f. e. peters, hellenism and the near east

Hellenism and the Near EastAuthor(s): F. E. PetersSource: The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 33-39Published by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3209688 .

Accessed: 02/07/2014 09:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The American Schools of Oriental Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Biblical Archaeologist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 37.122.171.88 on Wed, 2 Jul 2014 09:25:52 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asor

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3209688?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


HELLENISM

and the Near East

by E E. Peters

The Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, Lebanon. Lying in the heart of the ancient Semitic- speaking world, Baaibek became an arche- typal Near Eastern polis, a monument to Hellenism. Photo by Rev Francis Lyons III.

What we are and have been and likely will be is displayed through the pages of Bonitz's Index

Aristotelicus; here is revealed not the lyricism perhaps nor the feel- ing, which we share with many other societies, but our heart, our understanding. Those astonishing heuristic devices that at once pry into and are Hellenism were not all Aristotle's own inventions, but he described them best: the stunning insight, proclaimed like an oracle at the opening of the Metaphysics, that is the starting point of all science; the notion of entelechy, operation filled with function and so perfection; dynamis, not simply power, but power to, toward, al- most a longing, a need; theos, god, where at a stroke a whole mythic order of older deities was shattered and reconceptualized into a new demonstrable and defined divinity; psyche, too, and logos, the latter

the very entelechy of Hellenism, and of Western man.

The syntax of Hellenism is all in Aristotle, the program, the blueprint, whatever figure we choose to employ. It is in the Iliad too, embodied in the matter and the medium of epic; in buildings like the Parthenon; in the pots of Attic vase painters and the tragedies of Aeschylus; in the medical treatises of Galen and the astronomy of Ptolemy (whose hypotheses are often wrong but whose minds are invaria- bly right); in the city-plan of Miletus and in Alexander's phalanx. It can even be read off the works of converts and proselytes: in the Roman Vergil, the Egyptian Plotinus, and the Jew Josephus; in the Muslim Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the medina of Damascus; in Saadya ben Yusuf the Gaon, Ibn Rushd or Averroes, Thomas Aquinas; indeed, in the entire intellectual tradition of the West.

We can speak freely about Hellenism, more freely than we dare about Judaism or the Gallic spirit or the soul of America, because its bearers were at the same time its definers and its analysts. Their self- consciousness drew them to observe what they were and attempt to define it, to be simultaneously lepidopterist and butterfly So we have a solid grounding for an exploration of Hellenism. We need only to turn to the Greek self- portrait, as expressively manifested in literature, art and architecture or, more simply, to the intentional form of self-analysis, to Hellenism's summary of itself. We can study the Greeks' language with their own grammars, their philosophy with its own analytical tools, and do so easily since they are our own as well. More astonishingly, these are the only tools contrived by humankind for the inspection of both one's own and the other's reality. "Give

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/WINTER 1983 33



Hellenism is that center, and from it the entire world can be both moved and understood.

me someplace to stand," Archi- medes said in his heavy Doric, "and I shall move the earth." Hellen- ism is that center, and from it the entire world can be both moved and understood.

This understanding was available even to strangers and barbaroi. Not the least of the Greek achieve- ments was their devising of a new and profoundly effective way to transmit their values. Other societies relied on absorption or mime- sis, depending on the osmotic properties of a mother's knee or the example of the tribal elders to orient the young; the Greeks ulti- mately had little need for either method, since they did not "orient" but rather instructed their young in schools. Contemporary societies used schools to impart techniques; the Greeks used them to transmit culture. Exemplary texts which contained neither the arcana of life nor the revelation of mysteries beyond the grave but simply the moral and aesthetic values of the society were taught. And taught, moreover, not merely to Greeks. Hellenism was a tribalism of the spirit, not of the blood, and its lessons were learned and its effects felt no less by Egyptians in the Delta, schoolboys in Arabia or Iran- ians in the farthest reaches of Khurasan than by Athens' own native-born citizens. Alexander the Great proposed to incorporate just such young Iranians into his phalanxes and eventually into part- nership in his empire, and so he engaged them in studying not close- order drill but Homer. His analysis was exact: to fight like a Hellene, one had to think like a Hellene, and the shortest route between Khurasan and Hellas ran through the schoolbook that took its reader to Agamemnon's camp outside of Troy.

