ABSTRACT
As we have explained in the first chapter, in the geographical area through which Paul travelled three ‘layers’ of language and culture can be distinguished in the first century AD. First (in the area east of the Aegean coast) there are what Greeks and Romans would have termed ‘barbarian’ peoples, and nineteenth-century Europeans ‘natives’, ‘barbarians’ who made noises which sounded like ‘rhubarbrhubarb’ to Greeks who could not (and did not want to) understand them. The term (and the classification) was taken over from the Greeks by the Romans, though the Greeks unquestionably included the Romans in the category ‘barbarian’ so long as it was safe to do so. Then there were those who used the Greek language and led the distinctive ‘Hellenic’ way of life. Finally there were the visiting representatives of Imperial Rome, as well as a small body of emigrants from Italy, who (at least for official purposes) used Latin. Paul, as the quotations at the beginning of this book show, belonged in some measure to all three layers: as a Jew he belonged to the ‘barbarian’ culture which had most fiercely resisted assimilation into the Greek way of life (see pp. 68-9 on the events of the 170s and 160s BC in Jerusalem); as a citizen of the hellenised city of Tarsus he belonged to the Greek world; and as a holder of citizen status by birth he belonged to the Roman world.
