But the relationship between Hellenism and Christianity can’t be fully understood without a brief retrospective detour into the three centuries before the birth of Jesus, to Ptolemy I. He had ruled over both centers of the Jewish religion, in Egypt (Alexandria) and Palestine (Jerusalem). Under the dynasty he founded, Greeks in Alexandria were tolerant of Jews, and vice versa; it was in the third century BC that the labor of the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint, commenced. Jewish thinkers such as Aristoboulos even argued that the Greek philosophical pioneers
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