And what is it to think like a Hellene? To put it succinctly, Hel-

lenism proposed that man has the capacity both to understand and to achieve his own perfection, which is his happiness. That perfection is to be found in society, since man is a social or, as the Greeks said, a political animal. Hellenism's achieve- ment lies not simply in socializ- ing, however, but in the pursuit of intellectual ends. These can best be attained by mutual examination, according to Socrates, or dialectic, as Plato refined it, by analysis and diathesis, taking apart and putting together. Thus the setting of man's happiness is the city and its primary instrument is logos, the use of reason. Reason governs the universe through the operation of natural laws; it guides the individual in making prudent judgments; and it controls the civil environment through institutions.

Exegesis is the mode of Hel- lenism, the display of parts syntac- tically arranged that will at one end of the process show forth the assemblage as a beautiful whole or as a true effect, and at the other uncover the very elements, building stones, premises or causes that lay bare its mysteries. Analysis and synthesis -science is the understanding of the most primary of causes; wisdom the contemplation of the grandeur of the most universal of effects -the two are linked by logos. Logos, the bond that extends from cause to effect not only in the order of existence but in that of understanding and utterance as well, is both the measure and the essence of Hellenism.

The discovery of that looping effect, that the order of causality in nature could be replicated in both thought and speech and so fed back into nature, had enormous conse- quences. It shattered, though it did not annihilate, its chief competi- tor in the world of human discourse, what the Greeks called mythos. Mythos explained by describing: it

was narrative and paratactical. It was genially non-exclusive- appar- ently contradictory myths could exist side by side--but it was also static and unresponsive; mythos entertained no questions. Logos, on the other hand, explained, volu- bly and aggressively. It demonstrat- ed, and since it was also self-correc- ting, it evolved. Organic in nature, logos reacted, adjusted, and grew under outside stimulation, whether by new data or counter-argument. It defined the truth and then proceed- ed to fill its own parameters.

The world is not so simple perhaps, but as an approximation of reality, persuasive enough to rede- sign most of mankind's thinking about reality and apposite enough to control that environment, Hel- lenism's logos paradigm enjoyed a success more far-reaching and perva- sive than either Christianity's or Islam's. This paradigm triumphed over the most redoubtable authori- ty, God's own Word, which in the end had also to yield to Hellenism's exegesis. By its cogent analysis, classification and definition of truth, logos loosed the grip of all other modes of discourse and perception. "I feel," '"As our fathers taught," "It is related of old" were all swept, together with "The Lord saith," into a bin already marked by Aristotle for "Rhetorical Topoi" and "Refutable Sophistries." Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Rome's trouble- some Near Eastern province of Judea, was waffling; he knew perfectly well what the truth was, or at least how you get at it. The man standing before him could be no help, of course; he was still trafficking in mythos: '"Amen, amen, I say to you .... "

The Hellenes, or at least their Macedonian surrogates, came to the Near East in arms, but Hellenism put down its still discernible roots there through the polis, the city. As with all complex organisms, it is

34 BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/WINTER 1983



easier to understand and to translate Hellenism through its external properties, its embodiment in and functioning through matter, than to peer directly into its essence. Its prima facie presence can be imme- diately grasped in the controlled critical judgments of a Polybius or a Plutarch or a Sophocles attempting to penetrate to the causes of the most dense phenomenon, human polypragmatism. It is present in equal measure in Demosthenes' ora- tion, "On the Crown," and in the Roman Pantheon, where the syntax of word and stone is stretched into ever larger and more complex archi- tectonic units with such ease and skill and daring that the spectator can move effortlessly from part to whole and back again without either moral or aesthetic vertigo. And it is revealed, finally, in the Greco- Roman city, the polis or civitas.

On the surface the polis is merely an urban settlement, often a diminutive one, yet this small- scale polity carried deep within itself-like a genetic code-the essence of the Hellenic ethos. The public buildings, theaters, gymnasia, council chambers and temples that were the feature of every polis, were pleasant and even remarkable to the eye. But more importantly they were the housing of institu- tionalized acts and events that formed the basic ritual of Hellenism: men acting in concert by their own voli- tion can rule themselves and in the process procure the means to their own fulfillment. In those same buildings and acts, the Hellenic citizen navigated his own passage from dynamis to entelechy.

