A study of the foundation and Influences of the Christian Church
Written By: Thomas Milazzo
The Christian Church was born out of the legacies of the Greek, Roman and Jewish cultures. Through God’s providence and perhaps advantageous timing, the Christian Church entered a world prepared for the truth of God. The Greeks provided a universal language and philosophy that supported the acceptance of the Church. Roman laws, organization, and commitment to peace created proper surroundings for the Church to flourish. Lastly, the Jewish religious principles, helped form the backbone of the Christian Church. Through a detailed examination of the language and philosophy, organization and structure, and religions views of the early Christian Church we can determine that the Greek, Roman, and Jewish Cultures all contributed to the birth and spread of the Church.
The Hellenistic culture of the ancient Greeks contributed its philosophy and language to the Christian Church. Alexander the Great built an empire united by a common thread: Greek ideology, language and culture. This process of assimilation by which Greek culture was transplanted to the east became identified as Hellenization. The popular Greek language became a medium on which the Christian religion could flourish, as the language created a disposition of acceptance. The Greek language was the contemporary language associated with a well-established culture. Though the Greek religion was considered one-dimensional and simple, its language allowed the Jewish and other eastern religions, which would eventually contribute to Christianity, to communicate properly. The dominant Greek philosophical ideals of the time, which where Stoicism, Platonism and Epicureanism, all contributed greatly to the evolution of the Christian Church. One early Christian by the name of Clement of Alexandria wrote:
Philosophy has been given to the Greeks as their own kind of