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.