Must a Dominican have a plan to diminish Scripture if he can?

by

Damien F. Mackey

 

“To take the Genesis account as historical information … its value is

simply nil in informing us about what happened “in the night of times”.”

Lagrange

 

Dr. Dominque Tassot, writing an article, “The Influence of Geology on Catholic Exegesis”, for the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, tells us something about the opinions of M. Lagrange:

http://kolbecenter.org/the-influence-of-geology-on-catholic-exegesis/

…. On June 30, 1909, the Pontifical Biblical Commission granted liberty to Catholic exegetes to consider the word “yom” either in its proper meaning or in a broader meaning (sensu improprio) of indeterminate duration (DS 2128). In 1896, Fr Lagrange (who had founded Jerusalem’s Biblical College in 1893) rejected “concordism,” considering that the hexameron days and geological periods did not correspond.

The shaping of the Earth went on a long time after the appearance of life; plants and animals developed in parallel. But remains established the fact that the Earth took a considerable time to form. We renounced forever the historic precise duration of six 24 hours days.⁷

My comment: The ‘Six Days’ of Genesis One, real 24-hour days, have nothing whatsoever to do with the duration of God’s work of creation, and it is futile to attempt to make them fit so-called scientific views about origins, such as the ‘Big Bang’, or an evolutionary-based geology:

What exactly is Creation Science? Part One: Our Western obsession with ‘Science’

https://www.academia.edu/35676906/What_exactly_is_Creation_Science_Part_One_Our_Western_obsession_with_Science

Some have observed that the ‘Six Days’ (Hexaëmeron) may be a revelation of a creation already effected. Dr. Tassot continues:

The further influence of Lagrange on Catholic exegesis is indisputable: he devised the three main ways to render the presence of scientific errors in the Bible acceptable. These were set out in five lectures given at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse a century ago, in November 1902, later published under the title The Historical Method. I will not dispute Lagrange’s dedication to the Church and the Bible. But we will touch here upon the direct influence of geology on the exegesis of the 20^th century through Lagrange’s ideas.

When a schoolboy, Lagrange used to wander with his uncle, a geologist, in the foothills of the Alps, where he lived. Maybe this explains how readily and completely he accepted the long ages, not only for the earth but also for the history of Man. He wrote in the Biblical Review, which he founded:

Mankind is older than one believed when piously collecting the wrecks of remembrances assumed to be primitive. (…) Humanly speaking, oral transmission from the beginning of the world is supremely unbelievable. (…) To take the Genesis account as historical information, … its value is simply nil in informing us about what happened “in the night of times.”

So Lagrange invented a new and paradoxical concept: “Legendary primitive history.” The Fall, the Curse, the Flood are neither true history nor simple myth. Genesis gives an account based on a “generating fact” but inevitably distorted and downgraded by the transmission through thousands of generations. Another such concept is that of “historical appearances.” Here Lagrange tried to transpose to history what Leo XIII^th said in Providentissimus Deus about astronomy (the Galileo affair!), that the Bible speaks “according to appearances.”

From a Thomistic perspective, our senses give a true path to knowledge. But in the Kantian perspective of that time, “appearance” meant the opposite of reality. In 1919, Lagrange abandoned his theory of “historical appearances,” but the idea remained that the Bible had to be confined to the sphere of religion, and this was indeed the most secure way to prevent any conflict with science.

The third method proposed by Lagrange to explain supposed natural science errors in the Bible was the theory of “literary genres.” The idea underlying this explanation was that one does not deceive when simply asserting the false, but only when teaching it:

All that the sacred writers teach, God also teaches and this is true. But what do the sacred writers really teach? What they affirm categorically. But—it has been said for a long time—the Bible is not a collection of categorical theses or affirmations. There are such literary genres where nothing is taught concerning the reality of the facts. They only serve as basis for a moral teaching.”⁸ [And further:] “It is impossible that God teaches errors. Of course [there are places in] the Bible, where everybody is speaking errors; but it is impossible that an intelligent examination of the Bible compels us to conclude that God taught errors.”⁹

It is obvious that an intelligent use of these three methods is sufficient to get rid of any difficult passage of the Bible. But the authority of the Sacred Writings disappears at the same time, divine inspiration and inerrancy being inseparable! ….

[End of quotes]

We could term this method of exegesis as emptying the Bible of all of its meaning.

Père Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855-1938) was a Dominican (OP) priest and the Dominicans figure rather prominently in my life inasmuch as OP priests celebrate Masses at the University of Sydney (St. John Paul II) chapel and at Notre Dame University (St. Benedict’s), at both of which places I attend several times a week.

The day that a well-informed friend of mine queried, in an e-mail, the strange biblical views that have emanated from the École Biblique which père Lagrange himself founded in Jerusalem, I happened to attend a Mass at the University of Sydney chapel celebrated by a learned Dominican priest. I thought that I must tell him about the concerned e-mail letter that I had just received, I being particularly interested to get his (Dominican) reaction.

He is a scholar, basically a theologian, who seems to flit effortlessly around Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French for starters. It soon became clear to me, though, that the Scriptures were essentially, for him, about theology – fair enough – but that what my colleagues and I would consider to be historical accounts were written late, perhaps beginning “about 900 BC”, and that “Moses and Joshua could not personally have written about contemporary events, nor did they record dates”. He also made the typical comment that the early Scriptures would have been passed on by means of “oral tradition”. Also fair enough, but the written aspect always seems to get downplayed. Whilst some of this was starting to rub with me, especially that Moses and Joshua did not write down the biblical events of the time, I did not feel inclined to become argumentative or contrary with a man who has an easy-going, genial nature.

But, at the same time, I tried to push home some bullet points, such as:

–          God told Moses and Joshua to “write”.

–          Moses, in Egypt, was already a learned man and a scribe. [Cf. Acts 7:22]

“Yes”, he replied, “but he did not write in Hebrew, but in Egyptian”.

Some of what the priest said here is, I believe, just plain wrong, and smacks of what I find that père Lagrange had written decades earlier.

Deferring to the Numbers (Chronology) Men

Whilst I (and apparently Monty Python) find accountancy, numbers, to be utterly BORING:

Counsellor: (John Cleese) Ah Mr Anchovy. Do sit down.

Anchovy: (Michael Palin) Thank you. Take the weight off the feet, eh?

Counsellor: Yes, yes.

Anchovy: Lovely weather for the time of year, I must say.

Counsellor: Enough of this gay banter. And now Mr Anchovy, you asked us to advise you which job in life you were best suited for.

Anchovy: That is correct, yes.

Counsellor: Well I now have the results here of the interviews and the aptitude tests that you took last week, and from them we’ve built up a pretty clear picture of the sort of person that you are. And I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that the ideal job for you is chartered accountancy.

Anchovy: But I am a chartered accountant.

Counsellor: Jolly good. Well back to the office with you then.

Anchovy: No! No! No! You don’t understand. I’ve been a chartered accountant for the last twenty years. I want a new job. Something exciting that will let me live.

Counsellor: Well chartered accountancy is rather exciting isn’t it?

Anchovy: Exciting? No it’s not. It’s dull. Dull. Dull. My God it’s dull, it’s so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL.  ….

numbers appear to be greatly revered in modern times. Numbers seem to have replaced ideas.

It probably has something to do with the power that measuring offers, and, even, of man’s seeking to be ‘the measure of all things’. See e.g. my article:

The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’

https://www.academia.edu/8494268/The_Futile_Aspiration_to_Make_Man_the_Measure_of_All_Things_

Mathematics makes a wonderful servant, but it can be a very cruel taskmaster.

Chronologists are the powerful numbers men of (ancient) history.

In Egyptology, historians and archaeologists deferred to the ‘superior wisdom’ of the numbers man, Berlin School chronologist, Eduard Meyer (c. 1906), and allowed him to create a chronology of dynastic Egypt that has little bearing on reality.

See e.g. my:

The Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited

https://www.academia.edu/3665220/The_Fall_of_the_Sothic_Theory_Egyptian_Chronology_Revisited

Was Meyer, the numbers man, dull?

“The late great Classical scholar Werner Jaeger once said that the only time the lectures of the immortal Eduard Meyer were really interesting and the only time he was ever able to fill his lecture hall at the University of Berlin was when he talked about the Mormons”.

Enough said!

Meyer’s artificial dating of the Egyptian dynasties did not fit the shorter histories of, say, the Greeks and the Hittites. So, to save the situation, a massive slice of ‘Dark Ages’ (1200-700 BC) had to be inserted into these histories in order to ‘make’ them align with Egypt.

These ‘Dark Ages’ did not occur in real history, and their insertion has caused a disruption to the proper sequence of Greek and Hittite history.

Henk Spaan tells briefly what happened and how Dr. I. Velikovsky had identified the problem: http://www.henkspaan2.nl/velikovsky/15darkages.php

The history of ancient Greece is usually divided into several periods. The Archaic period is the time of ancient Hellas, that ran until about 1200 BC and ended shortly after the Trojan War. During this period Mycenae was the centre. Then followed a period of decline, the Greek Middle Ages, also called Dark Ages, when the country was invaded by primitive Dorians. The Greek heyday that we call Classical Greece, when Athens was the main centre, lasted from about 700 to 323 BC. Finally there is the Hellenistic period that begins with the conquests of Alexander the Great throughout the Middle East. In the Hellenistic period, Alexandria was the centre and the period lasted until the Roman conquest of Egypt.

The part of Velikovsky’s work dealing with “the dark ages of Greece” never appeared in print. Velikovsky worked on it in the last years of his life, but could not finish it. It is published in the Internet archive of his work entitled “The Dark Age of Greece”.

The Mycenaean civilization is closely linked to the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. During excavations in Mycenae, many objects from the 18th Dynasty were found and vice versa in Akhet-Aten, the city that Akhnaton had built, much Mycenaean pottery was found. This means that there must have been a period of more than 500 years between Archaic Greece that existed until 1200 BC and Classical Greece that began around 700 BC. This period is called a dark age because we know little or nothing about it and little remains of this period are found. Understanding those 500 years is difficult, because 500 years of human activity, however primitive, must have left traces above the remains of Mycenaean civilization and there must have been rulers, however barbaric, about whom people wrote of with fear or surprise. However, those traces are not there and neither are the stories. Of the Greek Middle Ages we know of no people like Vikings or Charlemagne of AD history.

Yet, if we move the Mycenaean civilization to 500 years later, it will be closer in line with the rise of Classical Greece and we are then more in line with what, for example, Herodotus and other Greek historians thought about their past.

Furthermore, many problems become easier. For example, the famous riddle: how could Homer write a detailed report of the Trojan War if the war took place more than 500 years before Homer wrote his work?