The marvel of the polis, whether in the Near East or elsewhere, is precisely its conversion of ideals into human institutions, each of which was lodged in its appropriate architectural setting. The council or bould, the basilica and the bath reflect, each in its own distinct way, the Hellenic view of man as a social animal with social powers, social responsibilities and social pleasures. The bath with its open yet complex spaces, its coherent func- tionalism distributed among a multi- tude of parts, its adornment and

A nineteenth-century artist's imaginative reconstruction of the interior of the Roman Pantheon in its heyday The splendor of the Pantheon testified to and perhaps epitomized the impact Hellenism had beyond the borders of Greece.

monumentalization of what others might view as a routine need or a simple pleasure is itself a perfect microcosm of the Hellenic city.

The Greco-Roman city was en- during even as a physical structure. Built of limestone or even highly polished basalt, finished often without benefit of mortar or even of timber because of the Romans' marvelous precision with stone, the public buildings of the polis were arranged across a grid of streets ruled off in its main lines with colonnad- ed avenues and anchored at the

cross-axes by arches or columned monuments. Public and private space, religious, commercial and residen- tial functions were all as mingled in the plan as they were in the citizens' own minds. Even today, the shape and monuments and character of a Greco-Roman city remain unmis- takable, whether it stands in deso- late splendor in the midst of a steppe or lies barely concealed under present-day Aleppo or Jerusalem.

Greek cities dotted Anatolia in clusters, stretched in a glittering line across High Mesopotamia, encir-




cled recusant Judea in the neck- lace of the Decapolis, and one of them, Alexandria, stood like a solitary brilliant crowning Egypt. Alexandria was more than the jewel of Egypt; it was the royal polis, Alexander's own city and the head and heart of the Hellenic enterprise in the Near East. Alexandria had its political rivals in Rome and Antioch and Constantinople, but its schools and scholars, the Curia that presided over the Propagation of Hellenism, had no peers. It was Alexandrian science, whether in mathematics or medicine or theology or Literaturgeschichte, that trick- led down into the curricula and thence into the public ways of Gerasa and Apamea and Ephesus, and even of Rome and Constantino- ple. No matter that the city was sacked and burned and mobbed with tedious regularity. In the seventh century, a thousand years after Alexander had founded his city, there was still a faculty propound- ing grammar and logic and cosmolo- gy and medicine at the university when the last class of Greeks gradua- ted and the first class of Muslims descended from their mounts and took up matriculation.

As the polis phenomenon un- folded in their midst, the barbaroi from Anatolia to Egypt and Iran stood without and wondered. Sub- dued by Greek arms, they were now witnessing in their own lands a more radical conquest by far. Their temples and gods rested in a kind of familiar accomodation, but the myths and belief systems that undergirded the cultus grew shabby or outmoded or were converted into the odd new currency of allego- ry. The Near East, where mythos had reached the state of high art, went onto the logos standard: local issues continued to circulate, but increasingly as colorful chits re- deemable only by rational exegesis at the tables of the Greeks.

We have seen the process repeat itself often enough in such a variety of cultural circumstances to understand why it occurs thus. Logos discourse, science as we might call it, along with the technology that is its necessary corollary, has no

The Near East, where mythos had reached the state of

high art, went onto

the logos standard: local issues con-

tinued to circulate but increasingly as

colorful chits re-

deemable only by rational exegesis at

the tables of the Greeks.

equal as an instrument of inven- tion, understanding and explanation. It uncovers new truths; it compre- hends them by systematically associ- ating them with an accumulated body of similar truths; and it is capable of demonstrating its case in a manner so clear and convincing that it seems, as Aquinas said, that veritas ipsa cogit nos, the truth itself compels us. Ghazali, a Muslim thinker slightly before Aquinas' time, was troubled by what Hellenic theology had to say about his re- ceived faith and proposed tossing out the lot of logos from Islam. He paused, however, at mathematics, coerced, it would seem, by the verity of it. The pause was fatal. If you wish the mathematics, you had perforce to take the theology since the two areas are as closely premise- linked as Homer and the Macedo- nian phalanx or, let us say, the computer and the logic and logos within it.

