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βάρβαρος (Barbaros): The Gospel for Every Nation Without Distinction · Reformed Thinking

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So imagine for a second being the undisputed ruler of the
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known world. You have the greatest military
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on the face of the earth, right? You've conquered literally all
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your enemies. Your legions are just, you know,
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marching across continents, enforcing your will everywhere.
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At the absolute peak of power. Yeah, and yet you spend your
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evenings desperately trying to learn your defeated enemies
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language because you are absolutely terrified.
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They secretly think you're a savage.
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So backwards. It is, but that was the Roman
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Empire. I mean, the conquerors of the
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Mediterranean were suffering from this massive a cultural
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imposter syndrome, and it all revolved around one single
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mocking word. It's a stunning historical
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reality, honestly. Yeah.
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This massive geopolitical powerhouse, Rome, essentially
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bowing down to the cultural ghost of Greece.
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Yeah. And they are just desperate to
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avoid a label that, well, it started out as a literal
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playground taunt. It did.
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And welcome to reformed thinking.
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This is our custom tailored deep dive.
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And today we are unpacking a concept that defined the ancient
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world. And honestly, it continues to
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dictate how human beings draw lines between us and them.
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You know, even today that's we we're looking at the Greek word
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barbaros, which is, you know, the direct route of our modern
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word barbarian. So if you are a student of
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history, or if you're reading the New Testament, or if you are
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simply fascinated by the psychological walls societies
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build to protect their own egos, this deep dive is going to
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completely reframe how you see the world.
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Yeah, and what becomes immediately apparent when you
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look at the historical timeline of this word is just the
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staggering irony of its progression.
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Oh, for sure. I mean, the word barbarian
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begins as a joke about stuttering birds, right?
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Then it morphs into a weapon of massive cultural superiority
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used to justify slavery and empire.
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And finally, early Christian writers turn the entire concept
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upside down to level the human playing field.
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They. Just flip the script.
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They do. It tracks the complete arc of
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human pride, divine grace. So let's start at the very
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beginning. Part one of our discussion is
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really about the actual sound of the outsider.
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Because before Barbaros was a geopolitical identity, before it
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was some philosophical category, it was literally just a noise.
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Yeah. Just a sound.
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The etymology here is so fascinating because the word is
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an animatopia. It just mimics the sound of
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stammering. You know, bar bar bar.
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Yes, and it's so crucial to recognize that in its earliest
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usage, the term carried 0 moral weight.
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None. It was a purely descriptive
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phonetic label. It just meant you didn't speak
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Greek. Spot on.
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It describes someone who spoke an unintelligible non Greek
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language. To really get this, you had to
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put yourself in the mindset of the ancient Greeks.
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It possessed an immense, blinding pride in their
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language. I mean, Greek was a language of
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poetry, of commerce, of high philosophy.
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Right. So to the Greek year, anyone
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speaking a foreign tongue didn't sound like they were conveying
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complex thoughts, they sounded like they were just repeating
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nonsense syllables. They just heard bar bar bar.
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It makes me think of Aristophanes and Aeschylus.
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Both of these massive figures in Greek theater use the specific
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root word to describe the twittering of birds.
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Yes, they did. Like in Aristophanes famous
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comedy The Birds, the chorus of birds is described using the
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Barbaros root. That phonetic association was
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incredibly common. The historian Herodotus provides
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a really perfect illustration of this when he writes about the
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Oracle at Dudana. Oh, right.
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Now Dudana was one of the oldest and most revered orticles in
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Greece. People would travel there from
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all over to hear the priestesses deliver divine messages.
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But Horridus notes this strange detail.
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The local population referred to these priestesses as doves.
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And not because they were, you know, peaceful or flying around,
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right? Nope.
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Horridus explains that these priestesses were originally
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foreigners. They were brought to the region
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and before they learned to speak Greek properly, their strange
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foreign speech sounded to the locals like the chattering of
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birds. They were just making bar bar
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noises, so the locals named them doves.
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It was a completely dismissive way of interpreting human
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communication. You see something similar in
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Homer's Iliad, actually. He uses a variation of the word
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barbarophonon to describe the Carrion's who fought alongside
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the Trojans. He's specifically highlighting
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their harsh, unintelligible speech.
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It's just fascinating how isolating language can be when
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human beings cannot understand one another.
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The default mechanism is almost never patience.
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Definitely not. We don't naturally pause and try
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to, you know, decode the syntax. The default biological instinct
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is to reduce the foreign speech to animalistic noise.
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It's a defense mechanism really. It protects the ego of the
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listener. If I can't understand you, the
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problem can't possibly be my own ignorance.
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Obviously not. The problem must be that you
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weren't actually saying anything meaningful.
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By categorizing foreign speech as animal noise, the Greek
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listener maintain their own intellectual supremacy.
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You know, for you, the listener, you've probably experienced a
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version of this instinct yourself.
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Think about being a kid on a playground, listening to adults
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or other kids speak a foreign language.