[End of quote]

Thus, when the likes of W.F. Albright, in close alliance with the École Biblique, attempted to date Joshua’s Jericho, the absence of any Mycenaean pottery at the site meant that – at least according to what Eduard Meyer had established chronologically about the Egypt of the same time, that it was to be dated to c. 1400 BC – the Jericho destruction would inevitably have to be shifted back centuries before this time.

A major part in all of this was played by another (pottery-) chronologist (numbers man) and another Dominican, père Louis-Hugues Vincent, who joined the École Biblique only a year after it was founded. Of course, coming for a Lagrangian background, père Vincent was always going to be operating from a base of biblical fluidity.

He, being a pottery-chronologist, was accorded a respect similar to that of the ‘expert’, Meyer. Consequently, we now find ourselves in the situation in which the biblical events have been separated from their right archaeology and history by many centuries – almost a millennium in the case of the famous Jericho incident.

One of my correspondent’s main concerns was that this – the Bible’s no longer fitting with the textbook history – was one of the reasons why many dismiss much of the Scriptures as being myth or fantasy, having little in the way of historical credibility.

“Didactic fiction” is how one elderly Dominican in Sydney has described the Book of Jonah.

Not that the Bible is essentially about history, or science, of course.

For the Dominican priest to whom I spoke, it is really about “theology”.

According to pope Francis, in Aperuit Illis, it is about “our salvation” (# 9):

The Bible is not a collection of history books or a chronicle, but is aimed entirely at the integral salvation of the person. The evident historical setting of the books of the Bible should not make us overlook their primary goal, which is our salvation.

It is clear from this, though, that the biblical books have an “evident historical setting”, contrary to Lagrange’s view that early Genesis is pre-historical, but also non-historical (see below).

Dei Verbum even has “our first parents” (Cardinal Pell take note), Abraham, Moses, and so on.

3. God, who through the Word creates all things (see John 1:3) and keeps them in existence, gives men an enduring witness to Himself in created realities (see Rom. 1:19-20). Planning to make known the way of heavenly salvation, He went further and from the start manifested Himself to our first parents. Then after their fall His promise of redemption aroused in them the hope of being saved (see Gen. 3:15) and from that time on He ceaselessly kept the human race in His care, to give eternal life to those who perseveringly do good in search of salvation (see Rom. 2:6-7). Then, at the time He had appointed He called Abraham in order to make of him a great nation (see Gen. 12:2). Through the patriarchs, and after them through Moses and the prophets, He taught this people to acknowledge Himself the one living and true God, provident father and just judge, and to wait for the Savior promised by Him, and in this manner prepared the way for the Gospel down through the centuries. ….

1. Lagrange, on the other hand, according to the following, denied early Genesis historicity:https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/dominicans/artifacts/the-bible-in-context/

His major challenge, however, would be to establish for fellow Catholics the importance of the Bible’s literary and historical contexts while still proclaiming it to be the Word of God.

To promote Catholic biblical scholarship Lagrange founded first the periodical Revue biblique which was to publish articles on exegesis by teachers at the Jerusalem school and elsewhere, and second Études bibliques, a series of commentaries which began with a study of Judges published in 1903. Church censorship was a continual possibility.

Lagrange challenged in his lectures and articles the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and he denied the historicity (though not the truth) of the creation narrative in Genesis 1–11. As a result, he found himself forbidden to publish a commentary on Genesis.

[End of quote]

The Dominican priest to whom I spoke did not actually deny an Adam and an Eve, but said: “The first man and woman are called Adam and Eve in Genesis, but these would not have been their real names as they are Hebrew names”.

I also advanced this bullet point:

–          The JEDP sources that scholars claim to identify in the Book of Genesis are not fundamentally the sources from which Genesis was compiled. These latter are the toledôt divisions, to be read as endings of family histories, the histories of the pre-Moses patriarchs.

Whilst the priest was familiar with toledôt, he did not comment on my insistence that they were endings, not headings. He admitted to being uncomfortable with JEDP – “you can’t preach it”.

I also recalled to him the case of the French Catholic physician, Jean Astruc, really a pioneer of the modern documentary sources, who had intuitively discerned that the Flood account in Genesis appeared to have been composed from more than one source. The toledôt perfectly accounts for that, of course, it having been written by Noah’s three sons.

The next series, I said, was signed off only by Shem, who must by then have become separated from his brothers, Ham and Japheth.

Furthermore, I said, scholars who deny the influence of Moses in the compilation of the Pentateuch may not have any expertise in the ancient Egyptian language, and are not able, therefore, to discern a prevailing Egyptian influence throughout much of those books – this being an indication that these books, in their original states (before later editing) were written at an early point in time when Israel had been in close contact with Egypt, and not written in a later Babylonian period as the documentists insist.

I queried that, if the early Bible were not really historically or archaeologically relevant, why was it that there is a substantial archaeology underlying e.g. the Conquest when properly dated, and not dated according to the whims of the unreliable chronologists. The Middle Bronze I (MBI) people – the priest knew of them – basically trace the same geographical pattern as do the Exodus Israelites, and they are known to have been bearing Egyptian artefacts.

But conventional historians (the more biblically-minded ones) tend to identify the partially nomadic MBI as belonging to the time of Abram (Abraham).

Once we fix Abram to his right stratigraphical level, however, which is Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze I, we can identify the destruction caused by the four invading kings as narrated in Genesis 14, Amraphel of Shinar and his confederacy.

All of this is a real history, with a real underpinning archaeology.

The Book of James considered today

Clearly a farmer is not expected to be patient over a period of centuries for his crop to emerge.

And that is the difficulty with any timetable that does not accord with the bald statements of Jesus Christ and the Apostles that that very generation would be experiencing his “coming”.

The emptying of the meaning from the holy Scriptures that was considered in relation to the Dominican founder of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, Pere Marie-J. Lagrange (1855-1938), seems to be a continuing phenomenon among Dominican priests, with one recently emphasising to Catholics at a Mass in Sydney (Notre Dame University), with regard to Genesis: “Whatever you do, don’t take any of this literally”.

Then, a few days later (15^th December, 2019), another Dominican priest, at the same venue, made some statements regarding the New Testament Book of James that I would consider to be emptying that book of some of its meaning, and to be implying that the Apostles were rather clueless about “the Second Coming”.

First of all, the priest claimed that the Book of James was written about 90 AD.

That is after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (conventional dating).

And James was already dead by then.

The bald statements of James regarding Jesus’ imminent return (5:7-8): “Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. … the coming of the Lord is at hand” [literally, “has drawn near”]”, was an indication to the Dominican priest that the Apostles did not have any idea as to when the Second Coming was due to occur. But, still, he added, we need to await it patiently just as does a farmer for the land to yield its crop.

Clearly a farmer is not expected to be patient over a period of centuries for his crop to emerge.

And that is the difficulty with any timetable that does not accord with the bald statements of Jesus and the Apostles that that very generation would be experiencing his “coming”:

• Romans 13:12: “The night is far gone; the day is at hand” [literally, “the day has drawn near”].
• Hebrews 10:25: “[Do not neglect] to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encourag[e] one another, and all the more as (because) you see the Day (already) drawing near.”
• 1 Peter 4:7: “The end of all things is at hand” [“has drawn near”].

70 AD, far from being a couple of decades before the Book of James was written, was the year when the prophesied “coming” would occur. For more on this, see my article:

Beyond the “Second Coming”

https://www.academia.edu/29837194/Beyond_the_Second_Coming_

Who was this James?

The following article poses a similar question:

Who Was James, the Brother of Jesus?

It is no secret that the Catholic Church teaches, and has always taught, that the Blessed Virgin Mary was just that — a virgin — all the days of her life. This teaching does not come out of nowhere, but is based on a long tradition in Christian history. Despite this venerable Christian tradition, Mary’s perpetual virginity is one of the Catholic beliefs most often questioned by Protestants.

It is interesting to note that most, if not all, Protestant denominations have no official teaching on whether or not Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus. Virtually all of the founding fathers of Protestantism (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al) maintained a belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity. Luther preached that “Christ… was the only Son of Mary, and the Virgin Mary bore no children besides Him” (Sermons on John, ch 1–4). Zwingli wrote, “I firmly believe that Mary, according to the words of the gospel as a pure Virgin brought forth for us the Son of God and in childbirth and after childbirth forever remained a pure, intact virgin” (Zwingli Opera, Corpus Reformatorum, Berlin, 1905, v. 1, p. 424.).

Most Protestants today, however, assume Mary and Joseph would have had normal marital relations resulting in other children. This is not based on any new historical data unavailable to those in the early Church. Rather it is based on an assumption that… well, that’s just what married people do, isn’t it?

For many, the belief that Jesus had younger siblings seems supported by the Bible itself. After all, we have verses like this: “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon?” (Mk 6:3). Isn’t this biblical proof that Mary had other children besides Jesus?

Before we delve into this specific question, it is important to keep one thing in mind …. The Church has studied the scriptures for thousands of years.

Yet the Church maintains that Mary remained a virgin all her life. Has the Church somehow remained unaware of Mk 6:3 all this time? Or is there more to the story?

“Brethren of the Lord”

There are several other passages that mention the “brethren” of Jesus (Mt 12:46, Jn 7:5, Acts 1:14, 1 Cor 9:5). “Brethren” in this context has always been taken to mean “cousin.” This is how Martin Luther interpreted its meaning in his Sermons on John quoted from above. The reason for this is simple. There was no word for “cousin” in Hebrew or Aramaic (the language Jesus most likely would have spoken). The term “brother” or “brethren” was used generically for any male relative, and this is how it is used in the Greek of the New Testament (even though Greek does have a word for “cousin”).

….

Those who maintain that James, Joseph, Judas and Simon were other biological children of Mary and Joseph might say that this “cousin” explanation is a little too convenient. But it can be demonstrated as true in at least one case — the case of James, the most famous “brother of the Lord.”

St. James was one of the Apostles, the first leader of the Church in Jerusalem, and a very prominent figure in the early Church. Was he, in fact, another son of Mary and Joseph?

We do know that his mother was named Mary. The gospels give us that information. But they also tell us that she was not Mary, the mother of Jesus. We can tell this by comparing the different gospel accounts of the women standing at the foot of the cross.

“Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (Mt 27:56).

“Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joseph, and Salome” (Mk 15:40).

“And meanwhile his [Jesus’] mother, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene had taken their stand beside the cross of Jesus” (Jn 19:25).

If we compare these three accounts, we see three women named Mary standing at the foot of the cross: Mary, the mother of Jesus; Mary Magdalene; and Mary, the wife of Cleophas who was also the mother of James and Joseph.