Ghazali was not the first Muslim to have had problems with Hel- lenism, nor was Islam the first Near Eastern religion to experience fear and resentment at the dyna- miting of its divinely revealed foun- dations. The Jews first and then

the Christians had already heard the thunder in their cellars and were forced to choose between resistance, acceptance or accommodation. It was not very helpful to express the question as Tertullian had, 'Ath- ens or Jerusalem?" since there was no more likelihood of discarding Athens in the third Christian century than of ignoring Darwin and the scientific tradition in the twentieth -none, that is, short of living in an insulated shtetl. Christianity was not shtetl-bound, however, and to put it in gross terms, while Christi- anity, pace Tertullian, accommodated, Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism chose the shtetl when and where it could, which was not everywhere or often. Not in Alexandria certainly, where a large community of Jews lived in the very shadow of the so-called "bird cage of the Muses" and shortly after its introduction to Hellenism produced not only a new, "scientific" translation of its Scriptures into the sacred tongue of Greek but also the first "reformed" Jew. The theologian Philo, an odd, new title in the Jewish world, instructed his coreligionists how to adjust their sight at precisely the correct angle for reading the Bible simultaneously with the eye of faith and the eye of reason, the new Hellenic reason.

There were many Jews who ignored Philo, just as there were many Egyptians who ignored Eu- clid and Ptolemy and many more Syrians and Anatolians who were untouched by Hellenism. Hellenism spoke to the high tradition and left untroubled the peasant and shop- keeper and slave with their kitch- en gods and vernacular shrines. The polites or citizen was a member of a social and economic elite, and access to the polis, if it lay not through the bloodstream or genealo- gies, did march over property and deeds and tax assessments. It re- quired leisure to become a Hellene.

But if it demanded wealth, the Greeks' way taught altruism in the name of civic good. Hellenism was an economic as well as a cultural agent: it took the burdens and the rewards of public works, once the responsibility of royalty alone, and




spread them among the citizenry. The large civic enterprises that went on in every city of whatever size in the Greco-Roman Near East redis- tributed wealth as effectively as an income tax, and its end products in the city--the theatrical production, the library, the temple, the endowed professorship -while perhaps ap- pearing to us as civic amenities, represented for the generation that sponsored and used them an authen- tic public utility. The axiom "from each polites according to his abili- ty; for all polites unto the common good," was everywhere demonstrat- ed in the public facilities that were the ornaments even of what once had been only villages.

Jerusalem was no village. Prior to the Greek age, it had been a substantial urban settlement, a na- tional capital and a shrine-city. Then, under the Ptolemies and the Seleucids it slowly became in fact, if only briefly in legal status, a polis. The Hasmoneans, only recently themselves rebels against the god- less Greeks, lived in a Hellenized court and were buried in Greek-style tombs. Jerusalem had a boulh and a gymnasium and a rapidly Helleniz- ing upper class. It was bourgeois stuff likely, the icing without much cake beneath. But Herod, unabashed admirer of things Greek and Roman and public works benefactor of half the eastern Mediterranean, put some yeast in the mix. Jerusalem got its grid-plan of streets, theater and race-course, and as the rabbis gasped, though in delight and won- der and not in Maccabean disdain, the worship of the One True God of the Jews was celebrated in a temple as grandly Hellenic as the one Philo was constructing for Him in Alex- andria.