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Kids will naturally mock the cadence with nonsense syllables.
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They'll go bork, bork, bork, or mimic the vowel sounds in a
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highly exaggerated way. It's a universal human reflex to
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label what we can't comprehend as gibberish.
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It's the exact same phonetic border wall the Greeks built
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thousands of years ago. And we know this is a universal
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human trait because the linguistics extend far beyond
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Greece. There's a direct connection to
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ancient Sanskrit. Really.
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Yeah, the word Barbara in Sanskrit also means stammering
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and it was used to describe non Aryan people.
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Wait, so the Aryans in ancient India were doing the exact same
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thing to the indigenous populations they encountered?
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They were the Aryans possessed a highly developed language which
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eventually became classical Sanskrit, and they looked at the
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indigenous tribes and essentially said, well, we speak
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the language of the gods and you stammer.
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It's a boundary drawing exercise that happens across the globe.
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You identify the insider by their mastery of the dominant
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language, and you identify the outsider by their perceived
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phonetic failures. But making fun of someone's
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accent is one thing. Turning that linguistic
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observation into a tool for geopolitical domination is
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something else entirely. And that brings us to the
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evolution of the word. The Greeks didn't stop at making
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fun of foreign languages. No, they.
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Took it much further. They took the word barbaros and
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turned it into a rigid, impenetrable wall between
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Hellas, the Greek world and everybody else.
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This is where the word absorbs a massive amount of moral and
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intellectual baggage. The dividing line between
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Helene's and barbaroi became the defining feature of the ancient
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worldview, right? The Greeks no longer just
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thought barbarian sounded funny. They began to believe that
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because these people didn't speak Greek, they were
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inherently poor in culture, wild, uneducated, and fierce.
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The word shifted from a person who speaks a different language
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to essentially savage. So how deep did this arrogance
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go? Was it just a casual stereotype
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among the common people, or was it baked into their highest
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philosophy? Oh, it was completely baked into
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the highest echelons of their intellectual life.
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To understand the scale of this cultural pride, you have to look
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at the ancient philosopher Thales.
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He was one of the seven sages of Greece, a huge figure in
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philosophy and mathematics. There's a famous prayer
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attributed to him that perfectly captures the ancient hierarchy.
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Thales prayed, thinking fortune for three specific things.
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And those three things are just shocking to modern ears.
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They really are. He thanked Fortune that he was
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born a human and not a beast. OK, a man and not a woman.
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Wow. And a Greek and not a barbarian.
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Let's just pause and look at those pairings.
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Human over beast, man over woman, greet over barbarian.
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He is equating the gap between a Greek and a foreigner to the gap
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between a human being and an animal.
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That is the crucial take away and the classical Greek mindset.
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To be a barbarian was to exist closer to a beast than to a
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civilized human. And this wasn't a fringe
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extremist view. This was the mainstream
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consensus of the greatest minds of the era.
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Aristotle, the father of Western logic, and Euripides, the
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legendary playwright, actively argued that it was the natural
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order of the universe for Greeks to rule over Barbarians.
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Because they believed Barbarians were essentially slaves by
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nature. That is a horrifying concept.
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Slaves by nature. It implies that your DNA, your
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very essence, dictates that you exist solely to serve someone
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with better philosophy and better architecture.
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If we pull back and look at the psychological mechanism at work
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here, it's terrifyingly common. Human beings naturally elevate
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their own cultural achievements. The Greeks looked at their
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democracy, their theater, their sculptures, and their
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philosophical schools. They decided that these specific
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cultural outputs were the absolute peak of human
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existence. Therefore, they assumed that
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anyone lacking those specific outputs lacked fundamental human
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worth. We confuse our technological or
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artistic achievements with intrinsic human value.
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Absolutely. We do it all the time.
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We use our own specific strengths as the universal
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measuring stick for human dignity.
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If our culture values logic, we say the emotional culture is
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barbaric. If our culture values military
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discipline, we say the artistic culture is barbaric.
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The Greeks set the rules of the game so that only they could
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win. Spot on, But maintaining that
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illusion of supremacy required constant paranoia because a
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boundary built on culture is incredibly fragile.
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If you define your humanity by your language and your
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education, what happens if you lose your language and your
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education? Right.
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And this is where the historical record gets fascinating, because
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the Greeks were actually terrified of this happening.
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They knew the wall wasn't permanent.
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Dionysius of Halochronassus wrote extensively about this
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fear. He did.
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He described Greeks who lived in foreign lands surrounded by non
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Greeks beaters who eventually forgot how to speak Greek.
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The terror of assimilation. Dionysius is describing A
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cultural nightmare for the ancient Greek mind.
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These colonists spent so much time among the Barbaroi that
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they unlearned their Greekness. They forgot the language.
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They adopted foreign customs and in the eyes of the mainland
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Greeks, they essentially devolved.
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It's the ancient equivalent of going native.