So James’ mother was a Mary, but not the Mary (Mary is a very common name among 1st century Jewish women. I can’t cite it now, but I remember reading in one source that 25% of Jewish women of the era were named some version of “Mary”).

What do we know of James’ father? In Mt 10:3, James is called the son of Alphaeus. It is worth noting that the Aramaic name for Alphaeus could be rendered in Greek as either Alphaeus or Clopas/Cleophas. Since James’ mother Mary is described as the “wife of Cleophas” in Jn 19:25, this is probably the same man described here.

And what do we know of him? Not too much from the scriptures, but according to the 2nd century historian Hegesippus, he was the brother of Joseph, Jesus’ foster-father. This would make James the cousin of Jesus.

However, even if Hegesippus is wrong about that detail, we still know from the gospel accounts that James is the son of Alphaeus/Cleophas and a different Mary, and not the son of Mary (mother of Jesus) and Joseph. In other words, James cannot be the biological brother of Jesus.

Does this prove the perpetual virginity of Mary? No. But it does show the danger of challenging any long-held and well-established Christian teaching on the basis of one or two “proof texts” from the Bible.

Benedict XVI – Bible “based on history”

“The evident historical setting of the books of the Bible should not make us overlook

their primary goal, which is our salvation”.

Pope Francis

In this article I have suggested that the ‘emptying Scripture of its meaning’ exegetical approach of Père Lagrange of the École Biblique appears to have been followed by contemporary Dominicans.

From the recent exhortation by one to by no means take literally the content of the Book of Genesis, to another’s insisting that neither Moses nor Joshua wrote down contemporary records – biblical writing did not begin until “900 BC” – to another’s labelling the book of Jonah “didactic fiction”, to another’s uncertainty as to whether Daniel and his three friends were actual historical characters.

And that is only a part of it.

As a Christian, I found the last one, concerning the Book of Daniel, to be particularly disconcerting as the aged priest mentioned it in a sermon in which he also proposed that the courageous witness of Daniel and his three friends, in the face of fierce persecution, ought serve to strengthen us today as we face persecution and ridicule for our faith.

I don’t know how other Christians would feel about this, but if ISIS had a knife at my throat ordering me to renounce my faith, I would not find it terribly consoling to have that particular Dominican close, Book of Daniel in hand, urging me to remember the heroic witness of Daniel and his three friends. “But you said they may not have been real!!!”

Far more refreshingly, I think, pope Benedict has insisted that the Bible was “based on history” (as quoted by Greg Sheridan in “Christmas story still resonates down the ages”):

The former Pope Benedict, in his magisterial, scholarly book, Jesus of Nazareth, explains the importance of historicity: “It is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolising supra-historical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this Earth.”

Benedict also explains the severe limits of the historical-critical method in trying to deconstruct the New Testament. Concerning biblical critical studies, which once in their wilder speculations did much to undermine religious faith, Benedict writes:

“We have to keep in mind the limits of all our efforts to know the past: We can never go beyond the domain of hypothesis because we simply cannot bring the past into the present. To be sure, some hypotheses enjoy a high degree of certainty, but overall we need to remain conscious of the limit of our certainties.”

And more recently pope Francis referred to, in “Aperuit Illis” (# 9): “The evident historical setting of the books of the Bible …”.

First, recalling Paul’s encouragement to Timothy, Dei Verbum stresses that “we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures” (No. 11). Since the Scriptures teach with a view to salvation through faith in Christ (cf. 2 Tim 3:15), the truths contained therein are profitable for our salvation. The Bible is not a collection of history books or a chronicle, but is aimed entirely at the integral salvation of the person. The evident historical setting of the books of the Bible should not make us overlook their primary goal, which is our salvation. Everything is directed to this purpose and essential to the very nature of the Bible, which takes shape as a history of salvation in which God speaks and acts in order to encounter all men and women and to save them from evil and death. ….

 

Institut Catholique de Paris ignores Carmignac

Fr Jean Carmignac dates Gospels early

 

Part Two:

Institut Catholique de Paris ignores Carmignac

 

 

“The Catholic weekly Il Sabato has been hunting down his manuscripts. It discovered that

Fr. Carmignac’s entire archive is to be found at the Institut Catholique in Paris where he

had taught. In all these years, the Institut Catholique has taken care not to tend to the publication of those pre-announced works, and, above all, it has prohibited people

from seeing the material when they ask to see it …”.

 The Wanderer

 

 

In the 1990’s, colleague Frits Albers (RIP), PH.B, wrote about what he considered to be the “betrayals” perpetrated by Paul Cardinal Poupard, the Archbishop of Paris, including his complete snub of the research of Fr. Jean Carmignac.

 

 

…

History has recorded several major betrayals by Cardinal Paul Poupard, Archbishop of Paris and president of its Institut Catholique. I will briefly describe two of them here as an introduction to his major one, his ‘resolution’ of the Galileo Case.

 

PART ONE:   WHY I MISTRUST CARD. PAUL POUPARD

 

Here follows the official text of this “public put-down”, issued by the Holy See press office on July 11, 1981, as it appeared in the Osservatore Romano of July 20 1981, mentioning Archbishop [by then not yet Cardinal] Paul Poupard by name.

 

The letter sent by the Cardinal Secretary of State to His Excellency Mons. Poupard on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin has been interpreted in a certain section of the press as a revision of previous stands taken by the Holy See in regard to this author, and in particular of the Monitum of the Holy Office of 30 June 1962, which pointed out that the work of the author contained ‘ambiguities and grave doctrinal errors’.

 

The question has been asked whether such an interpretation is well founded. After having consulted the Cardinal Secretary of State and the Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, which, by order of the Holy Father, had been duly consulted beforehand about the letter in question, we are in a position to reply in the negative. Far from being a revision of the previous stands of the Holy See, Cardinal Casaroli’s letter expresses reservations in various passages – and these reservations have been passed over in silence by certain newspapers – reservations which refer precisely to the judgment given in the Monitum of June 1962, even though this document is not explicitly mentioned.

 

The second example of betrayal involving the Institut Catholique of Paris and its president, Archbishop Paul Poupard, centres on interference with the dissemination of truth by means of the direct and wilful suppression of Catholic scholarship in favour of a free and unencumbered promotion of doctrinal errors. The scandal appeared in the March 19, 1992 edition of the American Catholic paper The Wanderer, quoting two other major European Catholic periodicals, 30 Days and Il Sabato.

 

Reporting a scandal: An editorial in the current issue of 30 Days magazine (issue no. 2), titled “Scandal at the Institut Catholique” raises some tough questions about the openness of modern biblical scholars to research which offers evidence that the Gospels were written by A.D. 50.

 

Reporting on investigative work conducted by the Italian Catholic weekly Il Sabato the editorial asks why the Institut Catholique in Paris will not allow to be printed, or even acknowledge the existence of, the biblical scholarship of Fr. Jean Carmignac.

Fr. Carmignac, until his death in 1986, was one of the world’s leading experts in Hebrew and Aramaic, and his extensive research in language and the Fathers of the Church led him to believe Matthew, Mark, and Luke had written their Gospels by A.D. 50.

 

In addition, Carmignac noted the scholarship of 49 other recognised experts who agreed with him, but whose works also had either been ignored or censored or else they did not dare wage a battle in the name of their scientific conviction.

 

“For the consequences”, stated the 30 Days editorial, “would have revolutionised the dominant exegetical trends today. Many ideas, whose certainty is taken for granted today, would have crumbled … If the Synoptic Gospels were written in a Semitic language it means they were written soon after Jesus’ years on earth, when the protagonists were still alive. It means that the Synoptic Gospels are the testimonies of people who saw and heard, of witnesses to the facts. It means they are not late elaborations by anonymous transcribers of popular traditions”.

 

In 1983. Fr. Carmignac published a small book containing his findings and conclusions, and promised a later book which he described as “more convincing than ever and, I hope, irrefutable”.

 

But at that time an effort began to bury his work, the editorial said, under hefty shovelfuls of earth … Six years after his death, none of these texts has ever been published. An impenetrable curtain of silence has fallen on Fr. Carmignac and his work. The Catholic weekly Il Sabato has been hunting down his manuscripts. It discovered that Fr. Carmignac’s entire archive is to be found at the Institut Catholique in Paris where he had taught. In all these years, the Institut Catholique has taken care not to tend to the publication of those pre-announced works, and, above all, it has prohibited people from seeing the material when they ask to see it …

 

One of the 49 scholars mentioned here by the late Fr. Jean Carmignac is, no doubt, Claude Tresmontant whose magnificent book on that very same topic, The Hebrew Christ, carries a lengthy foreword by the Most Reverend Jean Charles Thomas, Bishop of Ajaccio, dated May 1, 1983: three years before the death of Fr. Jean Camignac. In his Foreword Bishop Thomas refers specifically to the same general state of affairs as was reported by the three Catholic papers mentioned above. There is no change of heart in either the ‘Institut Catholique’ or its president, Paul Poupard …

 

 

Philosophy of Origins

by

Damien F. Mackey

 

God, who lives beyond time, has made everything that is (John 1:1-2):

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made”.

God created all ex nihilo, “not out of anything”.

 

God and Creation

Jesus Christ has revealed God as a Trinity of Persons, a Communion or Family of Love.

According to Pope Francis: Christ “has shown us the face of God, One in substance and Triune in Persons; God is all and only Love, in a subsisting relationship that creates, redeems, and sanctifies all: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

The Son of God showed that God first sought us, and revealed that eternal life is precisely “the immeasurable and gratuitous love of the Father that Jesus gave on the Cross, offering his life for our salvation.”

“And this love, by the action of the Holy Spirit, has irradiated a new light upon the earth and in every human heart that welcomes it.”

“May the Virgin Mary help us to enter ever more, with our whole selves, into the trinitarian Communion, to live and bear witness to the love that gives sense to our existence”.

The Holy Family, Jesus (in his humanity), Mary and Joseph, is an icon of the Holy Trinity, Joseph reflecting the Father and Mary (the Immaculate Conception) reflecting the Holy Spirit (the uncreated Immaculate Conception).

God, who lives beyond time, has made everything that is (John 1:1-2): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made”.

God created all ex nihilo, “not out of anything”.

Psalm 33:9: “He spoke, and it was.” That is, its existence depended on his Word; the universe sprang into being at his command; he had only to speak, and it arose in all its grandeur where before there was nothing.

I personally do not favour the concept of a Big Bang explosion, but I might be wrong.

Can anything constructive, let alone our glorious cosmos, emerge from an explosion?

