by
Damien F. Mackey
St. Justin Martyr had espoused
the view of the Greek philosophers
borrowing from the biblical
Hebrews.
This article continues with a common theme of
mine, that the Church Fathers were quite right about the Hebrew origins of
mainstream Greek philosophy.
In previous articles I have supported
i.
St. Clement of Alexandria’s view that Plato’s
writings took their inspiration from the Hebrew Moses, and
ii.
St. Ambrose’s belief that Plato had learned from
the prophet Jeremiah in Egypt; a belief that was initially taken up by St. Augustine,
who added that
iii.
Greek philosophy generally derived from the Jewish
Scriptures.
And, though St. Augustine later retracted his
acceptance of St. Ambrose’s view, realising that it was chronologically
impossible for Jeremiah (c. 600 BC) to have met Plato anywhere, considering the
c. 400 BC date customarily assigned to Plato, I have, on the other hand, looked
to turn this around by challenging the conventional dates.
From the Book of Jeremiah we learn that Jeremiah
and Baruch went together to Egypt. So this Baruch, whom tradition also
identifies as Zoroaster, would be a possible candidate to consider for St.
Ambrose ‘Plato who was contemporaneous with Jeremiah in Egypt’.
Again, much of Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, with
its themes of justice
and righteousness,
could have arisen, I suggest, from the intense dialogues of the books of
Jeremiah and Job of identical themes. I have discussed this further in other
articles.
Saint Justin Martyr
Moreover, St. Justin Martyr had, even earlier than
the above-mentioned Church Fathers, espoused the view of the Greek philosophers
borrowing from the biblical Hebrews. And Justin Martyr too, had, like Plato,
written an Apology,
in Justin’s case also apparently (like Plato) in regard to a
martyrdom. So we read (http://beityahuwah.blogspot.com/2005/08/plato-stole-his-ideas-from-):
Plato Stole his ideas from Moses: True or False ….
The belief that the philosophers of Greece,
including Plato and Aristotle, plagiarized certain of their teaching from Moses
and the Hebrew prophets is an argument used by Christian Apologists of Gentile
background who lived in the first four centuries of Christians.
My comment: I would like to take this thinking yet a stage
further, however.
Just as I have argued in my:
Solomon and Sheba
that the supposed Athenian statesman and lawgiver,
Solon, was in fact a Greek appropriation
of Israel’s wise lawgiver, Solomon, so do I believe that the primary ‘Ionian’
and ‘Greek’ philosophers of antiquity were actually Greek appropriations of
Hebrew sages and prophets. Regarding the supposed “Father of Philosophy”,
Thales, for instance, see my:
Consequently, I am appreciative of this item by
Peter J. Leithart, entitled “Philosophical Bible” (https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2016/06/philosophical-bible),
in which Leithart makes mention of Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture:
Why isn't
the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political
thought? That it isn't is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, his graduate training
at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of
political ideas were presented as a tradition that began in pre-Socratic
Greece, ad proceeded from there to Plato and Aristotle, to the Greek and Roman
political schools, to the political thought of Christianity as found in the New
Testament and the writings of the Church Fathers and especially Augustine.”
From there to Thomas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, and so on. But “the
contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideas of the West is either
passed over in silence, or else dismissed in a handful of (often quite
offensive) sentences” (15-16). Hazony does a quick survey of some of the
leading texts of political thought and philosophy to confirm that this
oversight is pervasive.
Why?
Hazony chalks it up to the reason v. revelation paradigm that arises in the
earth church “as a way of sharpening the differences between the teachings of
the New Testament and those of the various sects of philosophers” (1) and is
employed in the Enlightenment to demote the Bible from its central place in
Western thought. He cites Wilhelm von Humbodt's Hellenophile plan for the
reform of German universities. The goal was “to find one's ideal only in the
Greeks. To draw inspiration from the Greeks alone” (14). Greek thinkers were on
the side of reason, and the Hebrew Scriptures (and religious texts in general)
were dismissed as irrational superstition and myth. Even in biblical studies,
little attention is paid to “the ideas the Hebrew Scriptures were written to
advance” (18). Thus, “today the field of biblical studies produces a steady
stream of works on the philology, compositional history, and literary character
of the biblical texts. But the ideas that find expression in the Bible—the
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy of biblical
authors—have all too often eluded the interest of academic scholars of Bible.”
Across the academic spectrum, then, “what was once an unashamedly anti-Semitic
revisionism aimed at showing that the Greeks were ‘almost divine,’ and that the
West—and Germany in particular—was descended from these demi-gods alone, has
long since crystalized into an orthodoxy” (19).
To this,
Hazony has two main lines of response. First, he shows that on any fair
reading, the charges leveled against the Hebrew Bible apply also to ancient
Greek texts that are taken seriously as philosophical sources. The fact that
Moses records that “the Lord said” is enough to rule Moses out as a serious
thinker; the reference to divine speech makes it easy to categorize the
Pentateuch as revelation rather than as reason. Hazony quotes several passages
from Parmenides in which the philosopher claims to receive messages from a
goddess, whom he visits by riding a chariot into the sky accompanied by
“daughters of the sun” (6-7). Socrates too claims to have a prophetic power and
a divine voice within (8-9). Yet this doesn't keep Bertrand Russell from
devoting “a short chapter each on Parmenides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus
without so much as mentioning the role of the gods in producing their
philosophies. He does draw attention to the fact that Socrates believed he was
guided by a divine voice, oracles, and dreams. But nothing is said to follow
from this.” Like other modern philosophers, Russell takes “the fact that some
philosophers present their works as divine revelation in stride, either
ignoring it entirely or mentioning it in passing without drawing any weighty
conclusions from it” (9-10). This is what philosophers are supposed to identify
as special pleading.
Hazony's
other line of response is to point to the actual contents of the Hebrew Bible.
On the reason v. revelation paradigm, one would expect it to be full of
mythical creatures, journeys through the underworld, divine secrets disclosed
to the elect. There are miracles and strange happenings in the Bible, but
Hazony is right: A great deal of it covers “many of the same kings of things
that are found in the works of reason: histories of ancient peoples and
attempts to draw political lessons from them; explorations of how best to
conduct the life of the nation and of the individual; the writings of
individuals who struggled with personal persecution and failure and their
speculations concerning human nature and the search for the true and the good;
attempts to get beyond the sphere of the here and now and reach a more general
understanding of the nature of reality, of man's place in it, and of his
relationship with that which is beyond his control.” God is a constant
presence, but “the God of Israel and those who wrote about him seem to have
been concerned to address subjects close to the heart of what later tradition
calls works of reason” (2).
Hazony's
work is important for Christian thinkers, who have often spiritualized the
outlook of the Hebrew Bible on the way to distorting the New Testament as well.
The Old Testament is part of the Christian canon, and the New Testament
presents itself as the fulfillment, not the cancellation, of the Old, and that
means it brings to fuller expression the same political, philosophical, and
ethical themes that the Old explores.
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