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You see this in the colonial eras of the 18th and 19th
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centuries. The British Empire had this
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massive paranoia about officers stationed in India or Africa
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losing their Britishness. Oh yes, they would demand that
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officers drink tea at specific times and wear wool uniforms in
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the sweltering jungle heat just to maintain the psychological
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boundary. For the ancient Greeks, there
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was an absolute terror of slipping back into the Babel.
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It proves that they knew civilization as they defined it
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was a fragile construct. It was a construct that required
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massive daily reinforcement. The Greeks had to constantly
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convince themselves that their way of life was the only valid
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way of life, and for a long time the Mediterranean map allowed
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them to maintain that illusion. Because everyone stared in their
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lame Yeah. The Greek state in their city
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states, the Barbarians stayed outside, and the boundary held.
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But then a young Macedonian king decided to change the map of the
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world. Alexander the Great.
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Alexander the Great is the massive pivot point in this
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historical timeline. He sweeps out of Macedonia,
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conquers Greece, and then proceeds to conquer the entire
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known world, pushing all the way into India.
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And his military conquest brought something completely
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unprecedented. It was the aggressive,
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intentional spread of Hellenism. Hellenization.
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He don't just want to tax the people he conquered, he wanted
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to turn them into Greeks. Precisely.
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Alexander's strategy was cultural domination on a global
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scale. He built Greek cities everywhere
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he went. I mean, he named dozens of them
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Alexandria. Very humble.
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Very he established Greek gymnasiums, forced the local
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elites to learn the Greek language, and spread Greek
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philosophy from Egypt to Persia. Putark, writing centuries later,
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described Alexander not just as a conqueror but is a divinely
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sent reconciler who destroyed the enmity between Greeks and
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Barbarians. By forcing the Barbarians to
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become Greek. It's a very specific type of
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reconciliation. We can be friends as long as you
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act exactly like me. It's assimilation of the point
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of a sword, but it created a massive philosophical crisis
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back home because suddenly you have Egyptians speaking perfect
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Greek, you have Persians studying Plato.
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The rigid boundary between Greek and Barbarian started to blur.
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So the intellectuals had to respond.
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Yeah. Intellectuals like the sophist
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Antiphon started arguing that Greeks and Barbarians are
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entirely alike by nature. They observed that a Persian
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bleeds the same way as Spartan bleeds.
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They both laugh, they both cry, they both need food.
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The biological reality started breakdown the cultural wall.
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So the massive expansion of the Empire forced the Greek mine to
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reckon with the actual humanity of the people they were
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subjugating. But here is the most fascinating
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fallout of Alexander's world, the Roman impostor syndrome.
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This. Is one of the great ironies of
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Western history. Fast forward a couple of
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centuries. Rome rises.
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Rome defeats the descendants of Alexander's generals.
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Rome conquers Greece militarily. The Roman legions are the
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undisputed masters of the Mediterranean.
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But technically speaking, according to the strict Greek
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definition we've been discussing, the Romans were
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Barbarians. They didn't speak Greek, they
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spoke Latin. They didn't have a massive
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history of philosophy. They had a history of farming
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and fighting. It's like a corporate takeover.
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Imagine a massive, wealthy tech company buying out a small
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boutique design firm. The tech company has all the
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money and all the power, but the executives at the tech company
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secretly feel incredibly uncool. Yeah, that's a great way to
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picture it. So they start wearing the
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boutique firms merchandise and copying their office layout,
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desperate to be accepted by the very people they just bought.
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The Romans had the swords, but the Greeks own the cultural real
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estate. That is a brilliant analogy.
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The Romans suffered from a huge inferiority complex.
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They possessed the military might to crush any Greek city
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state that rebelled, but they desperately wanted the cultural
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validation of the people they crushed.
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To avoid the label of barbaros, the Roman elites engaged in an
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aggressive campaign of self hellenization.
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They just absorbed it all. They really did.
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They hired Greek tutors for their children.
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It became a status symbol in Rome to speak Greek fluently.
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They imported Greek architecture, copied Greek
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statues, and Roman poets spent their lives trying to mimic
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Greek poetic meters. All to prove they belonged at
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the civilized table. It proves that the psychological
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weight of a cultural label can actually be more intimidating
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than a physical army. And you see the sheer pain of
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this label in the life of Avid. Oh yes, Avid was one of the
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greatest poets in Roman history. He was a master of the Latin
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language, an absolute celebrity in Rome.
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But he runs afoul of the Emperor Augustus, and Augustus exiles
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him to the far shores of the Black Sea, to a town called
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Thomas, surrounded by the Gette tribe.
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He's sent to the very edge of the map, yes.
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And while in exile, Avid writes letters back to Rome.
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And he pens this heartbreaking, deeply ironic line.
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He writes, I am a barbarous here because no one understands me.
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The master of Latin poetry, the man who could manipulate
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language better than almost anyone alive, is reduced to a
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babbling outsider. He's making the barbar noises to
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the locals and the locals are laughing at him.
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He experiences the total inversion of the word.
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He realizes that barbarian is not a biological reality.
