Institute for Travesty

When we began our investigation of the influence of Hebrew thought on the classical world In Chapter 1, the Seven-Day Week was presented as the simple example of Jewish influence on the Mediterranean world during the Silent Years. The simple case is that the Jews had lived by a 7-day week for much more than a thousand years before the Romans adopted it. The more complicated reality is that the Romans did not adopt it recognizing a direct indebtedness to the Jews but instead imported from Mesopotamia a non-Jewish, paganized form of the 7-day week.

If that seems circumlocutive, it is only the start of circumlocutions based in a pagan refusal to borrow directly from monotheistic Judaism. In the next three chapters, we consider the intricate reasoning and fact-gathering that are routinely necessary to see what is altogether probable: that cosmopolitan, Old World, faith-centered Judaism routinely pressed heavily against much younger and less sophisticated pagan societies, still struggling with the intellectual and psychological pitfalls of animism and syncretic polytheism.

Jewish-Influenced Greek Philosophy

It is possible that of all the effects of Diasporan Jews upon Europe, none was stronger than effects on Greek philosophy. From early times, at least from the time of the disciples of Socrates (c. 400 B.C.), the interaction between Jews and the philosophers has been noted. And it has been said more than once that all Greek philosophy bears the stamp of Jewish influence. Nevertheless, modern discussions of philosophy seldom if ever suggest that there is a fruitful interaction between Greek-originated ideas and much older ideas strongly represented in Judaism and particularly in its Scriptures.

Jews as a Philosophical People

Adding to the intrigue is that in the ancient world itself, the Greeks were much inclined to see the Jews as a most philosophical people, and the Jews made every effort to suggest to Greeks that they were similarly interested in the world of philosophical ideas.

Greeks didn’t have to know very much about Jewish thought to focus on the fact that one day out of every seven for the Jews was a day of rest and contemplation. Those with somewhat deeper knowledge would know that the Jew was exhorted to focus on such thoughts, always God-centered and Scripture-centered, to be first thoughts on waking up and last thoughts when going to bed on the other six days of the week. The Jews were a philosophers’ dream and the proof of the possibility of a utopia in abstract thought. Moreover, the Jews were reputed to have produced the greatest philosopher of the Old World in King Solomon. Jewish Scriptures explicitly included books of Wisdom, parts of which may be dated as early as 1400 B.C. And a philosopher was a “lover of Wisdom.”

From the Jewish point of view, after the world-conquering exploits of Alexander the Great, accommodation to a Greek world seemed the sine qua non of political sense. And since they, the Jews, were the paragons of thinking beyond the visible world, presenting themselves as philosophical was the obvious way of being au current in Greek culture.

It might be added at the same time that Jews who felt that their religious traditions extended to reaching the world for their God would naturally accept the Greek philosophic temperament as the route toward Jewish witness to the world of the Nations outside Judaism.

Pagan Inclusivity

We have already noted that paganism generally was anything but averse to new deities. From its animist origins, European paganism had to assume that as one got to know a wider world, one would also be coming into wider contact with more gods and their particular earthly domains.

At the end of The Odyssey, at least in one of its variations, Odysseus is given the task of carrying an oar until he reaches some land where people are entirely ignorant of what an oar is. Such people would be entirely unacquainted with Neptune, the god of the sea, and Odysseus, a thorough man of the sea and mariner, was to make them acquainted with this new god. There is no sense from The Odyssey that Odysseus is being given a dangerous assignment. Rather the reverse: there seems to be an assumption that people will gladly hear of the new god preparatory to hearing about a wider world.

This basic inclusive attitude of paganism, what is normally known as Syncretism, never really changed, and we can observe it in the realistic narrative of Paul at Athens found in Luke’s Book of the Acts of the Apostles. There we are told that the Athenians did nothing except look for new things to hear from foreigners, that their city was full of temples and idols to seemingly every imaginable deity including, just for logical comprehensiveness, those “to an unknown god.” Even the Apostle Paul got a tolerant hearing from such people, tolerant in the sense of fully ready and willing to accept an ever-expanding pantheon. (See Acts 17: 16-34.)

Greeks Meeting Hebrews before Greek Philosophy’s Origins

The Greeks did not wait for the Silent Years or for the conquests of Alexander, however, to be influenced by Jewish thought. As animistic pagans, they probably were interested in Jewish ideas of God from the first day they met a Jew or heard of one. There are no recorded philosophical interactions between Jews and Greeks before Socrates, but we know, as indicated in early chapters, that Jews started into Diaspora experiences with the Nations in the 8^th century before Christ. Greek philosophy does not go back that far. Perhaps the first philosophical Greeks had already heard of philosophical Jews.