Proverbs 8:30 describes Wisdom at play, as beautifully explained here:

This song describes the dynamic of authentic play. Play is not wasting time, but

entering into time with fullness of heart. This reflects rejoicing in the birth of each new day, delighting in how we as God’s children co-create with God, bringing forth a world of beauty.

“Day after day, God’s wisdom at play in the universe,

delighting to be with us, the children of earth”.

Wondrous Wisdom, rejoicing in earth’s birth and rebirth:

majestic mountains, rolling hills, roaring waters, flowing streams.

Playful Wisdom, setting out a table of fine food;

with whole grain bread, full-bodied wine, bountiful banquet blessing with joy.

Creative Wisdom, dancing on the edge of chaos;

divine desire dwells deep within, risking passion, daring us to dream.

Gentle Wisdom, calling out with dawns’ first light;

graceful instruction, creative counsel, whispers of wisdom speak softly to our heart.

Radiant Wisdom, sparkling starlight, flame of love,

resplendent as sunlight at mid-day, fields of wildflowers bright and alive.

“Gentle Wisdom” – hard to reconcile this with a Big Bang!

We need to learn again how, like Wisdom, to make ‘work’, playful, and not a soul-destroying drudge. God’s universe is intimately known to Him, for He “telleth the number of the stars: and calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 146:4, Douay). He rolled out those mighty luminaries like a child playing with marbles, but all done with a sublime teleological purpose (Genesis 1:14), to “serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years”.

Nowhere is this fact better exemplified than in Lieutenant-Colonel G. Mackinlay,’s The Magi: How They Recognised Christ’s Star (Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), in which the author demonstrates that the heavenly cycles when properly co-ordinated with the life of Jesus Christ reveal a stupendous witness of sun, moon and stars as appropriately marking sacred times.

Those billions of years posited by astronomers and physicists seem to me to be ridiculous and eccentric. Who can reasonably think in terms of such massive numbers?

The solar system is, in my opinion, geocentric.

Anyway, no one can prove this statement to be un-scientific or wrong.

Some qualified scientists, at least, have cast serious doubt upon the supposed ‘vast cosmic ocean of dark energy (matter)’.

According to: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/bang.php#axzz4k

“Religious circles embraced the idea of an expanding universe because for the universe to be expanding, then at some point in the past it had to originate from a single point, called the “Big Bang”. Indeed, the concept of the Big Bang did not originate with Edwin Hubble himself but was proposed by a Catholic Monk, Georges Lemaître in 1927, two years before Hubble published his observations of the Red Shift.

The “Big Bang” coincided nicely with religious doctrine and just as had been the case with epicycles (and despite the embarrassment thereof) religious institutions sought to encourage this new model of the universe over all others, including the then prevalent “steady state” theory. In 1951 Pope Pius XII declared that Georges Lemaître’s work proved the Christian dogma of divine creation of the universe.

Then history repeated itself. Evidence surfaced that the “Big Bang” might not really be a workable theory in the form of General Relativity, and its postulation that super massive objects would have gravity fields so strong that even light could not escape, nor would matter be able to differentiate.

Since the entire universe existing in just one spot would be the most super massive object of all, the universe could not be born”.

The science fiction version of cosmology with which scientists must assail us today – with its great galloping galaxies, cosmic vacuum cleaning Black Holes, microwave cooking radiation and Doppelganger (or is that Doppler?) Effect – seems to be entirely lacking in any sort of cogent Divine plan – the true structure of the universe.

It is all yet awaiting, I believe, a wiser interpretation.

There may well be, for example, a cosmic compatibility between the structure of the universe, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Garden of Eden; the Temple in Jerusalem (patterned on the Garden of Eden); and the Tent of Meeting. In the Book of Hebrews, St. Paul tells us that the Tabernacle, and all its services, were “patterns of things in the heavens” (Hebrews 9:23). The physical objects associated with the earthly sanctuary were “figures of the true” (Hebrews 9:24) — the “shadow of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5).

The Garden of Eden was, like the Temple afterwards, a micro-cosmos.

Dr. Ernest L. Martin’s “The Temple Symbolism in Genesis” is well worth reading in this regard. “Each physical item had its spiritual counterpart in Heaven”.

Early Genesis and Toledôt

The Triune God is not affected by time.

Genesis 1 has nothing to do with the time taken by God to create the universe – a ridiculous suggestion! So, Creationists and Evolutionists are free to debate the actual age of the earth.

As some have divined, Genesis 1 is (at least in part) a revelation to man of God’s work of creation. Man – and not God, who never tires nor ceases (Isaiah 40:28) – needs to retire in the evening and then to resume again in the morning.

The Six Days (Hexaëmeron) were real, 24-hour days.

Key to the structure of the Book of Genesis are the eleven colophon divisions, “These are the generations of …”.

Here is an arrangement of it:

Tablet	Starting Verse	Ending Verse	Owner or  Writer
1	Genesis 1:1	Genesis 2:4a	God Himself (?)
2	Genesis 2:4b	Genesis 5:1a	Adam
3	Genesis 5:1b	Genesis 6:9a	Noah
4	Genesis 6:9b	Genesis 10:1a	Shem, Ham & Japheth
5	Genesis 10:1b	Genesis 11:10a	Shem
6	Genesis 11:10b	Genesis 11:27a	Terah
7	Genesis 11:27b	Genesis 25:19a	Isaac
8	Genesis 25:12	Genesis 25:18	Ishmael, through Isaac
9	Genesis 25:19b	Genesis 37:2a	Jacob
10	Genesis 36:1	Genesis 36:43	Esau, through Jacob
11	Genesis 37:2b	Exodus 1:6	Jacob’s 12 sons

These “generations” (Hebrew: toledôt) constitute the family histories of the various biblical patriarchs leading up to Moses. These (and not the fragmentary and confusing JEDP sources) are the documents upon which Moses drew to compile what we now call the Book of Genesis, of which he was the editor, but not the author.

The first of these toledôt, concluding Genesis 1, indicates this primary part of Genesis to be a “book” (2:4):

αυτήThis 3588ηis the 976βίβλοςbook 1078γενέσεωςof the origin 3772ουρανούof heaven 2532καιand 1093γηςearth

Moses substantially wrote the remainder of the Pentateuch, as according to tradition.

The Pentateuch would receive further editing, probably by the likes of Samuel, Solomon, Ezra.

Location of Paradise and Eden

Helpful geographical additions provided by editor Moses (Genesis 2:11-14), to elucidate for his contemporaries what had originally been a very simple account of the hydrography presented in Genesis 2 (Adam’s toledôt), enable us to identify the four rivers apparently originating from a single river in Eden. Clearly, the Tigris and Euphrates are the rivers still known today in Mesopotamia, and the Gihon is the circuitous Blue Nile of Ethiopia.

The Pishon, far more disputed, is presumably also towards the west, for reasons of symmetry. Some would place the Pishon in the region of Saudi Arabia.

These four rivers were still flowing many centuries later, in the days of Sirach, who now also included the Nile and the Jordan (Sirach 24:25-27). {Naturally, with the passing of time, and due to catastrophism and severe tectonic activity – for example, the Noachic Flood and the emergence of the Great Rift Valley – the source, courses and capacities of these primeval rivers would have altered significantly}.

Throughout this ancient riverine system stretched the well-irrigated Paradise.

The Garden of Eden, where ancient Jerusalem would later be situated, was central to Paradise.

That is why Jerusalem is said in the Scriptures to be at “the centre of the earth” (e.g. Ezekiel 38:12). It also explains why Jesus Christ could pin upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the murder of Abel, by Cain (cf. Genesis 4:8; Luke 11:51), ‘… from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary’.

The Creation of Man

Since “… our God is in heaven: He hath done all things whatsoever He would” (Psalm 113:11, Douay), the Triune God could have, had he so wished, created humankind by using an evolutionary process, just as he could have formed the universe through the agency of a Bang.

Pope Pius XII (Humani Generis, 1950) did not entirely discount the possibility of man’s having evolved from a lower form, but with an important qualification:

36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.

I personally find the theory of evolution to be un-scientific and against common sense.

The most pertinent comment about it, I believe, came from the witty pen of G. K. Chesterton: “The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing”. And again: “Anthropologists … have to narrow their minds to the materialistic things that are not notably anthropic. They have to hunt through history and pre-history something which emphatically is not Homo Sapiens, but is always in fact regarded as Simius Insipiens”.

The “Cambrian Explosion”, that sudden appearance in the fossil record of complex animals with mineralized skeletal remains, is one sort of ‘explosion’ that I would accept. And it appears to be disastrous for the theory of evolution, which really likes things to happen very slowly.

Whilst, according to Genesis 1:27, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”, the evolutionists promote a bestial origin for humanity. And they pitch back the origins of man with the increasing additions of a zero. Mungo Man (Australia), a relative youngster in the anthropological scheme of things, went from a 60,000 years old estimate to a 40,000 years old estimate in the space of a week.

No one batted an eyelid.

Skeletal remains must be force-fitted into a pre-conceived evolutionary matrix.

Those fine Neanderthals, for instance, have apparently been thus ‘doctored’. Dr. Jack Cuozzo, examining the skull of a ‘teenage Neanderthal’ in Germany, ‘found once again that the replica skull on display was made to look apelike, but a color slide purchased at the museum showed that the lower jaw was dislocated, positioned 30mm out of its socket!  This brought the upper jaw 30mm forward, looking more like a muzzle, and very apelike’.

The Neanderthals, who were physically far superior to us, and who lived much longer than we, were the long-lived antediluvian peoples, some of these also continuing on for a time after the Noachic Flood until this Divine decree was fully realised (Genesis 6:4): “Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years’.”

A great ‘sin’ of certain scientists today is to imagine that they are fully equipped and entitled to pontificate philosophically and theologically. Most of them are not qualified to do this. Whilst science and technology have brought immense material benefits to our modern world, philosophy itself does not benefit at all from science speak.

We need a return to the pursuit of realism and common sense.

David Collits has well explained it (“Opening up to being – learning to trust ourselves again”):

“An air of unreality pervades current day discourse. Focus on identity rights, same-sex ‘marriage’, unisex bathrooms, safe spaces, the mendaciously called ‘Safe Schools’ and so on bespeaks not only a divorce from tradition and custom, but more fundamentally a divorce from reality itself. Something unreal persists in political agitation for a panoply of rights not rooted in human nature or the cosmos itself, and which in fact denies the existence of human nature as such.

Such campaigning is based upon the liberal conceit constitutive of modernity that meaning and identity flows from an ever-expanding assertion of the will and not who we are as human beings. On this view, there is no human nature: I choose, therefore I am. This disconnection from reality is not confined to political issues but permeates our technology-saturated culture. Restoring contact with the real is vital for our culture to convey authentic meaning, as well as how we form our children, use technology and even how we worship.