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It's just a matter of geography and local consensus.
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If you're in Rome, the gate are the Barbarians.
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If you're in, Thomas Ovid is the barbarian.
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Which brings up a very interesting point about how
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later movements handled this insult, because I know that
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early Christian writers eventually had to deal with
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Greek intellectuals mocking them, right?
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I mean, Christianity started with a crucified Jewish
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Carpenter in a Roman backwater. To the sophisticated Athenians,
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the entire Christian message sounded like uncultured Babble.
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But didn't early Christianity just adopt the existing social
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ladders to survive? Didn't they try to prove how
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Greek and philosophical they were?
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Some certainly tried, but the most striking response came from
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apologists who weaponized the insult.
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Think about men like Tation and Justin Martyr.
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In the 2nd century, Greek philosophers were mocking the
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Christian faith because it lacked the Polish rhetoric of
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Aristotle or Plato. It was considered a barbarian
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religion. And how did they respond?
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They owned it. Tation essentially writes back
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and says you are absolutely right, our teachings are
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barbarian. We don't use your fancy
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rhetorical tricks, but our barbarian teachings are older,
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truer, and infinitely more virtuous than your so-called
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civilized philosophy. I.
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Love that. He points out that Greek
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philosophers engaged in terrible moral behavior while claiming
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intellectual superiority, whereas the simple barbarian
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Christians were actually living lives of genuine virtue.
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They took the insult, claimed it as a badge of honor, and used it
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to completely dismantle Greek arrogance.
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It's an incredible rhetorical judo flip, but while the Greeks,
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the Romans, and eventually the early Christians were fighting
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over who gets to hold the civilized title, there was an
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entire population living right in the middle of this mess who
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had a totally different way of measuring human value.
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And that brings us to the Jewish dilemma.
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This is a vital piece of the puzzle.
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The Jewish people lived under Greek rule and then under Roman
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rule. They're constantly dealing with
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this Hellenized world, But their internal categories of insider
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and outsider were not based on language and they weren't based
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on philosophy. They were based on covenant.
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Exactly. I mean, yes, absolutely.
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The Greek divide was based on human intellect and culture.
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The Jewish divide was based on divine revelation and God's
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covenant with Abraham. It was Israel versus the nations
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Gorium, right? So when Jewish scholars sitting
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in Alexandria, Egypt decided to translate the Hebrew scriptures
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into Greek, a translation we call the Septuagint or the LXX,
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they faced a massive linguistic problem.
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What do they do with the Greek word barbarous?
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When you look at the Septuagint, they actually used it very
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sparingly for a massive translation project.
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The word only shows up twice in the canonical text.
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And those two instances perfectly capture the dual
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meaning the word had acquired. The first is in Psalm 114.1,
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which describes Israel coming out of Egypt.
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People of strange speech. So they use it in the old
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phonetic sense, the Egyptian Spiegel language Israel doesn't
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understand. Right, a purely linguistic
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barrier. But the second usage is in
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Ezekiel 21.31, which talks about God handing Jerusalem over to
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brutal, violent men. There the Greek translators use
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barbaros to describe violent, uncultured destroyers.
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They use the moral, pejorative sense of the word, yeah.
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We see this continue in the Apocrypha in books like
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Maccabees, where foreign enemies and cruel tyrants like Antiochus
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Epiphanes are labeled Barbarians because of their savagery toward
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the Jewish people. But the tension really ramps up
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when you look at the Jewish intellectuals of the diaspora,
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people like Philo of Alexandria. Alexandria was the intellectual
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capital of the Greek world. It had the great to be a Jewish
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scholar in Alexandria meant you were constantly feeling the
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gravity of Greek culture. Philo is a fascinating case
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study in how marginalized groups try to handle dominant cultures.
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Philo wrote in beautiful, highly sophisticated philosophical
19:28
Greek. He desperately wanted the Greek
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intellectual world to respect the Jewish faith, so he actually
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adopted the Greek usage. He divided the world into Greeks
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and Barbarians in his writings. He used their categories.
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That seems like a massive compromise.
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It was a compromise, but he added a brilliant twist.
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He agreed with the Greeks that the world was divided into the
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civilized and the barbaric. But he argued that the Jewish
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law, the Torah given by God, was the only force on earth that
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could actually heal the diseases of both Greeks and Barbarians.
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I see he's threading the needle. He's using their arrogant
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categories to get their attention, but then he places
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Jewish divine revelations supreme over both of them.
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It's a very clever apologetic strategy.
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It is, we see a different strategy with Josephus.
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Josephus was a Jewish historian writing after the destruction of
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the Temple in 70 AD. He is writing primarily for a
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Roman audience, trying to explain Jewish history to the
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people who just burned Jerusalem to the ground.
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That's a tough crowd. Very tough, Josephus.
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His main goal was to prove to the Romans that the Jews were an
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ancient, noble and civilized people.
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He wanted to explicitly exclude the Jewish people from the
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barbarian category. He went out of his way to
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highlight Jewish antiquities and philosophy.