Considerations of the origins of Greek Philosophy quickly support the possibility of Jewish influence in its origins and also suggest that Greek unwillingness to gladly trudge in others’ footsteps is immediately at work in the development of Greek philosophy.

The First, Possibly Jewish-Influenced, Greek Philosophers

The first Greek philosophers, we are told, were Ionians; that is, they did not live on the Greek peninsula at all but rather came from seacoast areas on the other side of the Aegean, what is currently modern Turkey. Ionia included cities like Ephesus, far down the coast of Turkey, at the point where Turkey turns radically to the east and the Levant. That is to say, Ionia can mean land just up the coast from Palestine, at least if the coast of Syria and southern Turkey are considered simply a narrow connecting coastal strip, comprising two sides of a triangle where modern navigation would save time and difficulty simply by sailing the hypotenuse.

Thales and Materialistic Greek Philosophy

Thales of Miletus is thought to have founded Greek philosophy sometime around 640 B.C. In the last paragraph, Ephesus was used as a good approximation of the southern limit of Ionia as Turkey turns east. Actually, Miletus is the best approximation of that eastward turn. So Greek philosophy was born just where Jewish influence was likely to have appeared earliest and strongest.

Moreover, Thales’ date of 640 B.C. is more than 80 years after the Assyrian Captivity which began the Diaspora. The Assyrians were not in a position to directly transport Israelites to Miletus, but they were in a position to move Diasporan Jews at least up the Syrian coast. The timing of Greek philosophy’s development then is reasonably chronologically related to Diaspora realities.

Thales is reputed to have posited that Water is the basis of all things. That got things going, and a younger countryman, Anaximenes, chose to put Air in place of Water as a first principle. Heraclitus of Ephesus (ah, that’s where Ephesus comes in!) chose aetherial Fire as his principle, somewhere around 500 B.C. By then, we must remember, the Babylonian Captivity was a century old, the Persians had replaced the Babylonians, and the Jewish Remnant had built the Second Temple. Only the Post-Exilic Prophets remained to be recognized, and two of the three, Haggai and Zechariah, had already written their books.

It was only a matter of time, before Empedecles of Agrigentum was daring enough to think not in terms of one principle but four: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, sometime around 450 B.C and thus at about the same time that Anaxagoras of Clasomenae established philosophy at Athens (where it is said to have found a home without intermission for at least 1,000 years.) Anaxagoras went beyond Empedocles with his four elements and posited instead an indefinite or even infinite number of imperishable primary elements. (More Greek inclusiveness at work in the animist tradition?)

Materialistic Philosophy Predates Socrates and Echoes Jewish Ideas

For most students, this is “all Greek to me.” Why not just start with Socrates? Fine to concentrate on the Socratic tradition which has so dominated Western philosophic thought, but for the idea of Jewish influence on Greek philosophy, Socrates, though a more complex thinker, was essentially the new kid on the block, coming a half-milenium after Solomon.

Going back to Thales then, the first Greek philosopher was extremely “Jewish” in thought orientation. First of all, he believed in unity. The Jews constant cry was, “Hear, O Israel, the LORD thy God is one.“ Thales’ Greek world already in 640 B.C. had a host of dieties that perhaps grew larger in number seemingly by the day. And to Thales’ mind, that multiplicty didn’t help thought. Nor evidently did it seem that gods running around chasing women and bickering with their goddess wives was much a base for serious thought.

Second, if Thales didn’t want to consider god thoughts at all, he might still have heard the first chapter of the Five Books of Moses, Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (1.1).

Get rid of God, and you still start in the past, the far distant past, the primary beginning. Thales and Jewish Scripture both chose to start from the same distant origin and in oneness.

So what is that one thing in the primordial past?

For the Hebrews, the answer was obvious: God.

But for Thales, as a Greek who was not about to trod along in imitation of the Hebrew, he’d have to look further. Well, there was form, except there wasn’t any. There was void, but that’s a nothingness. There was darkness, and there was the deep. What was the deep anyway? Happily, it seemed to be closely related to “the waters.”

If Thales was Jewish-influenced, he would---and did—start from the primary past. He’d then have to choose what was there in that primordial past, and he had rejected that God was there. (Perhaps “rejected” is too strong. Like all later Greek philosophy, Thales was “not willing” to posit the supernatural as the base for advanced thought.) He seems to have had a 50-50 chance of choosing water rather than darkness, and darkness like void can be seen as an absence rather than a presence. So that would give Thales a 100% chance of choosing Water as the primordial oneness. QED.

Q.E.D. :What was to be demonstrated, namely that one in Thales’ position could start with a reasonable knowledge of Jewish basic Scripture, work step by step with it along Greek lines that didn’t include the supernatural as the basis for advanced thought, and arrive exactly at Thales’ famous fundamental position in materialistic philosophy.

