The Mystery and Destiny of the Church: God's Plan for Our Salvation - From Eden to the Apocalypse by Sr. Rosena Marie

Author:Sr. Rosena Marie [Marie, Sr. Rosena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Catholic
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2011-04-29T09:46:00+00:00

For fifty years after the deportation to Babylon, the fortunes of the Chosen People remained unchanged, until Babylon itself fell before the rising power of Persia. With this event, Israel had a new overlord in the Persian conqueror. By a providential design of God, the Chosen People found favor with their new masters, and in 538 BC, the Persian king Cyrus the Great issued a decree permitting them to return to their own land. He permitted Zorobabel, a prince of Judah to return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and that was the first step toward the rebuilding of the nation.

The return from the exile, however, was at first slow and halting, and it was only about twenty years later that the full tide of return got well underway: that was seventy years after the great deportation. For two centuries more, Israel remained subject to the Persian empire, until Persia itself fell before the rising power of Greece. Then once again she changed her master.

Alexander the Great, founder of the Greek empire, conquered the Persians in the year 331 BC and thus became the new master of the Chosen People. It was at this predestined hour that the destiny of Israel became linked with the Greek civilization, which was destined to play such an important part in the mystery of salvation. Because of the nature of this mission, it might be worthwhile to consider briefly the history and culture of Greece.

About 1000 BC, Greece was the first European country to become civilized, originally borrowing its civilization from ancient Babylon. Soon, however, it outstripped its ancient master and became itself the most excellent of all ancient cultures. Greece had been civilized for about seven centuries when Alexander the Great rose like a meteor upon its horizon. He dreamed of world conquest and founded the Greek empire, which stretched from Egypt to India in the east, and westward to include all the countries of the Mediterranean shoreline. This vast empire welded together in a single culture all the various races and nations it conquered, and in this way, the Greek language became the common tongue of the educated classes everywhere, while Greek manners and ideas pervaded the society of the whole civilized world.

This superb culture was to provide the language in which the message of the gospel was first preached to the Gentile world. The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek about three centuries before Christ, by Jewish scholars at Alexandria. This translation was called the Septuagint and was used by the Evangelists in the Gospels and by St. Paul in his letters, as well as by other writers of the New Testament. Three of the four Gospels were written in Greek, while St. Matthew's, which was originally written in Aramaic, was translated into Greek less than twenty years after it was written.

The Greek language with its delicate nuances of expression was admirably suitable for the elucidation of the finer points of Christian theology and proved to be an apt instrument for furthering the development and authentic explanation of the Christian message.

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