Probably not, but still - when Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were alive, was the Old Testament (or parts of it) available to them in any way? Would they have known about Moses, for instance? And Jesus? Would he have have been in touch with Socratic philosophy in any way, shape, or form?
I am putting this in GQ in hopes that there’s an actual answer but any speculation as to what the answer might be is very welcome.
IAMNABible Scholar, just a lay reader, but from what I know:
The Greeks didn’t have much contact with, or interest in, other philosophies.
The Septuagint translationof the Hebrew Bible was
Since Plato was born around 429/423 BC, he couldn’t read it.
As for the other way, in John’s evangelion, there are many specific phrases and images that point towards John being a Jew educated in not only Greek language but also Hellenic thought and philosophy and merging it with his hebrew faith when viewing Jesus.
Since Jesus himself was, according to the little we know about him, a not-wealthy man from country background who spoke Aramic dialect instead of Hebrew, the normal assumption would be that he wasn’t educated about Greek philosophy.
On the other hand, trade routes went quite far in those days already, and we don’t know where Jesus went or what he did before he became public around age 30. Some people speculate he went to India to learn from Yogis their powers and point to certain parts of NT; speculating that Jesus met with some Greek traders or even educated Greeks (or Jews) in cities and discussed philosophy with them is far less unlikely.
OTOH, the attitude about mankind, gods, the universe and everything, the starting and end position of both systems - the classical Greek philosophy and the Christian worldview* - is quite different.
Was Jesus even literate?
Seriously, I can’t recall any mentions of him either reading or writing anything, and literacy was the exception back then.
For what it’s worth, my copy of the Oxford Annotated Bible I had in college stated that a number of the (chronologically) later books of the Bible (the book of Wisdom in particular, if memory serves) show distinct signs of the influence of Greek philosophy, which shouldn’t be surprising since Alexander the Great’s empire and its successor kingdoms had pretty much made the Greek language and Greek ideas the lingua franca of educated folks in the whole Middle East. One of the things the Maccabees were revolting against was (what they perceived to be) excessive Greek influence in Hebrew culture. So assuming Jesus was a person of education, he would have at least a nodding familiarity with Greek ideas, though possibly as a set of alien philosophies to be shunned.
Less sure about the other way round, but I’d be legitimately surprised to learn that the Greeks had any particular knowledge of Hebrew religious writings, since Israel and Judah, even at their height, were tiny, peripheral states that spent most of their existence as tributaries of bigger empires.
Of course he was. He was called Rabbi, which means teacher, and had several disputes with the Pharisees about interpretation of the Torah. In one of the Evangelions it’s told how on Schabbat he happened to be in his home town (village) and was called forward to read from the Torah and interpret, and he talked about how a prophet (referring to himself) isn’t respected in his home town.
And among the Jews, literacy for men was expected and taught, because they had to read the Bible out loud on Schabbes and interpret it. True, that was uncommon during those times compared to other nations where most farmers were uneducated, but as a devout Jew, Jesus would have been able to read and write Hebrew.
Whether he could read and write Greek is up for guess: Likely not because of his circumstances we know about, but nothing says he didn’t learn it during his wanderings.
Really? Even while there were still priests in the temple? I always assumed the sabbath-at-home rituals were a necessity born out of the destruction of the temple and the end of the priesthood.
The priests were in the main temple in Jerusalem for the big festivals and sacrifices, but as you can see in Fear Itself’s nice link, the towns had their own synagogue for the weekly sabbat.
Doh! Missed that.
That is utter nonsense. Many of the earliest Greek philosophers, the presocratics, were well known for having traveled widely beyond the lands of Greece, and it is thought likely that philosophy as such - i.e., the tradition of thinking critically about belief systems - probably emerged in Greece when it did precisely because of their awareness of the sophisticated intellectual traditions of older (but still extant) civilizations, such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Socrates and Plato may not have taken much interest in non-Greek intellectual traditions (they did not like to read too much anyway), but they lived some two centuries after the time of the early presocratics, and in that period Greek philosophy had advanced to be streets ahead of the older (and, mostly, non-critical) traditions. Despite that, in the next generation Aristotle took a great interest in other cultural traditions, receiving reports about them from the armies of his patron, Alexander, as they rampaged through the lands where the earlier civilized traditions had flourished. He also collected a large personal library, probably the largest library in existence up to that time (setting aside such things as the ‘library’ of Asurbanipal, which was, mostly, really more of an archive of civil service records).
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Whether any of them were aware of The Bible is another matter. At that time, the Hebrews were a small culture, little known and considered of little significance outside of the small area where they lived. It is quite possible their traditions were overlooked by the earlier Greek thinkers who took an interest in such matters. Nevertheless, within a generation or so of Aristotle’s time, the Library of Alexandria (an institution inspired, in many respects, by the Aristotelian tradition of scholarship) was collecting texts of the Hebrew scriptures.
So, Socrates and Plato very likely were not familiar with the Hebrew scriptures, although some of the earlier philosophers who influenced them may have known of the Hebrew traditions. Aristotle may possibly have had some knowledge of them, but he probably would not have regarded them as very important or interesting. Later Greek and Hellenistic philosophers would certainly have had the opportunity to access them, but I know of no evidence that any took any particular interest (unless they were actually Jewish, of course).
To be frank, unless you antecedently take it to be the word of God, there is not very much of philosophical interest in the Old Testament. A lot of it is, at best history and at worst myth and legend, and its ethical theory (which, I hasten to add, is not the ethical theory of either Christianity or modern Judaism) amounts to little more than “follow these rules because God says so.” Greek philosophical ethical theory was already light-years ahead of this by Socrates’ time. Sure, once you have the cultural tradition of thinking that the Bible is a terribly important document, then you can extract all sorts of allegorical meat from it, and put all sorts of interesting philosophical glosses on its contents, but the pre-Christian Greeks had no inkling that it was an important book - it was the myths and legends, and the eccentric laws, of a small, unimportant tribe - and probably found it rather dull and silly for the most part, if they ever bothered to look at it.
