This is the Bamboa Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we start an in-depth look at the five different responses to Hellenism in the first century world of Judaism.

We will examine the priestly group known as the Sadducees.

Yeah, and eventually in our discussion day, we're going to get into a presentation just to give you a heads up on that. Be a little while before we jump into it, but there will be some photos that will hopefully aid in your learning.

So I'll be watching and ready for those as they show up.

I have a fancy new tool that allows me to add chapter markers and add images into the podcast. So if you are using a podcast player, the sports chapter markers, which is pretty much the most third party podcast players.

The one I like to use is overcast, and that's where the tool comes from. It's the same developer. But pocket casts, podcast addicts, pretty much any of the ones we recommend on the How to Listen page on our website will support it.

So if you're using one of those apps when we're talking about an image, I'll set the chapter marker to show up and the podcast artwork will change from our Baymont Discipleship Baymont podcast artwork to the image.

So you'll just see it there, but we'll also have our normal presentation as well. So whatever works for you to view it, we're pretty cutting that chair with the Baymont podcast. Try to be not going to lie.

Bren Billings, everybody. So we got a ton of stuff. We went through a lot of stuff in our last conversation. Just talking about Hellenism and racing through a timeline.

And I'm hoping that we didn't attempt to try to get it all. Just try to learn it all on that run through. We need to go back and we need to kind of hone in on these different moments and these different groups.

And so over the next handful of podcasts, what I want to do is we talked in our last discussion about Hellenism and this new Brent kind of described to me what you have heard and understand as what Hellenism is.

So Hellenism is like the shift from the gods being the center of the universe to man being the center of the universe. And man is how we measure everything against.

We can make a comparison to man man is that the center man is the measure of all things is one of the common things.

Perfect. So this changes our motivations and it changes our end goals. It's not just about some abstract philosophy or theology even this is actually about what becomes important because now the sudden pleasing the gods isn't my foremost concern. It ends up becoming pleasing myself and the gods still exist. They're still part of the world.

Yep. And even maybe even more importantly now the gods almost serve me rather than serving the gods. The gods are almost something I manipulate for my ends because now the world has become about my comfort, my leisure, my security, my luxury.

And so this has totally changed the world. And as Judaism was changing the world was changing and Judaism had to figure out the world of Jesus is what we're wrestling with really is a couple centuries preceding or that immediate century preceding Jesus.

And so this is the world that Jesus is born into and encounters and you know, Galatians four four I believe says at just the right time one translation puts it at just the right time most translations will say at the fullness of time at just the right time God sent Jesus into the world.

And so one of the questions is why why this time of all the points in human history this was just at the right time. There's a lot of ways that we could rest with that question answer that question.

But I think one of the reasons why it was just the right time is because of the tension that Judaism was experiencing as God's people.

They were trying to grapple with what do we do with Hellenism and they responded in multiple ways different ways really five different ways that we're going to identify in our study.

We're going to look at five different groups and how they responded to Hellenism and try to use it to reflect on ourselves. I think as we go through these five groups definitely part of the goal of why I'm doing it this way as I want us to reflect on it and I want us to relate to these groups in different ways.

I think there's definitely a group that that we're going to probably relate to more than any other each one of us as individuals we probably wrestle with different aspects of each group as individuals.

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