The influence of Greek culture on many of these writers was not confined to language and literary form; they lived in an atmosphere of Greek thought--the popular philosophy, in which Platonic and Stoic elements were fused or confused--and a few had a more academic acquaintance with the Greek thinkers. But, under all this, they were Jews to the core, devoted to the religion of their fathers, of the superiority of which they were the more convinced by the spectacle of heathenism about them: Judaism was the only true religion, its Scriptures the one divine revelation. The Law and the Prophets had the same precedence as in the Palestinian synagogue. Of the other Scriptures there was no authoritative and exclusive list, and among books read solely for private edification it is not likely that a very sharp line was drawn; but, on the whole, the practice of the Greek-speaking Jews does not seem to have been materially different from that of their countrymen in Palestine. Outside of Palestine, Christianity was spread by Greek-speaking Jews who had embraced the new Messianic faith, and their converts in the fields of their missionary labours, both Jews and Gentiles, spoke Greek, either as their mother tongue or as the language of common intercourse. The church, therefore, took over the Jewish Scriptures in the existing translations: the Christian Old Testament was from the beginning the Greek Bible, not the Hebrew. They received also from the Greek-speaking Jews the belief in the divine inspiration of the translators, by virtue of which the same infallible authority attached to the version of the Seventy which belonged to the Hebrew original. In their desire to possess every word of God, they gathered up the religious books which they found in the hands of the Jews, without inquiring curiously whether the Jews included them in the narrower category of Sacred Scriptures or not; and they discovered no reason in the books themselves why Esther, for example, should be inspired and Judith not; or why Ecclesiastes, with its scepticism about the destiny of the soul, should be divinely revealed, and the Wisdom of Solomon, with its eloquent defence of immortality, a purely human production; or, again, why the Proverbs of Solomon were Scripture, and the Proverbs of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) nothing but profane wisdom.