Neither edifice survived very long. Herod's was destroyed in the civil insurrection of 70 A.D., and the shock of that encounter and the issues that it raised in its wake probably toppled Philo's exegetical temple as well. Despite some obvious opportunities, no one appeared much interested in emulat- ing Herod, but Philo's enterprise was somewhat more urgent. The issue was resurrected some eight hundred

years later, under an Islamic re- gime that was itself struggling to come to terms with Hellenism, by Saadya ben Yusuf. The Gaon's problems were the same as those of his Muslim contemporaries and arose from the same roots. In the early ninth century the leaven of Alexan- dria had begun to work once again, and the Islamic world was introduced, half willy and half nilly, to transla- tions of the founding fathers of scientific Hellenism. The physical and mathematical sciences went down with satisfying ease, as Ghazali remarked. But when the bedazzled Muslims and Jews reached the crown upon the work, the First Philosophy, they found there a portrait of God, the one carefully limned by every precision tool in the armamentarium of Hellenic science, that squared ill with the Scriptural, and so equally guaranteed, portrait of that same deity. The True Believer and the Enlightened Modern had the issue of faith and reason neatly and precisely before them, where it rests today.

Christianity had fewer problems. Though Jesus was as backwater a prophet as Muhammad would be and had only the vaguest of no- tions about the Good News of the Ancient World, his followers were somewhat better informed. Moreover, their headlong flight from Judaism carried them directly into the em- brace of the Gentiles and their endemic Hellenism. Those Gentile Hellenes were no longer Greek, to be sure, but Roman converts to the ways of Hellenism. The Romans were apt students and even shrewder masters of empire. They left intact and even enhanced the Greek polis- network in the Near East and gave it a political and administrative coherence that lay beyond either Greek talents or interests. They built better and stronger and more permanently than the Greeks, wheth-

er cities or roads or laws or alliances. They suffered philosophers, some- times even gladly, and particularly in the incorrigible East. They suffered Christians too, once they were assured that they were not Jews. And in the end, they joined them.

The Gentiles subscribed to Christianity, but those new converts were already Hellenes by tempera- ment and education and not simply outback pagani. They added to their belief in Christ what was alien and unnecessary for the earlier Jewish Christians, a dialectically reasoned and theologically defined faith. Their summary legacy was the creed: orthodoxy, true and correct faith, became the touchstone of a Gentile, Hellenic Christianity, and for the millennium between Justin, the Christian rabbi and philoso- pher of Sichem, and Thomas Aquinas, Christianity set forth, in diction, style and concepts that are unmistak- ably Hellenic, precisely what it believed. The martyrs had died for the faith, but it was the Fathers and Doctors, all of them Hellenes under the cloth, who explained it.

In one of the most extraordinary meetings of mind and method in history, Hellenism, the Roman Em- pire and Christianity became vehi- cles of mutual propagation. Con- stantine, Roman Emperor and lately Christian, built out of imperial funds grandiose Roman basilicas and mausoleums over the sites of Jesus' birth, death and burial in Palestine. At the same time, he summoned his bishops about him to discuss, in terms far more appropriate to the university of Alexandria than to the Gospels, what exactly was meant when Jesus was said to be the Logos. Was he homoousios, of the same essence as the Father, or homoiousios, of a like substance? It was anaodd way for a Christian to talk about Jesus perhaps, but in the

The True Believer and The Enlightened Modern had the issue of faith and

reason neatly and precisely before them.




The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, "the finest of Hellenism 's later architectural monuments," as it appeared over a half-century ago.

Another view of the ruins of the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek. Photo by Rev Francis Lyons III.

Hellenized world of the fourth century, it was the only way.

Emperors from Trajan to Septi- mius Severus had raised the Near Eastern poleis to new heights of grandeur and perfection: Bostra, Baalbek, Palmyra, Gerasa, Berytus, Damascus, Philadelphia that was once Rabboth Ammon, Beroea- Haleb, Emesa-Homs, and Jerusalem now renamed Aelia Capitolina. A single imperial visit, like Hadrian's tour of the Near East in 130 A.D., left a flood of patronage in its wake. Once Christians, the later Roman emperors continued the tradition, and though the object of their benefactions were still municipali- ties, the settings and motives were somewhat different from what they had been in the second century. Where once it had been the commer- cially valuable caravan city of Palmyra that had benefited from imperial interest, Zeno and Ana- stasius in the fifth century built cities in equally remote places in Egypt and Syria and called them after their long-dead inspirations, City of Saint Menas, City of Saint Sergius.

