1. All scripture was written to be understood.
2. No scripture was written to be understood by us in 21st century New England.
3. No scripture was written to be scripture.
4. All scripture comes to us in heavily modified form.
5. All translation is modification.
There are many more letters from Paul than those in the Bible, as evidenced by phase, "in my last letter" in 1 Corinthians 5. Only seven of those that are purported to be his in the Bible actually are his.
Excavators have to make decisions based on costs and when they can only reconstruct some ruins they choose those that are most monumental and glorious leaving us to believe it was all monumental and glorious. It would be important instead to see the ancient living quarters.
The same is true of literature. Our Bible was not produced by peasants. Paul was not a pauper. The upper 10% were those who contributed to the Bible.
There was no complete New Testament manuscript until the fourth century. By then there were already modifications from when it had been written.
Paul entered Athens on the Sacred Way seeing many idols and he was repulsed. He approached the Areopagus (Mars Hill) to speak on the matter. He was skilled in rhetoric, the art of persuasion.
Paul's style of evangelism was that he would go to places of worship, observe and then share the news of Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama said you can either have a crusading mind or a crucifixion mind. That is, you can either believe, "I have the truth and no one else does" or the mind of the crucified Christ, which desires to serve others in all their complexity.
The Areopagus at Mars Hill enabled Paul (the judged) to stay separately from the one who would judge
Hadrian gate at Temple of Zeus.
Greek Parliament
University of Greece
Tourist v. Pilgrimage is like sight-seeing versus interacting with people, understanding culture. We visited Helping Hands, a Christian organization dedicated to helping Afghan refugees.
We had a communion service on Mars Hill. We sang Hallelus and This is the Day. Our preacher, Rev Gwyneth Arrison took 1 Corinthians 12 for her text with special emphasis on verse 26. She emphasized that if one of us is broken we are all broken and told the story of her kids realizing that it starts with each of us-with the church.
We saw the Herodian Theater where moderns like Frank Sinatra have played.
Pelopopus (sp) is the nickname for love of grandfather (who, in this case, was the king).
It took nine years to build the Parthenon.
Only those who were male and over the age of 18 were allowed inside. They were required to attend the very long meetings but were given a break every nine days to attend to their livelihood. There was an egalitarian system to pay their salary while absent but in order to keep it from being abused, There was a rope around the area. The rope was painted with red, wet paint so if you touched it, you were "caught, red-handed!"
The goddess Athena gave the olive tree to humankind after a battle with Poseidon which she won.
The statues' necks are reinforced by the braid of hair. The Parthenon is made of 16,500 pieces of marble. A bombing in 1687 destroyed the walls and roof.
As we completed our time at the Acropolis, we saw a storm front approaching. We got rained on a bit but got into the museum and seated for lunch when we saw GOLF BALL-SIZED HAIL coming down, enough that our archeologist, David Scahill from The American School, the next day said it had dented his car!
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