful, they destroyed Corinth in a big battle in 144BC. Pompey was the Roman general who took over Jerusalem in 63BC. So the Romans were in charge of Judah from 63BC on. And this is very important, because the Romans, as their power grew in the East, they simply moved increasingly into the eastern Mediterranean and they adopted the whole Greek system, the Greek world, and they didn’t even try to make it non-Greek. So Romans didn’t go around trying to get people in the East to speak Latin. They might put up an official inscription in an Eastern City in Latin, but they’d almost always, if it was an official inscription, it would also be listed in Greek, So Romans who ruled in the East were expected to speak Greek. And by this time all educated Roman men were expected to be able to speak Greek, well if possible. So the Romans didn’t try to make the East Roman, in that sense, culturally, nor did they try to change the language. Greek language, culture, and religions, different religions and the syncretism, Greek education, the polis structure-all of these things remained in the East throughout the Roman rule of the East, all the way up until the time you had a Christian emperor with Constantine, and later.
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Ham
Today, for lack of other words, it is Americanization..
but where mathematics, science and technology are concerned.. they seem to be more qualified than "us"..
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teachmevp
Then this came about,
Now there’s one thing that the Romans made even more of, than the Greeks had made of, and this the patron-client structure. This is a bit more of a distinctly Roman institution, even a legal institution; but it’s important for understanding both the Roman Empire, as well as early Christianity and its patron-client relations. The household structure of a Roman household was this-the Roman household was constructed like a pyramid, not a triangle. At the top of it is the head of the household, the man, ‘the oldest man of the household.’ Under him is his sons, his daughters, and then at the bottom are his slaves, and here are his freedmen, freed persons. And then also we consider, in some ways, free people who may exist as clients. But legally the word client refers to the freed slaves of the man of the household.
Now where’s the wife in this picture, why isn’t the wife and mother in there? Because legally she’s actually not part of this man’s household. She remains part of the household of her father, and she’s legally under the control of her father probably, or her brothers, if her father is dead; or her grandfather, if her grandfather is still alive. But since life expectancy in the Ancient World was much less than ours, they didn’t have usually several generations in these households. The wife though is legally a part of her own household over here. Why did the Romans do that? That’s very different from the Greeks, very different from other people in the Ancient Mediterranean. Why did they want to make sure that the daughters stayed in the households of their fathers? They did this because they didn’t want the upper-class in Rome, who were the elite, they didn’t want anyone household, or any small group of households, to become too powerful. And if you have women marrying off into other families, and then they leave the household of their fathers, and they are officially and legally in a household with somebody else, that may end up increasing those households that have intermarriage coming in and not so much intermarriage going out. By keeping women under the household of the men of their original family, the upper-class Romans tried to balance these different households in size and importance. They didn’t care about the lower-class really. The lower-class didn’t really count much. What they cared about-because the Roman republic by this time was basically a bunch of every important households, wealthy men and their households, and they were the members of the Senate, they were the knight class, they were the people who ran Rome. So they didn’t want one king to arise, and they didn’t want a small coterie of leaders to arise. They wanted there to be some kind of balance of power among the several major households of Rome, the families of Rome.
Now slaves, when a slave is freed in the Roman Empire, they didn’t become a free man, they became a freed man, and that was legally different. So the status of salve was lowest, freed persons was next highest in Roman Law; and free people were next; but even though they became freed, they were still considered a member of this guy’s household, as his client and his freedman, and they owed certain duties to him. Only in the Roman Empire could slavery actually start being a way that you can move up in society, because you could=if you were a talented slave, your owner might free you. When he freed you, if he was a Roman citizen, you would automatically become a Roman citizen also, and your children would be Roman citizens. And although you were a freedman, which was lower in status than a free person-there were some privileges you couldn’t have-your children would be, if they were born after you’ve been freed, would be free people, not freed. So within a couple of generations, people could move up from being the lowest slaves to two generations of being free Roman citizens. So Roman slavery and the freedom of that was actually one way that a few people in the Ancient World recognized some kind of social mobility, which was very rare in the Roman Empire. This will be very important, because Christians started out as house churches, and their house churches fit sometimes the model of a Greek ekkiesia, ‘the voting body of the Greek citizens, an assembly,’ but sometimes the model of the Roman household; and so this household structure becomes very important.
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Ham
that really defines what "sucks" here.
