"... In his work On the Heavens, Aristotle sets forth his cosmology, based upon astronomy as he knew it. The universe is eternal, and the farthest heavenly bodies, moving in majestic cycles, are likewise eternal and unchanging. Influenced by geometry and astronomy, both Plato and Aristotle understood the universe to be a gigantic sphere (actually, for Plato, it is a dodecahedron). At the center of the sphere is the earth, a place of change, generation, death, and corruption. The earth is at rest in its center and spherical in shape ... This natural philosophy became the common stuff of Hellenistic culture, and the foundation for the development of Greek, Roman, and medieval science (including Islamic science). The greatest classical astronomer, Ptolemy, held an Aristotelian cosmology. Aristotle finished his work almost four hundred years before Paul. By the time of Jesus, this Greek cosmology was the common stuff of the intellectual world. Of course, there were opponents, such as the Epicureans, but they did not gain the imagination of the majority. Jews and Christians added to this basic Greek cosmology a further heaven, the “heaven of heavens” or “highest heaven” or simply “the highest” where God and the angels dwell (Deuteronomy 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Psalm 148:4-6; Sirach 16:18; Luke 2:14; 19:38; Revelation 4:1-2; compare Luke 10:18; 2 Corinthians 12:2-4). But their cosmology below the highest heaven was much the same as that of the Greek natural philosophers ..."