There were no theaters in these new shrine-cities of the Chris- tian martyrs, no gymnasia or am- phitheaters in the old Hellenic style. They were municipal ephemera perhaps, but they were not garrison towns or corporate compounds either. The Christian Roman city still governed itself as a polis should, and while the political au- thority within it was vested more often in the bishop than in the secular magistrate of the prototype, this was the sign of a new age when the best talents went into the Church and the largest investments, public and private, were directed to the construction and endowment of houses of the worship of God. In the sixth century, the most splendid new buildings in Bostra, still the capital of Provincia Arabia, were a bold new domed cathedral and an episcopal palace. The former caravan towns of the Negev sprouted churches as if they were a native desert bloom, and Madaba in Transjordan, once an obscure village, had laid down across its terrain of churches a




carpet of mosaic in the new man- nerist style.

Among the Madaba mosaics is a large-scale map of Byzantine Jerusa- lem, a city sitting for her portrait sometime near the turn into the seventh century. The polis mark- ings are all still there, such as a Piazza del Popolo just inside the Damascus Gate with a monumental column set in its midst; yet, we can make out few secular buildings on the map other than walls, gates and citadel; instead, the city is jeweled with churches, hospices, hostels, shrines and convents. And though Jerusalem could boast no philosophers as such, there was enough dialectic and theological disputation to satisfy the spirit of a Plato or an Aristotle that Hellenic inquiry was still flourishing in the once Jewish and now Christian holy city.

Plato and Aristotle were themselves still alive in Jerusalem. By the sixth century the premises and methods of Christian theology were adroitly and unashamedly derived from the two Greek thinkers, just as the churches where those disputa- tions took place were, basilica and martyrium, the not unworthy de- scendents of Hellenic prototypes enlarged and magnified by the Roman mastery of brick and con- crete. Temple architecture was as unsuitable by its associations for these new houses of worship as the old myths were for Christian discourse, and so in one as in the other, different, more secular forms were taken up and adapted. In philosophy, the logical and physical works of the Hellenic masters were harnessed to supply conceptual rigor and exegetical energy to the ongoing work of Christian theology, while the apsed basilical hall was adapted for church and synagogue. Imperial Roman mausolea taught both Christians and Muslims to suspend domes of dizzying dimen- sion over a variety of polygonal bases: the Cathedral of Saint George at Bostra, Hagia Sophia in Constanti- nople, the church on the site of the former Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim, and the finest of Hel- lenism's later architectural monu-

In philosophy, the

logical and physical works of the Hellenic masters

were harnessed to

supply conceptual rigor and exegetical energy to the

ongoing work of Christian theology. ments, the Dome of the Rock on the Muslim Haram in Jerusalem. The self-conscious though unobtrusive symmetry of that building, its organic relationship of parts to whole, the sober yet glittering mosaic work within, the open concealment of its innermost part, its imposi- tion of order upon a rock irregular in shape and uneven in texture, all of it speaks of Hellenism; it is only the rock itself that echoes another, non-Greek, perception.

There were many such rocks scattered across the Hellenized Near East, bits and pieces of other traditions unyielding to logos and the persuasiveness or coercion of its instruments: the cross that still stood defiantly beneath the Roman building on Golgotha; the Torah enshrined in synagogues whose mosaic floors shone with the glories of Greek mythology and astrology; Muhammad's footprints in the earth under an elegant Hellenic cupola next to the Dome of the Rock; still-living mythologies and that most unhellenic of all ideolo- gies, Gnosticism. These are not mere aberrations; they are the standards of an incomplete accommodation, pickets along a line of demarcation between rationalism and belief, between the Hellenes' lofty vision where man was enshrined and reaching for heaven and that other high place where God alone had His dwelling.

Suggestions for Further Reading Peters, E E., The Harvest of

Hellenism. New York: Galaxy, 1970.

Eddy, S. K., The King is Dead. Studies in the Near Eastern Resis- tance to Hellenism 334-31 B.c. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Hengel, M., Judaism and Hel- lenism, 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.

Jaeger, W, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. New York: Oxford, 1969.

Brown, P, The World of Late Antiquity from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.

Peters, E E., Allah's Common- wealth. A History of Islam in the Near East 600-1200 A.D. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.




f. e. peters, hellenism and the near east

Documents