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teachmevp
Here is how that spirit teaching got it's hold in Yahweh's word. Basic structures are part of any kind of Greek city in the Ancient World. And what Alexander and his successors did was they took that basic Greek structure, and they transplanted it all over the Eastern Mediterranean, whether they were in Egypt or Syria or Asia Minor or anyplace else. One can travel right now to Turkey or Syria or Israel or Jordan or Egypt, and one can see excavations of towns, and it’s remarkable how they all look so much alike, because they’re all inspired by this originally Greek model of the city. Alexander and his successors Hellenized the entire eastern Mediterranean, and that meant, every major city would have a certain commonality to it. It would have a certain koine to it; that is, a Greek overlay, over what may be also be there, the original indigenous kind of cultures and languages. Just what was this high priest named Jason thinking, when he built a gymnasium in Jerusalem in 175BC; he also founded a Greek City structure.
The Greek polis, which is simply the Greek word for city, had several institutions that are very important; They all practiced a certain kind of Greek education. The Greek word paideia, means education, but it also means more than simply role learning or memorization or learning to read, like we think. Paideia is the Greek word that means the formation of the young man. Throughout all this it was mainly young men and boys who were educated, girls could be given some education, if their families were wealthy enough, but the cities didn’t really concern themselves so much with girls’ education. Their family might, but the cities concerned themselves with the education of their boys. So paideia referred to the education of the young man, both mentally, but militarily=so one was taught to fight=and culturally; one might be taught other things about culture. One might even have some music training or something like that. The place where this education took place was the gymnasium. Now a gymnasium doesn’t mean what it means in English, it actually comes from the Greek word for naked, gymnos. And the reason it was called ‘the naked place’ is because, of course, young Greek men always exercised in the nude and played sports in the nude. But this also became the place where one would do other kinds of learning. So if one was learning rhetoric, for example, you might practice giving speeches at the gymnasium. But also men in town would just kind of gather there, it was kind of a place where men gathered and they had gone to school at the same place. One would meet your friends, play games; so this would all take place in the gymnasium.
Another institution was what they called the ephebeia. When one was a young boy, one would have studied just reading and writing Homer. When one got to be 16 or 22 around their, one might enter the ephebeia; one would become an ephebe, and that just meant that one was past their sort of early secondary training and now one was being really in training to be a warrior and a citizen. They would march together in a parade in town. They would go on military training perhaps together. They would also engage in sports together, and they would develop a camaraderie because they were expected then to be the fighting force for their city, their city-state. So the ephebeia was this institution that every boy had to go through in order then to be a full citizen of a city.
Their also was these political structures, the first political structure is the demos. Demos just means the “people,” It’s just a Greek word for “the people.” But it actually referred more politically to all of the male citizens, and in Greek cities, by tradition, only men were citizens of a city. But all the men who were citizens had a vote, and the demos referred to that political body of voting men. Now they kept this idea that the demos=that is, the adult citizen males of a city-were a political body. And that’s when, if you had everybody come to the theater for a big debate about something, you could still have people voting in certain things that the city might decide to do, although they couldn’t rule themselves completely by themselves. Then they had a smaller council that might be 50 people. It varied the size, according to the city. The council was called the boule, and that referred to a smaller council of older men, usually, who made decisions that they then would put before the whole the demos the whole voting population. These are the basic structures that are part of a Greek City, and Jason just brought Alexander’s dream to Jerusalem.
Their was a group of former high priests, who have been dislocated and other priestly families withdrawing from Jerusalem, and apparently going out in the desert, and maybe building a community out there, and we find out about them in the twentieth century when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in the late 1940’s. So that may have been another way to respond to this increasing Hellenization in Jerusalem, to just pull away and from a different community.
The Romans, when they came on the scene, in the East, and they gradually became more and more powerful, they destroyed Corinth in a big battle in 144BC. Pompey was the Roman general who took over Jerusalem in 63BC. So the Romans were in charge of Judah from 63BC on. And this is very important, because the Romans, as their power grew in the East, they simply moved increasingly into the eastern Mediterranean and they adopted the whole Greek system, the Greek world, and they didn’t even try to make it non-Greek. So Romans didn’t go around trying to get people in the East to speak Latin. They might put up an official inscription in an Eastern City in Latin, but they’d almost always, if it was an official inscription, it would also be listed in Greek, So Romans who ruled in the East were expected to speak Greek. And by this time all educated Roman men were expected to be able to speak Greek, well if possible. So the Romans didn’t try to make the East Roman, in that sense, culturally, nor did they try to change the language. Greek language, culture, and religions, different religions and the syncretism, Greek education, the polis structure-all of these things remained in the East throughout the Roman rule of the East, all the way up until the time you had a Christian emperor with Constantine, and later.
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