… the further we are from an unmediated experience of reality, the further we are from God. It is not possible even to think of God philosophically or theologically if one has not first been exposed to the creation that God has put in front of us.

We come to know Being itself through exposure to created being. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” so wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. God, transcendent but immanent to creation, is revealed in the beauty and order of the natural realm perceived in the senses and apprehended in the mind. …. because we are body-soul beings, truth is known to our minds because it is first known to our senses.

Catholicism is not a gnostic religion or philosophy in which knowledge is mediated directly to the mind apart from ‘evil’ matter. Knowledge of God comes first through sensory perception. It is not for nothing that Christ uses parables and lessons based on everyday contact with the earth: the mustard seed and the big tree it becomes, employment in the vineyard, the lilies of the field, the fig tree, the pearl, the field, and so on. Man’s first home was a Garden. The Prince of the Apostles’ occupation was to fish. The Church’s liturgy and sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist, incorporate and elevate basic human and earthly realities: flowing water, bread and wine, oil. Authentic culture arises from liturgical cult fostered on humus, work with the soil that humbles us and can yet be offered to God. Genuine education grows around liturgical cult and is fostered by immersion in the Western canon, whose own roots are in that liturgical culture.

Centuries of rapid technological development, and decades of material wealth and relative peace in the West have inured generations of people to the vicissitudes and hardships that have been the common lot of humanity. Underappreciated perhaps is the negative effect that this material wealth has on the capacity for us to perceive created being and through that God himself. Especially is this acute in the case of the millennial generation, about which much has been written, from issues of housing affordability to its members’ apparent sense of entitlement and ‘flakiness’. ….

Ours is a technological age predicated … on the Modernist idea that reality itself is to be rejected and replaced with artificial constructions of our own, not simply technological but philosophical and ethical as well. The eclipse of religion, gender ideology, and the deconstruction of marriage and the family in the West are the end result of centuries of philosophical and cultural unrealism”.

Metaphysics, which has been replaced by bankrupt modernism and scientism, sorely needs to be revived. But, this time, metaphysics needs to be firmly established upon biblical (Hebrew) foundations, and not as a product of the ancient pagan Greeks.

The Father of Philosophy is God the Father, who created the human mind.

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2)”, wrote pope John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio.

The Fall

The real existence of Adam and Eve, and of Noah (and his posterity), though almost universally doubted today (including some church leaders, it seems), may find a scientific ally in science. Do not geneticists refer to the maternal ancestor of all living humans as “Eve”?

The mitochondrial Eve, they call her, to whom our species is robustly and genetically linked.

The ‘crafty serpent’ in Eden (Genesis 3:1), the Devil, Satan the accuser, the “great, fiery red Dragon” of the Apocalypse (12:3), cunningly masterminded the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Whilst this has been catastrophic for humanity, and for the whole created world, nevertheless, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Roman 5:20). God, as has been famously remarked, is able to take a discordant note (such as the Fall) and write a whole new symphony.

Always a one better than the first.

He may use a ‘rival operation’. Thus the serpent seduced the woman, but now the new Woman, Mary, will crush the serpent’s head.

Saint Louis de Montfort in his Treatise on True Devotion to Mary, wrote of this marvellous cosmic bouleversement:

“God has established only one enmity — but it is an irreconcilable one — which will last and even go on increasing to the end of time. That enmity is between Mary, his worthy Mother, and the devil, between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin and the children and followers of Lucifer. Thus the most fearful enemy that God has set up against the devil is Mary, his holy Mother. From the time of the earthly paradise, although she existed then only in his mind, he gave her such a hatred for his accursed enemy, such ingenuity in exposing the wickedness of the ancient serpent and such power to defeat, overthrow and crush this proud rebel, that Satan fears her not only more than angels and men but in a certain sense more than God himself”.

Revelation 12:1-3: “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labour and in pain to give birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads”.

The Triune God, a Family of Love, is the all-seeing Creator.

But, in our age, the Devil is furiously leading a campaign of ‘sin against God’s creation’, particularly against the family. This is the final onslaught.

Such, indeed, was the firm view of Fatima seer, Sister Lucia:

“… the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue”. And then she concluded: “However, Our Lady has already crushed its head”.

Dr. Ernest L. Martin presented a strong case for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden to have been a fig tree – a view supported by tradition. Commenting on Jesus’s somewhat enigmatic and ‘out of season’ cursing of the barren fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22), Martin wrote (Secret of Golgotha, p. 260):

“It [the withered and dead fig tree] signified that NO LONGER would that symbolic tree be in the midst of humanity TO ENCOURAGE MANKIND TO SIN IN THE MANNER OF OUR FIRST PARENTS. But there is even more teaching. It meant that when Christ went to that miraculous tree looking for some figs to eat (like Eve did), CHRIST WOULD NOT FIND ANY WHATSOEVER! This signified that there was NOT going to be a REPETITION of what Eve (and later Adam) did in regard to the fig tree that they partook of. One fig tree [in the Garden of Eden] was the instrument to bring ‘sin’ into the world, BUT THE SON OF GOD COULD NOT FIND ANY FIGS ON HIS FIG TREE (the miraculous tree on the Mount of Olives that was typical of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Christ cursed THAT symbolic tree at the top of Olivet SO THAT NO MAN WOULD EAT OF IT AGAIN. And to COMPLETE his victory over sin, four days later Christ was going to be SACRIFICED FOR THE SINS OF THE WORLD JUST A FEW YARDS AWAY FROM THIS WITHERED AND DEAD TREE”.

That ‘rival operation’ again: Since Satan had used a tree to engineer the Fall, so would God use a Tree to undo Satan’s work. Galatians 4:4-5: “God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons”. And Colossians 2:13-15:

“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the Cross”.

Christ’s agonising journey to Calvary and to his immolation upon the Cross was, in fact, a triumphal parade, thereby ending the reign of Satan – a foe forever now with ‘a crushed head’.

Dr. Martin’s interpretation of the fig tree might well explain why Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together to hide their shame immediately after the fruit-eating incident (Genesis 3:7).

Adam and Eve were no longer permitted to live in the Garden or to have access to the salutary Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24): “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life”.

Although Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden, they still remained in the territory of Eden. It is important to note that the “Garden” and the country of “Eden” were not synonymous.

The Garden was in Eden.

According to some traditions, only Enoch and (later) Melchizedek were ever allowed after that to dwell in the Garden of Eden.

Pope Francis criticises overuse of adjectives

Pope gives views on language in speech to Vatican communications team

 

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Tue 24 Sep 2019 17.53 BST Last modified on Wed 25 Sep 2019 10.45 BST

 

Pope Francis has taken aim at adjectives while giving his views on language to the Vatican communications team, saying: “I am allergic to those words.”

In a speech to the team on Monday, the pope took particular aim at the word “authentic”, especially when describing “authentic Christians”.

“We have fallen into the culture of adjectives and adverbs, and we have forgotten the strength of nouns … Why say authentically Christian? It is Christian! The mere fact of the noun ‘Christian’, ‘I am Christ’ is strong: it is an adjective noun, yes, but it is a noun.

“The communicator must make people understand the weight of the reality of nouns that reflect the reality of people. And this is a mission of communication: to communicate with reality, without sweetening with adjectives or adverbs.”

The Vatican Dicastery for Communication, led by prefect Paolo Ruffini, underwent a revamp this year, with Matteo Bruni, a British-Italian, appointed as director of the press office in June. Bruni’s appointment came after the abrupt departure of American Greg Burke in late December.

Francis began his speech to the communications team by saying: “I have a speech to read, it’s not that long, it’s seven pages … but I’m sure that after the first one the majority of you will fall asleep.”

He later added: “For the Church, communication is a mission. No investment is too great for spreading the Word of God. At the same time, every talent must be well spent, made to bear fruit.”

Francis thanked the team, which is also responsible for maintaining his hugely popular Twitter account, for their work.

“But what should communication be like?” he said. “One of the things you must not do is advertising, mere advertising. You must not behave like human business that try to attract more people … To use a technical word: you must not proselytise. It is not Christian to proselytise.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/24/pope-francis-criticises-overuse-of-adjectives

 

Prophet Daniel and ‘Plato’

by

 Damien F. Mackey

 

 

The view of certain of the Fathers of the Church, that much of Greek philosophy was borrowed from the Hebrews, has led me – with the benefit of a revised history – to be able

to propose that sages who are traditionally regarded as Ionian and mainland Greek

(and Italian) philosophers may have been, in their original guise, Hebrews (Israelites, Jews).

  

 

Introduction

From the details given in the Book of Daniel it may be argued that Daniel’s floruit as the governor of Babylon extended from the early reign of Nebuchednezzar until the early reign of Cyrus. In conventional terms, this would be, in round figures, from 600 BC to 540 BC – approximately 60 years. King “Nebuchednezzar”, in awe of Daniel’s wisdom after the Jewish sage had recalled and interpreted the king’s dream, had made Daniel the ruler of Babylon (Daniel 2:48): “Then the king placed Daniel in a high position and lavished many gifts on him. He made him ruler over the entire province of Babylon and placed him in charge of all its wise men”. V. 21: “And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus”.

The last date that the Book of Daniel gives us for its hero is the third year of King Cyrus (10:1): “In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia, a revelation was given to Daniel (who was called Belteshazzar). Its message was true and it concerned a great war. The understanding of the message came to him in a vision”.

Considering Daniel’s significance to Babylon and Medo-Persia, it should be possible to find in the Neo-Babylonian records a governor of Babylon of long duration, who had continued until the early reign of Cyrus. Such, at least, is my view.

Less optimistic about the possibility of finding any such sort of account of Daniel (Belteshazzar) in the historical records , however, is Robert D. Wilson (Studies in the Book of Daniel, Vol. 2) http://www.biblicalresearch.info/page9d.html

Was Daniel An Historical Character?

There are those who doubt the historicity of Daniel upon the grounds that his name does not appear in the records of the period of the exile. One noted critic stated the case thus: “It is natural that we should turn to the monuments and inscriptions of the Babylonian, Persian, and Median Empires to see if any message can be found of so prominent a ruler, but hitherto neither his name has been discovered, nor the faintest trace of his existence.”

Dr. Wilson discusses this phase of the question thoroughly, looking at the various types of inscriptions that have come to us and showing that it is most unreasonable to base an argument upon the kind of data that we have, especially upon the lack of evidence. After setting forth the case in an impartial manner and discussing pro and con every possibility, Dr. Wilson draws this conclusion:

“Inasmuch, then, as these inscriptions mention no one filling any of the positions, or performing any of the functions or doing any of the deeds, which the book of Daniel ascribes to its hero Belteshazzar; how can anyone expect to find in them any mention of Daniel, in either its Hebrew or its Babylonian form? And is it fair, in view of what the monuments of all kinds make known to us, to use the fact that they do not mention Daniel at all as an argument against his existence?