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There is no evidence (and, I think, nothing in the Bible to suggest) that Jesus ever read any works of Greek philosophy. However, by the time of the origins of Christianity, the relevant part of the world was saturated with the Greek intellectual tradition, and there is no doubt that ways of thinking pioneered by the classical Greek philosophers (Plato especially) played a large role shaping early (and not-so-early) Christian thought. Jesus himself (who, if not illiterate, was probably educated only in the Jewish scriptures and traditions) may not have been much affected by it, but Paul and the Gospel writers (especially, but not only, John), who all wrote their works in Greek, certainly were, and slightly later Christian theologians, the so called “Church Fathers,” even more so. Whether or not Paul or the Gospel writers had ever actually read any of the works of Plato or other classical Greek philosophers, they certainly felt their influence.
Paul makes reference to Epimenides in one of his epistles; if he was aware of Epimenides, I have to assume that he was also aware of the other great Greek philosophers. Of course, Paul was more widely-traveled than Jesus, too, so that might not imply much about what Jesus knew.
Thank you all for some great answers.
I find this in particular to be very interesting. Given that it may be hard to sort out the influence of Christ as opposed to that of later church fathers and of Plato through them (I guess Augustine was a neo-Platonist, IIRC), what would an example of an element of Greek philosophy in the New Testament be?
ETA: Cmdroverbite also refers to this influence in what he seems to recall was the Book of Wisdom in particular along with chronologically younger parts of the NT. Can anybody expand on this influence?
That is a bit of an exaggeration. There is excellent reason to believe that Augustine was heavily influenced by neoplatonism (the dominant philosophical movement of his time), but it is probably a bit much to say he was a neoplatonist. Also, note that Augustine was the last of the Church Fathers, and lived centuries after the time of Jesus and the authors of the New Testament. Likewise, the neoplatonist movement (as opposed to Platonism as such) also began centuries after Jesus’s time. The most influential philosophical school at the time of the New Testament, and for some time after, would have been Stoicism (although there were plenty of other philosophical schools around, including brands of Platonism).
One that springs to mind is the opening of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word.” “Word” here is being identified with God (creating the world through his words: “Let there be light”), and with Jesus. John’s word for “word,” however, is the Greek “logos,” and the identification of logos with the controlling reason behind the apparent chaos of the universe goes back at least to the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus.
For Švejk, who posted the questions. If you are still around and monitoring the possible responses to your old questions, please read below and respond.
This is not a reply to answer your questions, yet. And although your questions are very relevant in my opinion, and this relevancy would be affirmed by anyone else that is a special student of both, Plato and the Bible; my question is to ask you; why did you, specifically, identify Plato’s Republic as being the dialogue that was, possibly read by Jesus? Does this, my question, mean anything to you?
Actually, proto-synagogues had arisen after the destruction of the First Temple as the people gathered for prayer on the Sabbath. Ezra is credited with establishing a practice of reading from the scriptures in every village during the period of the Restoration, before the Second Temple was completed. When the Pharisee and Sadducee political parties arose a bit before 100 B.C.E, the Pharisees promoted the idea that knowledge was essential to help Jews maintain their Jewish identity. With that in mind, they promoted the study of the Torah and its public reading on the Sabbath and on market days, (Monday and Thursday). In order to pursue those policies, the Pharisees encouraged greater education. Since the synagogues did not require a priest to preside, it became common for members of the congregation to lead the services, leading to further encouragement for education so that anyone could read from the Torah and other Scriptures. It is true that the first actual law promoting education, (that each synagogue in each community had to have an elementary school), did not occur until the proclamation of High Priest Joshua ben Gamala in 60 C.E., but the principles and culture that allowed him to make that declaration occurred in the century and a half that preceded it.
By the time the Second Temple was destroyed, the culture and practice of nearly universal (male) literacy was already well under way.
Just to take a swing at a lob here, but in the big picture the Greeks were into (gave the West) philosophy and the Jews were into (gave the West) religion. Not finding philosophical meat in Torah, at the simplest layer, is nothing to get defensive or offensive about. (Not saying anyone here is either.)
That said, The Book of Ecclesiastes stands out as an exception, and thus it is especially interesting that it was included in the canon.
I completely randomly came across this - I had no recollection of even starting this thread and came across it by chance, I don’t usually go into GQ anymore.
Don’t attach too much importance to me picking the Republic, it’s just the thread title but the OP itself and my later post as well make it clear I’m interested in possible awareness with Greek philosophy generally.
My understanding is that the study of Hebrew affairs would have been very much a niche interest among Greeks during the Golden Age of Greek philosophy- no doubt some Greeks particularly interested in ME affairs would have known of it, but a general, well-educated Greek would likely not.
The reverse would have been true around the time of Jesus - that is, a well-educated Israelite would certainly have heard about, and possibly read, the ‘Golden Age’ Greek philosophers - as Greek culture had widely permiated the cultural area of ‘Helenism’ (and later, the Roman world), of which Judea was a part.
The issue then would be whether Jesus was himself well-educated (aside from his ability to read the Torah). This is impossible to say. However, early Christians certainly included well-educated followers among them, who would have known the Greek philosophers.
It is also significant that at the time of Jesus, educated Romans in Rome mostly wrote and conversed in Greek
Really, in Rome? I thought this was only true of the middle east. Interesting.