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However, he made a very political calculation regarding
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the Jewish populations living outside the Roman Empire over in
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the Parthian Empire. The Parthians were Rome's great
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rivals in the East. Yes.
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So Josephus, trying to keep his Roman patrons happy, awkwardly
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refers to the Parthian Jews as upper Barbarians.
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Oh man, he threw his own people under the bus to look good for
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the Romans. He essentially did.
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It shows the intense pressure to conform to the dominant cultural
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narrative. If the Romans hate the Parthians
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and consider them Barbarians, Josephus is willing to adopt
21:13
that label for the Parthian Jews just to secure his own standing
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as a civilized historian in Rome.
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Why does the human brain do this?
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We see this constantly throughout history.
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Marginalized groups often adopt the very insults used against
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them and apply those insults to other subgroups just to gain
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proximity to power. It's the sociology of survival.
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When you are surrounded by a dominant, arrogant culture that
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holds all the economic and military leverage, there is an
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immense temptation to gentrify your own mind.
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You want to prove you're one of the good nuns.
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You scrub the perceived crudeness off yourself to secure
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a seat at the table. You actually see this explicitly
21:49
in the Letter of Aristus. This is an ancient text that
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tells the legend of how the Septuagint was translated.
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It describes the 72 Jewish elders who were brought to Egypt
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to translate the Hebrew Bible, and the author makes a very
22:02
specific point to assure the reader that these Jewish elders
22:06
had completely shed the crudity and barbarian nature of their
22:09
thought. That phrase is a striking
22:11
admission. The author is bending over
22:14
backwards to appease the Greek gays.
22:16
He's saying please don't dismiss our holy book.
22:19
The men who translated it weren't backward tribal
22:21
peasants. They were highly educated.
22:23
They have scrubbed the barbarian off themselves.
22:25
They think like Greeks. It's an incredibly defensive
22:27
posture. Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem and
22:30
the rabbinic Academy is the perspective was entirely
22:32
different, right? Entirely different.
22:34
The Rabbi's didn't care about impressing the Greeks or the
22:36
Romans. They used the word barbaros
22:39
simply as a lone word to describe foreign conquering
22:42
empires, specifically Rome, or to describe violently uncultured
22:45
individuals. But their worldview remains
22:48
strictly covenantal. The wall wasn't about who read
22:51
Homer or who read Latin. The wall was about who was part
22:54
of the covenant of Israel. But humans being humans, they
22:57
managed to add their own layer of pride to that divine
23:00
covenant. The historical records show that
23:02
the Rabbi's developed their own version of Thales's prayer.
23:05
Yes, the Three Beatitudes of Rabbi Mare, which became a
23:08
standard part of daily prayer. A Jewish man would thank God
23:12
that he was not made a gentile, a woman, or a fool.
23:15
And some textual variations substitute the word barbarian
23:18
for fool. It's the exact same
23:20
psychological structure as the Greek philosopher, just
23:22
substituting covenant status for cultural status.
23:25
Human over beast, Man over woman, Israelite over Gentile.
23:28
It proves that regardless of the metric, whether it is language,
23:32
philosophy, or even access to divine revelation, the human
23:36
heart desperately wants to build a hierarchy where it sits
23:40
comfortably at the top, looking down on the babbling masses
23:43
below. Every culture, every religion,
23:45
every empire. The Mantha barbarian to feel
23:48
good about itself. Which brings us to the absolute
23:50
explosion of this concept. We've spent all this time
23:54
building up the historical baggage, the mocking of foreign
23:56
speech, the massive cultural arrogance of the Greeks, the
23:59
painful identity crises of the Romans, the covenantal
24:02
superiority of the Jewish elites, Thousands of years of
24:05
humanity building thicker and taller walls.
24:08
And then we hit the New Testament, and the writers of
24:10
the New Testament take this loaded, heavy, blood soaked
24:13
weapon of a word and completely, systematically dismantle it.
24:16
It's one of the most radical linguistic subversions in
24:19
ancient history. The early Christians, writing
24:21
under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, look at this
24:24
massive cultural wall and pull the foundation completely out
24:27
from under it. Let's start with the Apostle
24:29
Paul First Corinthians chapter 14, verse 11.
24:33
Paul is writing to the church in Corinth.
24:36
Now, Corinth is a Greek city. It's wealthy, it's cosmopolitan,
24:40
and the people there are incredibly proud of their Greek
24:43
heritage and their sophisticated rhetoric.
24:45
Paul's writing to them about spiritual gifts, specifically
24:48
addressing the chaotic use of speaking in uninterpreted
24:51
tongues during their worship gatherings.
24:53
And he says this. If I do not grasp the meaning of
24:56
what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and
24:59
the speaker is a foreigner to me.
25:02
But the Greek word he uses for foreigner is barbaros.
25:05
Paul does two things simultaneously here.