“What about the numerous governors, judges, generals, priests, wise men writers, sculptors, architects, and all kinds of famous men, who must have lived during that long period? Who planned and supervised the building of the magnificent canals, and walls, and palaces, and temples of Babylon? Who led the armies, and held in subjection and governed the provinces and adjudged cases in the high courts of justice, and sat in the king’s council? Who were the mothers and wives and queenly daughters of the monarchs who sat upon the thrones of those mighty empires? Had the kings no friends no favorites, no adulatory poets or historians, no servile prophets, no sycophantic priests, no obsequious courtiers, who were deemed worthy to have their names inscribed upon these memorials of royal pride and victory; that we should expect to find there the name of Daniel, a Hebrew captive, a citizen of an annihilated city, a member of a despised and conquered nation, a stranger living on the bounty of the king, an alien, a slave, whose very education was the gift of his master and his elevation dependent on his grace? Let him believe who can. As for me, were the documents multiplied tenfold, I would not expect to find in them any reference to this humble subject of imperious kings.”

[End of quotes]

Let us not give up so easily.

 

A Possible Candidate for Daniel

If my recent revision of Neo-Babylonian history is correct, then this should affect somewhat – but also assist, hopefully – the search for the historical Daniel. Given my argument that some of the Neo-Babylonian kings have been duplicated, and perhaps even triplicated:

 

Aligning Neo-Babylonia with Book of Daniel. Part Two: Merging late neo-Assyrians with Chaldeans

https://www.academia.edu/38330399/Aligning_Neo-Babylonia_with_Book_of_Daniel._Part_Two_Merging_late_neo-Assyrians_with_Chaldeans

this series being supplemented by another article:

“Nebuchednezzar” of the Book of Daniel

https://www.academia.edu/35847164/_Nebuchednezzar_of_the_Book_of_Daniel

then one might expect the potential 60 years of floruit for Daniel as governor of Babylon to be somewhat reducible.

Whilst there may not be any known governor of Babylon from the early reign of Nebuchednezzar II until the first few years of Cyrus – as I’d anticipate from the Book of Daniel that there should be – with my new identification of Nebuchednezzar (and Daniel’s “Nebuchednezzar”) with King Nabonidus, then such an official comes right into view.

He is Nabu-ahhe-bullit, who was governor of Babylon from at least Nabonidus’s 8^th year until the 3^rd year of Cyrus. Thus we read in the following article

(http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?id=177754;article=15087;

From the contemporary cuneiform contract tablets, we know that Terike-sarrutsu was the governor (shakin mati) of Babylonia in Year 1 Nabunaid [Nabonidus] (555/4 BC).

Nabu-ahhe-bullit succeeded him as office holder by Year 8 Nabunaid (548/7 BC). This man remained in office down to Year 3 Cyrus but became a subordinate of the governor Gubaru, the appointee of Cyrus, when Babylon was captured by the army of Cyrus in 539 BC. He is not to be confused with Ugbaru.

[End of quote]

Rather than Daniel’s having at this stage become “a subordinate” of Gubaru’s, though, he may have departed (one way or another) from the political scene.

By now Daniel would have been in his 60’s or 70’s.

This is how I would tentatively reconstruct the chronology of his governorship:

Daniel, as Nabu-ahhe-bullit, had been appointed governor of Babylon close to the third year of Nebuchednezzar (= Nabonidus), who reigned for 43 years. That is a service of four decades.

He continued on through the 2-3 years of Belshazzar, son of Nabonidus, envisaging himself in Susa (Daniel 8:1-2): “In the third year of King Belshazzar’s reign, I, Daniel, had a vision, after the one that had already appeared to me. In my vision I saw myself in the citadel of Susa in the province of Elam …”.

He was still in Babylon in the 1^st year of Cyrus, but then moved to Susa, Cyrus’s capital, and served the king until his 3^rd year.

The Name

 

It is thought that the Babylonian name that “Nebuchednezzar” gave to Daniel, Belteshazzar, is not actually a Bel name, as definitely is Belshazzar (Bel-sarra-usur), “Baal protect the King”.

That Belteshazzar is more of a balatu (“life”) type of name.

Correspondingly, we read at (http://biblehub.com/commentaries/expositors/daniel/): “Thus the name Belteshazzar seems to be connected in the writer’s mind with Bel [sic], the favourite deity of Nebuchadrezzar; but it can only mean Balatu-utsur , “his life protect,” which looks like a mutilation”.

That does not mean that the name given to Daniel would have lacked reference to a deity. For “Nebuchednezzar” specifically said (Daniel 4:8): “Finally, Daniel came into my presence and I told him the dream. (He is called Belteshazzar, after the name of my god, and the spirit of the holy gods is in him.)”. From this it might be expected that Daniel was given the name of the god whose name was held likewise by the king (Nebuchednezzar/Nabonidus): namely, Nabu.

Appropriately, in the name of the long-lived governor of Babylon, Nabu-ahhe-bullit, we have both the Nabu element and the balatu-like element in bullit. This element, bullit, at least, is an appropriate one for the first part of the name, Belte-shazzar.

However, there is also the Nabu-ahhe-bullit like name, Nabu–bullitsu (e.g. in Sir W. Budge’s Babylonian Life and History, Index, p. 159), that comes yet closer to Belteshazzar, which is, after all, a foreign transliteration of an originally Babylonian name.

Finally, now with my revised Neo-Babylonian history, we have virtually a perfectly matching chronology for Daniel and his proposed alter ego, Nabu-ahhe-bullit.

 

* * * * *

There are various articles written according to which Plato’s views were based upon, now Babylonian, now Egyptian concepts. There is, for instance: “On the Babylonian Origin of Plato’s Nuptial Number”, by George A. Barton, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 29 (1908), pp. 210-219. On p. 210, the author goes so far as to write: “The passage in which Plato introduces this mystic number is said to be the most difficult passage in his writings”.

Gary Geck, however, regards the land of Egypt as the place of primary inspiration for Plato (http://brightmorningstar.blog.com/2013/08/08/platos-ideal-state-based-on-egypt/):

Put yourself into Plato’s shoes in the 4th Century BCE [sic]. What was the paragon of political perfection? Egypt of course, which was ancient even to Plato. Egypt was ruled by philosopher kings of a sort. The priest-class was said to have had tremendous influence over the Pharaohs. Who was the Pharaoh, but the highest of the philosopher/priests (a god even perhaps to them). It is my belief that Plato’s ideal state was based on Egypt. Several times during the Platonic works, references to Egypt are made and all paint the ancient kingdom in the light of a wise and mature state. As he writes in the Timaeus from the Egyptian perspective, “You Hellenes are ever children”. Keep in mind that Egypt had been around for thousands when Plato was writing this. A remarkable feat for any culture. And even more remarkable was the fact that Egypt remained conservative and traditional throughout this time. Egypt was the place to go for learning and spiritual initiation. Plato must have believed that Egypt’s longevity was because of their love of wisdom (Greek: philosophos). Alexander the Great choose Egypt as the location for Alexandria for good reason. Plato was said to have visited Egypt seeking knowledge [McEvoy, James (1984). “Plato and The Wisdom of Egypt” Irish Philosophical Journal (Belfast: Dept. of Scholastic Philosophy, Queen’s University of Belfast)] and then returned to Athens many years before writing the Republic. ….

[End of quote]

Or was the influence upon Plato and the Greeks, instead, a Persian (Magian)/Babylonian mix? (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/will-durant-the-story-of-philosophy-plato/):

I found an interesting article about Plato on David Livingstone’s site while reading about the roots of alchemy for something that came up in the comments section of your latest show. The part I found particularly intriguing was this tidbit: “The subject of Persian or Babylonian influences had been a contentious one in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The subject currently continues to receive attention from several leading scholars, including Walter Burkert, and M. L. West. On the whole, however, the idea has yet to penetrate into mainstream circles, because of a xenophobia which insists on the unique “genius” of the Greeks. The most detailed examination of the matter had been conducted by the greatest of the last century’s scholars, Franz Cumont. His work, Les Mages Hellenisees, or the Hellenized Magi, a compendium of ancient sources on the subject, has received little attention in the English world, due to the fact that it has not been translated. This continues to mar criticism of his theories, as most critics have not read the brunt of his work. Scholars have usually dismissed the possibility of Persian influence in Greece, because of the lack of similarity between Zoroastrian and Greek ideas. However, what these scholars have failed to see, as Cumont has pointed out, is that those Magi the Greeks came into contact with were not orthodox, but heretics. The only way to reconstruct their doctrines is by accumulating the numerous remnants of comments about them in the ancient sources. By reconstructing these pieces, we find that Magian doctrines are far removed from, or even inimical, to orthodox Zoroastrian ones. Cumont discovered that these Magi practiced a combination of harsh dualism with elements of Babylonian astrology and magic, which composed a Zoroastrian heresy known as Zurvanism. It is in this strange recomposition of ideas that we find the first elements that characterized Greek philosophy.

[End of quote]

‘Plato’ was almost certainly a non-historical ‘composite’, like Buddha and Mohammed were, and based on various biblical (and perhaps other) characters. but I think that a ‘cosmopolitan’ also well fits ‘him’. Continuing with the last quoted article above, we find the author now arguing for “a Jewish influence”, with reference to Daniel himself:

Another component which Cumont failed to identify though, was that of Jewish influence. The Magi cult of astrology and magic emerged in Babylon in the sixth century, precisely that era during which a great and prominent part of the Jewish population was there in exile. We cannot ascertain who was responsible for the introduction of these ideas, but the Bible itself identifies Daniel with one of the “wisemen”. Whatever the case may be, these ideas do appear in a recognizable Magian form initially among the Essenes, and more particularly in Merkabah mysticism, which scholars identify as the beginnings of the Kabbalah. There is little to examine the character of Jewish literature prior to the third century BC. Before that, it is in Greece where we find the elaboration of these ideas.” “Plato the Kabbalist” http://www.thedyinggod.com/node/105

[End of quote]

Let us consider some possible Danielic and other Hebrew influences upon what are now regarded as the writings of Plato. What follows (see Part Three) will be basically in line with previous articles of mine such as:

Re-Orienting to Zion the History of Ancient Philosophy

 

https://www.academia.edu/4105845/Re-Orienting_to_Zion_the_History_of_Ancient_Philosophy

 

Hebrew Bible as an Inspiration for Ancient Greek Philosophy

https://www.academia.edu/40215843/Hebrew_Bible_as_an_Inspiration_for_Ancient_Greek_Philosophy

Plato and Hebrew Wisdom

 

The writings of “Plato”, whoever he may have been, were undoubtedly influenced by Hebrew wisdom. Here we consider some likenesses to the Book of Job, for instance, before passing on to the Book of Daniel.

