Skip to main content

Christians, Jews and Greeks

 




A few years ago now, somebody at Quora asked the broad and fascinating question, "How has Greek philosophy influenced Christianity?"

I gave a brief answer, and one that I think is pertinent to this time of year.  Let's begin with Hanukkah, which actually begins at sundown on Christmas Day this year.  Hanukkah -- this is a quick and rough statement -- celebrates an uprising against Greek influence, as it manifested itself in the "abomination of Desolation" (pagan sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem). 

So my answer brings in the Jews of the Second Temple period, the early Christians, and of course as requested ... the Greeks.

In one mix. I hope I have stirred your curiosity.  Here is the answer:


     Very deeply. And from the beginning. After all, the two cultures (of Judea and Greece) were merging         already in the time of the Seleucid Empire. In the second century BCE the Hellenizers pressed too hard      and inspired an uprising. But the miraculous lamps were not able to reverse the fact that a good deal of      merging HAD taken place.

Jesus, then, inherited a Hellenized Judaism. One of his contemporaries, Philo of Alexandria, brought the challenge of uniting Moses and Plato to a very high level of self-awareness. Philo adopted, for example, Plato’s idea that the soul has three parts, and that reason is the highest of these parts. He also believed that reason was the one part of the soul with a divine origin — the part that God breathed into us. (Genesis 2:7).

Philo wrote, “Now, when we are alive, we are so though our soul is dead and buried in our body, as if in a tomb. But if it were to die, then our soul would live according to its proper life being released from the evil and dead body to which it is bound” (Op. 67-69; LA 1.108).

Read that language again. Doesn’t it sound like the gospels describing the empty tomb. The dead body itself — according to Philo, drawing on Plato, is such an empty tomb. Plato and Jesus, Athens and Jerusalem, have been mingled up like breathe and clay ever since.


Happy holidays. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more