A Reflection on the Greco-Roman Roots of the New Testament

     For most raised in Protestant churches, especially Evangelical churches, it's always reinforced how Jewish the Gospels are. We're taught the basics of 1st century Judaism alongside whatever Christianity is supposed to be because that's supposedly the only important cultural context for the events and writings of the New Testament.
     Except it's not. The older I get, the more I study about 1st century Greco-Roman Hellenistic culture, the more of a Greco-Roman context I see all over the pages of the N.T. Inasmuch as Jesus came as Messiah for the Jews, for the Greeks He was the Logos incarnate, something totally unknown in Jewish thought outside of Greco-Roman Stoic influence (Philo was a Jewish author and philosopher who discussed the Logos, but was clearly influenced by Stoic thought). The miracles He did spoke directly to His divinity, but they were all each of them demonstrating His authority over the particular jurisdictions of the various Olympians, from Dionysius to Apollo, from Poseidon to Zeus himself. Even his very teachings and the letters of Paul and John echoed the ethical teachings of the Stoic philosophy which was ubiquitous throughout Hellenistic society. Further, the Greeks and Romans would have recognized the conceptions of the Logos and the Pneuma as being identified with the God and Father far more readily than their strictly Jewish counterparts as this kind of a "Trinity" already existed in Stoic philosophy.
     The more I look at this, the more I realize there was no real wonder why Paul used the Greeks' own poets when preaching to the Areopagus and not once mentioned the Hebrew Scriptures, not even the Psalms. Why? He didn't have to. He could have preached the entire Gospel from the Greek philosophers in order to back up everything he said about Jesus, and they would have understood and accepted it far more readily than the "foreign" Hebrew writings.
     By ignoring the Greco-Roman cultural roots of the New Testament in favor of an entirely Jewish one, and by ignoring that Jesus was clearly broadcasting to the Greeks and Romans who He was by what He did and what He said even as He spoke more directly to the Judeans and Galileans, we seriously hobble our understanding of the Gospels and the New Testament as a whole.