 

 

 

Introduction

 

To presume to translocate so-called ‘Greek’ philosophy, to Babylonia, or to Egypt, or to Palestine, are moves that are probably not going to go down well with many. A reader immediately responded to an early effort of mine along these lines (e-mail of 25 March 2010):

…. I have not had much of an introduction before to your other theses on the identities of various historical personages. I must admit to being somewhat sceptical of the Plato theory. I think you would need more than a few parallelisms to make such a case. I think the historical evidence would be in favor of the fact that Plato and Aristotle were living breathing Greeks, the latter being Alexander’s tutor in Macedonia ….

In an article written at this time I had 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 had, on the other hand, looked to turn this around by challenging the conventional dates, and by proposing an identification of ‘Plato’ as (in part) Baruch, a Jew, the young priest-scribe contemporaneous with Jeremiah. This reconstruction – which I have not been able properly to develop – would have, if it had proved legitimate, enabled me to take the testimony of the Fathers a positive step further. From the Book of Jeremiah we learned that Jeremiah and Baruch went together to Egypt.

‘Plato’ – a ‘composite’ character, anyway, according to my estimation – may have both Daniel and Baruch likenesses. Baruch, after all, is sometimes considered to have been another great sage of antiquity, Zoroaster.

Later I learned that St. Justin Martyr had, even earlier than the above-mentioned Church Fathers, espoused this 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.

Thus 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. Three key figures who presented this thesis are Justin Martyr “The most important second­ century apologist” {50. Grant 1973}, Titus Flavius Clemens known as Clement of Alexandria “the illustrious head of the Catechetical School at Alexandria at the close of the second century, was originally a pagan philosopher” (11, Robert 1857) and is renowned as being possibly the teacher of Origen. He was born either in Alexandria or Athens {Epiphs Haer, xxii.6}. Our final giant who supports this thesis is Eusebius of Caesarea known as the father of Church history. Each of these in their defense of the Christian faith presented some form of the thesis that the philosophers of Greece learned from the prophets of Israel. Our interest in this paper is on the arguments of the earliest of these writers, Justin Martyr. He represents the position of Christian apology in the middle of the second century, as opposed to the later Clement of Alexandria and the even later Eusebius of Caesarea.

In light of the stature and the credibility of these three Church Fathers even if the idea that Plato learned from Moses seems far fetched we would do well to take a closer look at the argument and the evidence presented by such men of stature. Justin was a philosopher who came from a pagan background. He issued from Shechem in Palestine. He was a marvelous scholar in his own right well read and well qualified to make informed judgments in the arena of philosophy.

Our purpose is to briefly look at the theses presented by Justin Martyr and to try to discern the plausibility of the thesis.

Justin Martyr and the line Plato took from Moses.

Justin Martyr was a prolific second century Apologist. He was born in Flavia Neapolis (Shechem) in Samaria. Well known for the local Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim and a temple built by Hadrian to Zeus Hypsistos. He later passed through Stoicism and the way of Aristotle’s disciples the Peripatetics and was rejected as unqualified to study Pythagoreanism and finally he met a Platonist with whom he advanced in his studies. To him the goal of Platonism was “the vision of God”. One day he met a Christian on the beach and was converted to the faith. He did not become a priest or bishop but took to teaching and defending the faith.

Text

He wrote many works and many more bear his name. However modern scholarship has judged that of the many works that bear his name only three are considered genuine. These are 2 Apologies and the Dialogue with the Jew Trypho. They are preserved in one manuscript of the year 1364 (Cod Par, gr. 450).

Language

Justin wrote in Greek, and right in the middle of the period of philosophy called Middle Platonism. The book in which he outlines his thesis that Moses and the prophets were a source for the Greek Philosophers is his first Apology. It is dated to 155-157 BC and was addressed to “The Emperor Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antonius Pius Caesar Augustus, and the sons Verissimus, philosopher, philosopher, and Lucius” Grant (52, 1973).

Context

Grant (1973) believes the reason which triggered the Apology was the martyrdom of Polycarp in 156 AD and the injustice of it during the bishopric of Anicetus. Even as this martyrdom and its report may have spurred Justin on to write so it had been that it was on seeing the fortitude of the Christian martyrs which had disposed him favorably towards the faith (Ap 2.12.1). ….

In the Apology 1 Justin gives the reason for his writing

“I, Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, present this address and petition on behalf of those of all nations who are unjustly hated and wantonly abused; my self being one of them” (Apology 1 chap).

The Apology 1 is divided into 60 chapters. The translation we are using is that of the Ante Nicene Fathers and can be seen at www.ccel.org The topics covered are many. He starts in chapter 2 by demanding justice, he requires that before the Christians are condemned they should be given a fair trial to see if they have committed any crimes or not. They should not be condemned merely for being Christian. He covers many subjects including: the accusation Christians were Atheists, faith in God; the Kingdom of Christ; God’s service; demonic teachings; Christ’s teachings and heathen analogies to it; non Christian worship; magic; exposing children, the Hebrew prophets and their prophecies about Christ, types of prophetic words from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This brings us to about chapter 38. At this point Justin begins to cover the issue of determinism and free will. He argues that although the future was prophesied it does not mean every thing is determined according to fate and man has no responsibility for he has no choice. Rather he points to Moses revealing God’s choice to Adam “Behold before thy face are good and evil: choose the good”. (Apol 1 44) And he quotes lsaiah’s appeal to Israel to wash and be clean and the consequences of doing so or not doing so. The consequences of disobedience are that the sword would devour Israel. Justin picks up on the statement regarding the sword and argues that it is not a literal sword which is referred to but “the sword of God is a fire, of which those who choose to do wickedly will become the fuel” (Apol 1 44). Justin having appealed to Moses and Isaiah as a warning to the Roman rulers now appeals to one with whom they are more familiar, Plato the philosopher, to support his case that man is free to choose good or evil. It is here that Justin makes a most interesting and intriguing statement rallying Plato to the side of Moses and Isaiah, in the eyes of the sons of the Emperor whom he calls philosophers.

And so, too, Plato, when he says, “The blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless” took this from the prophet Moses and uttered it.

For Moses is more ancient than all the Greek writers. And whatever both philosophers and poets have said concerning the immortality of the soul, or punishments after death, or contemplation of things heavenly, or doctrines of the like kind, they have received such suggestions from the prophets as have enabled them to understand and interpret these things. And hence there seem to be seeds of truth among all men; but they are charged with not accurately understanding [the truth] when they assert contradictories.

….

He appears to be making the claim that Plato who has “exerted a greater influence over human thought than any other individual with the possible exception of Aristotle” (Demos, 1927.vi} was dependent for his understanding of freewill and responsibility on Moses. The saying “the blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless (Aitia helomenou Theos d’ anaios) {Joann. Mdcccxlii,224}” was taken from Moses by Plato and uttered it {eipe}”.

[End of quote]

I shall continue with this commentary later in this article, when I come to discuss one of Plato’s famous Myths.

Plato and Likely Borrowings

from the Book of Job

 

There can be a similarity in thought between Plato and the Jewish sages, but not always a similarity in tone. Compared with the intense atmosphere of the drama of the Book of Job, for instance, Plato’s Republic, and his other dialogues, such as the Protagoras, brilliant as they are, come across sometimes as a bit like a gentlemen’s discussion over a glass of port.

1. Guthrie may have captured something of this general tone in his Introduction to Plato. Protagoras and Meno (Penguin, 1968), when he wrote (p. 20):

… a feature of the conversation which cannot fail to strike a reader is its unbroken urbanity and good temper. The keynote is courtesy and forbearance, though these are not always forthcoming without a struggle. Socrates is constantly on the alert for the signs of displeasure on the part of Protagoras, and when he detects them, is careful not to press his point, and the dialogue ends with mutual expressions of esteem. ….

[End of quote]

Compare this gentlemanly tone with e.g. Job’s ‘How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me?’ (19:1-3), and Eliphaz’s accusations of the holy man: ‘Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities [which supposed types of injustice on the part of Job Eliphaz then proceeds to itemise]’ (22:5).

In Plato’s dialogues, by contrast, we get pages and pages of the following sort of amicable discussion taken from the Republic (Bk. 2, 368-369):

[Socrates] ‘Justice can be a characteristic of an individual or of a community, can it not?’

[Adeimantus] ‘Yes’.

[Socrates] ‘And a community is larger than an individual?’

[Adeimantus] ‘It is”.

[Socrates] ‘We may therefore find that the amount of justice in the larger entity is greater, and so easier to recognize. I accordingly propose that we start our enquiry …’.

[Adeimantus] ‘That seems a good idea’, he agreed.

….

Though Protagoras is a famous Sophist, whose maxim “Man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, and of those that are not that they are not” (Plato’s Theaetetus 152), I have often quoted in a philosophical context {– and also in}:

The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’

https://www.academia.edu/8494268/The_Futile_Aspiration_to_Make_Man_the_Measure_of_All_Things_

this Protagoras, however, may actually be based upon – according to my new estimation of things – the elderly Eliphaz of the Book of Job. Whilst Eliphaz was by no means a Sophist along the Greek lines, he was, like Protagoras with Socrates, largely opposed to his opponent’s point of view.

And so, whilst the God-fearing Eliphaz would never have uttered anything so radical or atheistic as “man is the measure of all things”, he was however opposed to the very Job who had, in his discussion of wisdom, spoken of God as ‘apportioning out by measure’ all the things that He had created (Job 28:12, 13, 25).

Now, whilst Protagoras would be but a pale ghost of the biblical Eliphaz, some of the original (as I suspect) lustre does still manage to shine through – as with Protagoras’s claim that knowledge or wisdom was the highest thing in life (Protagoras 352C, D) (cf. Eliphaz in Job 22:1-2). And Guthrie adds that Protagoras “would repudiate as scornfully as Socrates the almost bestial type of hedonism advocated by Callicles, who says that what nature means by fair and right is for the strong man to let his desires grow as big as possible and have the means of everlastingly satisfying them” (op. cit., p. 22).