25:07
First, he returns the word to its original neutral linguistic
25:10
root. He strips away the moral baggage
25:12
of savage or uncultured and use it to simply mean someone who
25:15
speaks a language you don't understand.
25:17
But second, and far more radically, he makes the label a
25:20
two way St. The Greek is just as much a
25:23
barbarian to the foreigner as the foreigner is to the Greek.
25:26
Yeah, imagine how that landed on the ears of a proud Corinthian.
25:30
They've spent their entire lives believing that if communication
25:34
failed, it was because the other person was an ignorant
25:37
barbarian. Paul says no, if you were
25:40
speaking a language nobody understands, you are the
25:42
barbarian in the room. He completely strips away their
25:44
cultural superiority. It makes me think of two people
25:47
trying to communicate on completely different radio
25:50
frequencies. You have one guy broadcasting on
25:51
AM and another guy listening on FM.
25:54
The guy on AM radio isn't morally or intellectually
25:56
superior to the guy on FM radio. They're just failing to connect.
26:00
Neither has the high ground. They're both equally isolated.
26:03
Paul takes away the high ground. That equalizing force is a
26:07
hallmark of New Testament theology.
26:09
We see Paul doing it philosophically in his letters,
26:12
but we also see it play out narratively in the book of Acts.
26:15
Oh, the shipwreck on Malta. This is Acts chapter 28.
26:18
It's such a brilliant piece of writing.
26:20
Paul has been arrested by the Romans.
26:22
He's being transported across the Mediterranean Sea as a
26:24
prisoner to stand trial before Caesar.
26:27
A massive storm hits, the ship is torn apart and Paul and the
26:30
crew wash up on the shore of a small island called Malta.
26:34
Now, Luke is the author of Acts. He's a highly educated
26:37
physician, writing an excellent Greek, and he notes that the
26:41
native people of Malta spoke a Punic dialect, so naturally Luke
26:45
uses the standard Greek term for them.
26:47
He calls them Barbaroi. But then Luke pulls off this
26:50
incredible narrative trick. He uses the derogatory label,
26:53
but look at the action he describes.
26:55
Verse 2 says these barbaroi showed them unusual kindness.
26:58
The Greek word is philanthropia, literally the love of humanity.
27:02
Think about the massive contrast Luke is setting up for the
27:05
reader. Let's look at the track record
27:07
of the civilized world in Paul's life.
27:09
The Jewish religious elites, the guardians of the law, handed him
27:12
over to be killed. The Greeks, the masters of
27:15
philosophy, mocked him in Athens.
27:17
The Romans, the pinnacle of law and justice, kept him in chains
27:21
for years without a fair trial, ignored his warnings about the
27:24
weather, and navigated him well, scared him into a catastrophic
27:27
shipwreck. The absolute zenith of human
27:30
civilization produced injustice, violence, and disaster.
27:34
The peak of human achievement tried to kill him.
27:36
Yes. And who rescues him?
27:38
The uneducated, uncultured, Punic speaking natives on a
27:41
beach. The so-called wild Barbarians
27:44
are the ones who build a fire, welcomed the shivering Roman
27:47
soldiers and prisoners, and showed genuine philanthropia.
27:49
For you, the listener, this completely short circuits the
27:52
ancient hierarchy. It forces a total re evaluation
27:55
of who actually holds moral authority.
27:58
The sophisticated, educated systems of the ancient world
28:01
failed to produce basic human decency.
28:03
The uneducated locals provided warmth and rescue.
28:06
It turns the entire diagnostic machine back on the Greeks and
28:09
Romans. It asks who is the real savage
28:12
here? It proves that education and
28:14
cultural refinement do not equal morality.
28:17
You can have the best philosophy in the world and still be a
28:20
monster. You can be entirely ignorant of
28:22
classical literature and still possess huge human compassion.
28:27
Luke dismantles the idea that culture produces virtue.
28:31
Which perfectly sets the stage for the theological core of how
28:34
the New Testament handles this concept.
28:36
Romans chapter one, verse 14. This is arguably the most famous
28:40
theological treatise ever written, and Paul uses the word
28:43
right in the introduction. He writes, I am a debtor both to
28:47
Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.
28:51
This is a staggering statement of universal need.
28:53
Paul takes the entire non Jewish world, the sophisticated elites
28:57
studying rhetoric in Rome and Athens, and the uncultured
29:00
illiterate stripes living in the forests of Germania and places
29:04
them on the exact same footing. They are all equally in need of
29:06
the Gospel. Spot on.
29:08
Paul is declaring that human culture offers absolutely zero
29:11
advantage when it comes to standing before a holy God.
29:14
The Greek philosopher cannot reason his way into heaven using
29:16
Aristotle, and the barbarian is not disqualified from grace
29:20
because he lacks a formal education before the absolute
29:23
holiness of God. Human cultural achievements are
29:25
completely flattened. The playing field is entirely
29:28
level because everyone is equally bankrupt.
