It is interesting how a small population from a limited area during a narrow period of history shaped the essential religious and social concepts of our entire western civilization.  In an area smaller than our western Oregon, the Jews, Romans, Greeks, and others mixed in a cauldron of clashes, generating ideas that would shape our basic view of history and set into us assumptions so familiar we don’t often notice them.  We also don’t notice is the context in which these ideas were adopted while…