Jewish Inception, Anti-Jewish Execution

It may sound as though Thales was also anti-god or anti-God. He may have been. But it is possible to think that he simply limited himself to thinking about the things he could detect around him with the natural senses. And to that extent, of course, he was very anti-Jewish because the Hebrew Scriptures start and end with God and are totally God-centered. Thus in Thales’ one great first philosophic move, we can see the central tendency for Greek philosophy to be both Hebrew-imitating and, at the same time, fundamentally diverging from Jewish thought.

None of the Thales’ story is a story of the Silent Years; he lived approximately two and a half centuries before the Silent Years. But there had already been plenty of time for Jewish thinking to reach coastal Ionia from coastal Israel with help from Diasporans of the Assyrian Captivity.

The Silent Years are not the story of Greek philosophy getting under way. Philosophy during The Silent Years were much more developed, and the development was heavily in favor of even more intransigent Greek bias against Judaism. Greek philoosophy worked strenuously in materialistic philosophy after Thales, but by the time of Socrates and Plato, Greek philosophy took a far more congenially modern turn, which in Plato’s case was to leave off materialistic thinking in favor of thinking about eternal ideas—if you wish, abstract ideas in the mind of God.

Mathematical Philosophy

As has been mentioned in Chapter 2 on Monotheism, there was another school of philolsophy other than the materialist school traced above. We know this school primarily as the work of Parmenides and Pythagoras of Elea, also in Ionia. The school actually began with Xenophanes who argued that God was an eternal unity. God, ignored by Thales, had finally gotten attention, sometime during the Babylonian captivity (606 B.C. – 536 B.C). The Pythagoreans eventually decided that God was Number or Number was God.

In the Eleatics, then, we get a second view of probable Jewish influence—there is God—only to find the Greeks yet again refusing to trudge in Jewish footsteps. The Jews’ God had a quality of personhood, though a personhood far removed from the girl-chasing, wife-bickering Greek dieties. The Pythagoreans so very early in the history of philosophy in general came up with an idea of God that could make him far removed from all earthly concerns, simply some embodiment or principle of Number. The clockwork god had been announced far before the Enlightenment.

Greek Quiet Rejection of Old World Philosophic Forms

It should also be noticed that both Thales and Pythagoras and the great majority of all their successors (whether we can pronounce their outlandish Greek names or not) rejected the Old World’s idea of philosophy which was embodied in the Hebrew Scriptural books of Wisdom. Proverbs is the epitome of that Wisdom literature, pithy expressions that cover very wide ranges of human experiencial evidence.

Taken at random, Proverbs 21:29 reads “ A wicked man hardeneth his face: but as for the upright, he directeth his way.”

Do we get it? Perhaps we don’t. Perhaps we need to consult the Hebrew, especially for “directeth his way.” But even if we don’t get it, Solomon is drawing on the wealth of experience of imperial kingship and evidently extraordinary scholarship into the wisdom of many cultures to draw a conclusion covering the standard modus operendi of two major human classes, the wicked and the upright.

Wisdom in the Solomonic sense often involves riddles and enigmas. Wisdom for Solomon takes committed attention and a desire to draw out the truth at all costs. So if we have trouble with “directeth his ways,” it is always possible that Solomon wanted it to be just that way. Solomon’s wisdom is a culmination of Old World philosophic concerns and of Old World Wisdom strategies and rhetoric. Most of Solomon’s proverbs were evidently set down in final form at least 250 years before Thales. Some of the later chapters of Solomon’s proverbs were evidently extant separately until compiled probably by scholars working for King Hezekiah sometime shortly after the Assyrian Captivity, say 700 B.C. and thus perhaps only a lifetime before Thales.

Solomon would have had to reject Thales in his most central proverbial thinking: Proverbs 3: 5-6 reads “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways ACKNOWLEDGE HIM, AND HE SHALL DIRECT THY PATHS.” Not only is Solomon’s conclusion diametrically opposed to Thales’ bias of an impersonal god; Solomon’s whole rhetorical stance is personalized—reflected in the King James’ use of the familial second person, “thou” and “thy”—and immediately practical in expression—don’t do this, do that instead. These differences also contribute to the consistent tension between Judaism and Greek abstract thought.

Thus, even as early as Thales, Greek phillosophic thought may have borrowed Jewish ideas, but it had moved decisively counter to Hebrew fundamental principle, counter to Hebrew focus on practical experience, counter to Hebrew familiarity in tone, and counter to Hebrew strategy of organizing thought around basic religious categories like the wicked and the upright. Hebrew influence could be everywhere present in Greek philosophy, but it would always seem that Hebrew thought was outlandish, quixotic, and fundamentally, barbarously not Greek.

