Beg your pardon...but Babylon had essentially ceased to exist even *before* any
New Testament references to it were written. Please cite some authoritative sources
attesting to your assertion that 1st Century Babylon was a "hub of Jewish intellectuals
and had a large Jewish population."
22 posted on 02/08/2006 7:30:24 PM MST by magisterium
b'shem Y'shua Babylon: The oldest and most stable of Jewish communities was saved from the Christians by Muslims sweeping through the Middle East.
That's total hogwash. Look up Babylon's history in any reputable encyclopedia, and you will see that is was virtually uninhabited by the 1st Century AD. The last people of any "learning" who are known to have been there were Chaldean priests in the late 1st Century BC. It was a ghost town after that, with just a few transient nomads sheltering among the ruins. In any case, and this is the point, St. Peter would have had no reason to stay there as a base of operations in the mid-1st Century, assuming he had any motivation to go there at all (there is NO evidence that he did). "Babylon," as used in 1Peter 5, was code for "Rome," used by the early Church, already in persecution, in part to hide the whereabouts of Christian leaders like St. Peter, and also to obscure Christian activity in the very heart of the Roman Empire. All of the references to "Babylon" in the Book of Revelation likewise refer to Rome. This is easy enough to ascertain, as the references to Babylon being "fallen" are in the context of a future event. The actual city had long since fallen to ruin.
Here's an excerpt from the Baghdad Museum website. I presume these people know a little something about the history of a city the ruins of which are planted on their own soil:
"In 331 BC, Darius III was defeated by the forces of the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela, and in October, Babylon saw its own invasion and occupation. A native account of this invasion notes a ruling by Alexander not to enter the homes of its inhabitants.
Under Alexander, Babylon again flourished as a center of learning and commerce. But following Alexander’s mysterious death in 323 BC in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar, his empire was divided amongst his generals, and decades of fighting soon began, with Babylon once again caught in the middle.
The constant turmoil virtually emptied the city of Babylon. A tablet dated 275 BC states that the inhabitants of Babylon were transported to Seleucia, where a palace was built, as well as a temple given the ancient name of E-Saggila. With this deportation, the history of Babylon comes practically to an end, though more than a century later, it was found that sacrifices were still performed in its old sanctuary. By 141 BC, when the Parthian Empire took over the region, Babylon was in complete desolation and obscurity."
The above quote was from magisterium and I read the article you posted in response....very enlightening. If I may, I would like to also pass on Josephus, "Antiquities of the Jews", Book XI, Chapter 5, Paragraph 2, lines 1-6.
Josephus, of course being....a 1st century Jewish historian of good respect.