29:30
This cuts right to the heart of Reformed theology, even without
29:33
using all the academic jargon. It's the concept of total
29:36
spiritual inability. But I want to focus on a
29:39
specific word Paul uses here because I think it's the key to
29:42
understanding his motivation. He says he is a debtor to them.
29:45
He owes them something. Why does Paul, a man who has
29:48
been beaten and mocked by both Greeks and Barbarians, consider
29:52
himself in debt to people he has never even met?
29:54
Because Paul really understands the mechanics of grace.
29:58
Grace creates an obligation. Think about Paul's own life.
30:01
Before his conversion, he had the ultimate religious and
30:04
cultural resume. He was a Pharisee of Pharisees,
30:06
the Hebrew of Hebrews. He was educated under the
30:09
greatest rabbis of his day. By every human metric, he was at
30:12
the absolute top of the civilized covenantal pyramid.
30:16
Yet he was using all that education to hunt down and
30:19
murder innocent Christians. He was completely spiritually
30:22
dead. Precisely.
30:23
His flawless resume did not save him.
30:26
His salvation on the road to Damascus was an act of pure,
30:29
unmerited grace. God intervened in his life when
30:32
he deserved absolute judgement. When you realize that your own
30:35
rescue was completely independent of your merit, that
30:38
your education, your culture, your good deeds contributed
30:40
nothing to your salvation, it fundamentally changes how you
30:43
view other people. Because if my resume didn't save
30:45
me, I can't demand a resume from anyone else.
30:48
Yes, Paul realizes he has no right to withhold the message of
30:52
rescue from anyone based on their lack of merit.
30:56
He owes the gospel to the sophisticated Greeks and the
30:58
illiterate Barbarians because the God who saved Paul did so
31:02
without looking at his cultural pedigree.
31:05
The dead is owed to God, but it is paid out to humanity.
31:09
That is a staggering reality check for anyone who claims to
31:12
follow this faith. It means that looking down on
31:15
someone because of their lack of education, their social class,
31:18
or their lack of refinement is not just arrogant, it is
31:21
actually a denial of the gospel itself.
31:24
If you look down on a barbarian, you are essentially saying that
31:26
your own refinement is what makes you acceptable to God.
31:29
You are denying the premise that we are all equally bankrupt.
31:32
Which leads us directly to the climax of the words usage, the
31:35
ultimate leveling of the human race.
31:37
This is Colossians chapter 3, verse 11.
31:39
Paul is writing to a church made-up of diverse backgrounds,
31:42
and he gives them the ultimate vision of what humanity looks
31:44
like under the authority of Christ.
31:46
He writes here. There's not Greek and Jew,
31:49
circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave free,
31:52
but Christ is all and in all. Let's unpack the four pairs Paul
31:56
uses in this verse because he is systematically taking a
31:59
sledgehammer to every single wall the ancient world had
32:02
built. First, he addresses the
32:04
religious and covenantal divide, Greek and Jew, circumcised and
32:09
uncircumcised, the wall that defined the rabbinic worldview.
32:12
Completely neutralized. Second, he addresses the
32:15
societal and economic divide. Slave and free.
32:19
This is the most rigid, immovable hierarchy of daily
32:22
life. In the Roman Empire, you're
32:24
either property or you owned property.
32:26
Neutralized. Third, he addresses the cultural
32:29
divide. But notice something very
32:30
specific here. Paul doesn't just use the
32:32
standard pairing. He doesn't just say Greek and
32:35
barbarian. He says barbarian and Scythian.
32:37
Let's dig into that. Why the Scythians?
32:39
Who were they and why does Paul single them out in this list?
32:42
To fully grasp the weight of this verse, you have to
32:45
understand the sheer terror the word Scythian struck into the
32:49
ancient Greco Roman heart. The Scythians were a massive
32:52
confederation of nomadic tribes that roamed the EUR Asian steps.
32:56
In the classical mindset, if a normal barbarian was uncultured,
33:00
A Scythian was a living nightmare.
33:02
They were the bogeymen of the ancient world.
33:04
How bad were they? The historian Herodotus
33:07
dedicated extensive writings to describing their brutality.
33:10
They fought entirely on horseback, striking without
33:13
warning and vanishing into the plains.
33:15
They were famous for scalping their defeated enemies and using
33:18
the scalps as napkins or sewing them into cloaks.
33:21
They would literally cut off the tops of the skulls of their most
33:23
hated enemies, line the inside with leather or gold, and use
33:27
them as drinking cups during feasts.
33:28
Good grief, they were essentially the ancient
33:31
equivalent of a post apocalyptic Raider gang.
33:34
They were viewed as the absolute extreme edge of human depravity.
33:38
They were bloodthirsty, chaotic, and entirely beyond the reach of
33:41
civilization or reason. To a Roman citizen or a Greek
33:44
philosopher, A Citian was barely human.
33:47
So by putting them in the specific list, Paul is taking
33:50
the absolute extremes of human civilization and forcing them
33:54
into the same room. Yes, picture the contrast.