The Silent Years Contest between Athens and Jerusalem

The early Greek philosophers seem based in Jewish rather than Greek ideas. That conclusion could be elaborated through volumes. But centuries later during the Silent Years, what was happening was largely a contest between Greek and Jewish ideas. In that contest, the Greeks typically were closer to or at the center of practical political power. The Jews were always outsiders.

Yet as this study has consistently suggested, by the end of the Silent Years, there was actually a three-way contest between the Romans, the Greek., and the Jews. The Romans thought of themselves as practical people muddling through rather than as ideologues. That left the ideological tensions of the Silent Years to become largely a Greco-Judaic conflict. Some of the basic weapons of that tense conflict should be enumerated—not what the Greeks owed to the Jews but ways the Greeks differentiated themselves from Jewish ideas.

Greek Alternatives to Jewish Thinking

Man the Center

Jewish thinking never put man at the center. “The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge.” (Proverbs 1:8a). From a Solomonic perspective, Thales had simply missed the boat. Garbage in, garbage out.

The Greeks moved consistently away from the Solomonic God center and eventually made Man the Measure of All Things. They had a very strong bias from early Greek philosophy on to be materialistic, mechanical, mathematical, and humanly defined.

Different Senses of Knowing Oneself

If Man was the Measure of All Things, then it made sense that the key was to “Know Thyself.” This could have been a similarity between Judaisim and Greek thought, but it wasn’t. In Genesis, things started with God and moved to humanity. And in two chapters it moved from God through humanity to fallen humanity. Humanity’s first great invention was sin. From a Jewish point of view, know thyself.

By and large, Greek philosophy behaved as if it had never heard of sin. In this sense, the Greeks held rather to pagan ideas. Gods were powers, and they could be offended. But gods weren’t moralists. Morals were human inventions. For example, the Eumenides of Aeschylus dramatises the human instigation of law and human courts. So for Greeks, Know Thyself had to be understood as Know Thyself in the Greek context, without reference to God’s understanding of human character or God’s values— that is, with Man at the center.

At the same time, the Jews were the Chosen People of God, a ponderous notion, backed by well-preserved historical documents. Jews knew themselves to be Chosen.

In stark contrast, The Greeks had no tradition or documentation of a history of being called out from among the Nations by their god, a fundamental difference that alienated not only Greeks but presumably every other non-Jewiosh ethnic group around the Mediterranean.

Greek Rational Optimism

The Greek philosophic ideal was Man the Rational Animal. Again in stark contrast, Jewish thought, especially orthodox Jewish thought, was the Sadder But Wiser Girl.

From a Jewish perspective, it was infinitely rational to keep close to an all-powerful God who could lead with a mighty arm out of Egyptian slavery, could have Goliath killed by David and Jonah regurgitated for mission by a whale. And yet, the Hebrew Scriptures showed time and again members of the Chosen People choosing to go their own way rather than God’s fully articulated way.

So much for rational humanity.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

It is important to recognize that this chapter has essentially focused on Greek thought before the great, three-generation flowering of Greek philosophy in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This intellectual triumvirate is normally the starting place for any undergraduate understanding of the history of philosophy, but as indicated, Greek philosophy was perhaps 250 years old before the advent of Socrates. The bases of Greek philosophy had been established.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are all frequently recognized to have assimilated Jewish ideas. It is often claimed that they were acquainted with Judaism, or even that they were indebted to specific Jewish sources. In subsequent philosophic history, Plato and Aristotle were both eventually hailed as “Doctors” (from Latin docere: to teach) of the Christian Church.

For the purposes of the present text then, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are a late complex developent of the general pattern of Jewish influence on Greek philosophy disguised, quite possibly deliberately, by the philosophers themselves.

All three stand head and shoulders above previous Greek philosophic achievement, and all three have easily deserved place at the sumit of all Greek philosophic thought. Historically, their institutions, the Academy and the Lyceum, dominated Mediterranean higher education for the better part of a millenium before the closure of the Academy by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in 529 A.D.

Late Silent Years Decline of Greek Philosophic Power

Thus, throughout the high development of Greek philosophy through the Silent Years, the Greeks relied on an array of powerful tools to keep their philosophical tradition clerarly distinct from any Jewish tradition. Many of these tools became basic premises of thought: that Man was the Measure of all things; that Knowing Oneself was necessary to thought and necessarily undertaken in a Greek fashion,; that human beings as a species are the Rational Animal; and that Greek philosophy is the culminating achievement of that rationality. There are others not covered in this brief overview.

Denouement

By the end of the Silent Years, Greek philosophic lines were wearing thin. Thales’ acceptance of oneness had become the One God bidding to dominate the Mediterranean world. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the Greek philosophic hope lay in turning Judeo-Christian forebearance and patience into Stoic acceptance and passivity.

From the perspective of deep thought, the Age of Theology, so thoroughly anti-Classical Greek, had clearly begun.

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