33:58
On one side you have the sophisticated Greek philosopher,
34:01
wearing a pristine white toga, sitting in a marble courtyard in
34:04
Athens, debating the finer points of ethics and virtue.
34:08
On the other side, you have the wild Scythian nomad covered in
34:12
dirt and blood, drinking fermented mare's milk out of a
34:15
human skull. The highest peak of culture and
34:17
the deepest valley of savagery. And Paul says that in Christ
34:21
both of these men are perfectly equal.
34:23
The Greeks philosophy cannot buy him an ounce of grace, and the
34:26
Scythian savagery cannot place him beyond the reach of grace.
34:30
They are perfectly equal in their absolute need for a Savior
34:33
and if they believe they have perfect equal standing in the
34:36
Kingdom of God. That shatters the ancient
34:38
world's most rigid hierarchy. It's the ultimate diagnostic
34:41
check on the human condition. When God looks at humanity, he
34:44
doesn't see a Greek bone structure or a Scythian bone
34:47
structure. He doesn't see a refined
34:49
cultural output or a barbaric cultural output.
34:52
He just sees dead bones that need resurrection it.
34:55
Proves that human culture, while it's fully capable of producing
34:58
beautiful art, stable governments, and incredible
35:01
poetry, has absolutely 0 currency in the economy of
35:05
salvation. Your culture cannot save you,
35:07
and your lack of culture cannot condemn you.
35:09
The ground at the foot of the cross is completely level.
35:13
Christ is all and in all. So let's bring this massive
35:16
historical arc to a close. We started with a word,
35:20
barbaros. That was just a phonetic
35:22
observation, a playground taunt about bird like babbling bar bar
35:27
bar. Then we watched the Greeks turn
35:29
that simple sound into a geopolitical weapon, using it to
35:32
justify their natural right to rule the world and enslave those
35:36
they deemed inferior. We saw it caused massive
35:38
psychological crises for the Romans, who conquered the world
35:41
but felt intellectually inferior, and for the Jewish
35:43
elites in Alexandria who tried to translate their holy text
35:46
without losing their dignity in the eyes of their conquerors.
35:49
And finally, we saw the writers of the New Testament completely
35:52
dismantle the Word. They recognize that all human
35:56
pride, whether built on language, intellect, or covenant
35:59
status, falls entirely flat before God.
36:02
They took the ultimate insult, claimed it, and used it to prove
36:06
that divine grace operates entirely outside of human
36:09
hierarchies. Which leaves us with a very
36:11
direct, slightly uncomfortable question for you, the listener.
36:14
Because while the word barbaros might be ancient Greek history,
36:18
the psychological mechanism is alive and well.
36:21
We haven't stopped doing this. We all still have our Barbarians
36:23
today. We absolutely do.
36:25
The instinct to build a wall and put ourselves on the civilized
36:28
side of it is a permanent feature of fallen human nature.
36:31
Think about your daily life. We all encounter groups of
36:34
people whose political language, social priorities or religious
36:37
convictions sound like unintelligible Babble to us.
36:41
We hear someone from a different political party, or someone from
36:43
a different geographical region with a thick accent, or someone
36:46
who didn't go to college. And our brains instantly go.
36:50
We reduce their genuine concerns, their fears, and their
36:53
lived experiences to gibberish because it protects our own
36:56
sense of superiority. If they're just babbling, we
36:59
don't have to engage with them. We don't have to treat them as
37:01
equals. We elevate our specific cultural
37:04
outputs, our degrees, our voting records, our theological
37:08
vocabularies, and assume that anyone lacking those specific
37:11
things is intrinsically less valuable, less intelligent, and
37:15
less worthy of respect. Which is why tracing this
37:18
history is so vital for our modern context.
37:21
If the ancient Greeks use classical education and language
37:24
to blind themselves to their shared humanity, what are the
37:27
modern metrics you use to draw the line between the civilized
37:30
and the barbarian in your own life?
37:32
Is it the car someone drives? Is it the news channel they
37:35
watch? Is it the way they pronounce
37:36
certain words? And more to the point, how might
37:39
looking through the lens of radical, equalizing grace force
37:42
you to see the modern civvians in your life as absolute equals?
37:47
If we truly grasp the theology of Romans 1 and Colossians 3, if
37:51
we really believe that our own standing before God is entirely
37:54
unearned, a sheer gift of grace to a spiritually bankrupt
37:58
Sinner, it must utterly destroy our right to look down on anyone
38:01
else. We are all debtors.
38:03
The sophisticated executive and the unhoused addict are sitting
38:06
on the exact same level. Ground grace leaves no room for
38:10
cultural arrogance. That is a phenomenal place to
38:12
land today. It completely reframes how we
38:15
listen to the voices we usually tune out.
38:17
We have to stop hearing Babble and start recognizing a shared
38:20
humanity and a shared need for grace.
38:22
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the sources here
38:25
on Reformed Thinking. Keep questioning the labels you
38:27
use, keep listening past the accents and we will catch you
38:29
next time.