Eliphaz was later re-invented (I think) as Protagoras the Sophist from Abdera, as a perfect foil to Socrates (with Job’s other friends also perhaps emerging in the Greek versions re-cast as Sophists). Protagoras stated that, somewhat like Eliphaz, he was old enough to be the father of any of them. “Indeed I am getting on in life now – so far as age goes I might be the father of any one of you …” (Protagoras 317 C). That Eliphaz was old is indicated by the fact that he was the first to address Job and that he also referred to men older than Job’s father (Job 15:10). Now, just as Fr. R. MacKenzie (S.J.) in his commentary on “Job”, in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, tells of Eliphaz’s esteem for, and courtesy towards, Job (31:23):

Eliphaz is presumably the oldest of the three and therefore the wisest; he is certainly the most courteous and the most eloquent. He has a genuine esteem for Job and is deeply sorry for him. He knows the advice to give him, the wisdom that lays down what he must do to receive relief from his sufferings.

[End of quote],

so does Guthrie, reciprocally (I suggest), say: “Protagoras – whom [Socrates] regards with genuine admiration and liking” (op. cit., p. 22).

But, again, just as the righteous Job had scandalised his three friends by his levity, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (“Literal Exposition on Job”, 42:1-10), “And here one should consider that Elihu had sinned out of inexperience whereas Job had sinned out of levity, and so neither of them had sinned gravely”, so does Guthrie use this very same word, “levity”, in the context of an apparent flaw in the character of Socrates (ibid., p. 18):

There is one feature of the Protagoras which cannot fail to puzzle, if not exasperate, a reader: the behaviour of Socrates. At times he treats the discussion with such levity, and at other times with such unscrupulousness, that Wilamowitz felt bound to conclude that the dialogue could only have been written in his lifetime. This, he wrote, is the human being whom Plato knew; only after he had suffered a martyr’s death did the need assert itself to idealize his character.

[End of quote]

Job’s tendency towards levity had apparently survived right down into the Greek era. Admittedly, the Greek version does get much nastier in the case of Thrasymachus, and even more so with Callicles in the Gorgias, but in the Republic at least it never rises to the dramatic pitch of Job’s dialogues with his three friends. Here is that least friendly of the debaters, Thrasymachus, at his nastiest (Republic, Bk. I, 341):

[Socrates] Well, said I, ‘so you think I’m malicious, do you Thrasymachus?’

[Thrasymachus] ‘I certainly do’.

[Socrates] ‘You think my questions were deliberately framed to distort your argument?’

[Thrasymachus] ‘I know perfectly well they were. But they won’t get you anywhere; you can’t fool me, and if you don’t you won’t be able to crush me in argument’.

[Socrates] ‘My dear chap, I wouldn’t dream of trying’, I said ….

Socrates and Plato are similarly (like the Sophists) watered down entities by comparison with the Middle Eastern originals. Such is how the Hebrew Scriptures end up when filtered through the Greeks, [and, in the case of Plato, perhaps through the Babylonians before the Greeks, hence a double filtering]. Even then, it is doubtful whether the finely filtered version of Plato that we now have could have been written by pagan Greeks. At least some of it seems to belong clearly to the Christian era, e.g. “The just man … will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned … and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified” (Republic, Bk. 2, 362).

I submit that this statement would not likely have been written prior to the Gospels.

“Plato and Porphyry each made certain statements which might have brought them both to become Christians if they had exchanged them with one another”, wrote St. Augustine (City of God, XXII, 27).

What is clear is that the writings of Plato, as we now have them, had reached an impressive level of excellence and unparalleled literary sophistication.

Thus we read in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan and Free Press, 1967, V. 6), article “Plato” (p. 332):

Plato As a Writer

Greek prose reached its highest peak in the writings of Plato. His flexibility, his rich vocabulary, his easy colloquialism, and his high rhetoric, his humor, irony, pathos, gravity, bluntness, delicacy and occasional ferocity, his mastery of metaphor, simile and myth, his swift delineation of character – his combination of these and other qualities put him beyond rivalry. …

[End of quote]

Much may be owed here, however, to the Hebrew books, such as Job, which appears to have exerted a heavy influence upon Greek literature. See e.g. my article:

Similarities to The Odyssey of the Books of Job and Tobit

https://www.academia.edu/8914220/Similarities_to_The_Odyssey_of_the_Books_of_Job_and_Tobit

 

 

Plato and Images From Daniel

 

 

 

Could the mysterious name, “Plato” – he probably being a ‘composite’ character –

be actually derived from the first element (Belte-) in the prophet Daniel’s Babylonian name, Belteshazzar? 

 

It is inconceivable, I would suggest – and certainly Justin Martyr seems to have been of this opinion – that it was a pagan Greek who was the first to argue strongly for the immortality of the soul, as is sometimes accredited to Plato’s Socrates.

Or to have been the first one to have discovered the four cardinal virtues.

 

As noted earlier in this article, Daniel’s given name, Belteshazzar, is of course “a foreign transliteration of an originally Babylonian name”. That Babylonian name, as I suggested there, may have been Nabu-ahhe-bullit, the name of the governor of Babylon, which Daniel was.

What I intend to do primarily in this article is to take some of the most picturesque and famous images from the Book of Daniel, and see if we can find an echo of these in the life and writings of Plato. I refer to such images as King Nebuchednezzar’s Statue of Four Diverse Metals representing kingdoms (Daniel 2); King Belshazzar and the ‘Writing on the Wall’ (Daniel 5); and Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts (Daniel 7).

Let us now try to re-locate ‘Plato’ to what may well have been his proper Near Ancient Eastern environment, as Belteshazzar, in Babylonia.

Plato’s Usage of Key Images

from the Book of Daniel

‘Plato’ Derived from a Babylonian Name

Though ‘Plato’ is generally considered to have been the real name of the great philosopher, historian Julia Annas, who entirely accepts this, tells however of a “surprisingly substantial minor tradition” that (and this is more in accordance with our own view) “‘Plato’ was a nickname which stuck”.

Thus she writes (Plato. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2003, pp. 12-13):

Name or nickname?

Plato’s name was probably Plato. The ‘probably’ may surprise you; how can there be any doubt? Plato’s writings have come down to us firmly under that name. But within the ancient biographical tradition there is a surprisingly substantial minor tradition according to which ‘Plato’ was a nickname which stuck, while the philosopher’s real name was Aristocles. This is credible; Plato’s paternal grandfather was called Aristocles, and it was a common practice to call the eldest son after the father’s father. We have, however, no independent evidence that Plato was the eldest son. And ‘Plato’ does not appear to be a nickname; it turns up frequently in the period. Further, the explanations we find for it as a nickname are unconvincing. Because ‘Plato’ suggests platus, ‘broad’, we find the suggestion that Plato had been a wrestler known for his broad shoulders, or a writer known for his broad range of styles! Clearly this is just guessing, and we would be wise not to conclude that Plato changed his name or had it changed by others. But then what do we make of the Aristocles stories? We don’t know, and can’t tell. And this is frustrating. A change of name is an important fact about a person, but this ‘fact’ slips through our fingers.

Our ancient sources about Plato often put us into this position. There are plenty of stories in the ancient biographies of Plato, and frequently they would, if we could rely on them, give us interesting information about Plato as a person. But they nearly always dissolve at a touch.

[End of quote]

This is quite telling. One so often finds that the textbook historians have to conclude on a disappointing note like she does, because, owing to their pursuit of someone in the wrong era, or in the wrong country, they end up chasing ghosts through mists; exactly as this writer describes it here, “they … dissolve at a touch”. I claim instead, through a revision that corrects dates and finds the ‘other halves’ of historical people, to be rendering full-blooded characters, with substantial (auto)-biographical information; people who produce deeds and writings of zeal and passion.

The name ‘Plato’ did, I suggest, come about by the philosopher’s having his name “changed by others”, as the writer has said above, but which she rejects as an option. Here, I believe, is the original historical account of it: it is the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity.

(Daniel 1:3-7):

Then the king [Nebuchednezzar] commanded his palace master Ashpenaz to bring some of the Israelites of the royal family and of the nobility, young men without physical defect and handsome, versed in every branch of wisdom, endowed with knowledge and insight, and competent to serve in the king’s palace; they were to be taught the literature and language of the Chaldeans. The king assigned them a daily portion of food and wine. They were to be educated for three years, so that at the end of that time they could be stationed in the king’s court. Among them were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah [not of the tribe of Judah as the NRSV has it but] of the sons of Judah. The palace master gave them other names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.

These were, I believe, real historical people. And I have identified Daniel as the long-serving governor of Babylon: Nabu-ahhe-bullit.

Professor William Shea claims also to have identified Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Daniel’s friends, in ‘a five sided clay prism found in Babylon and now housed in the Istanbul museum. It gives a list of men and their titles. Three men listed on the prism have pronunciations which Shea thinks are very similar to the names of Daniel’s three friends. (http://www.biblehistory.net/newsletter/meshach_shadrach_abed-nego.htm).

No doubt this is a sincere attempt on the part of Shea.

However, I find myself generally in agreement with a sceptic’s refutation of it at: http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/012more.html

This biblical era is in fact extremely well attested historically – against the constant assertions that the Bible is not historical – by the abundance of seals and inscriptions naming many of the characters who appear in the Book of Jeremiah; not least of which being a seal of ‘Baruch son of Neriah’ (cf. Jeremiah 36:11; Baruch 1:1).

The name Plato, I have suggested, was taken from one element in Daniel’s given name, Belteshazzar. We might expect now that there was at least a double filtering of the original Daniel, from firstly the Semitic (Hebrew or Aramaïc) recording of him through Mesopotamia (Babylon), then, secondly, from Mesopotamia through Greece. And we could possibly add a further one, from pagan Greece to Greece of the early Christian era. So, while we could no longer expect the now highly processed and much refined Plato to be a dazzling reflection of Daniel, we might still, nonetheless, expect to find a discernible echo of this Daniel in Plato.

From the above scriptural text of Daniel 1 we learn that the young Jew and his confrères were either of the royal line, or aristocratic (possibly how Plato’s other name, Aristocles, and that of his father, Ariston, arose). The young men comprised a highly educated, skilled and wise élite. And their experience would now be vastly augmented in their new culture, with a different language and mythology, in the intense atmosphere of a tyrant king’s court.

{No wonder that the Republic of Plato is filled with discussions of tyranny and tyrant kings! (E.g. Book 8, § 8 and Book 9, § 9)}.

Note the emphasis, too, on education, which is also a major feature of the Republic; especially in the context of the Book of Daniel, as education for effective rulership, for competency in the king’s court – i.e., the education of the philosopher statesman.

It has been said that Plato may have had kings David and Solomon in mind when writing about ‘the Philosopher King’. More chronologically proximate, though, would be this incident of the brilliant young Daniel and his friends being educated towards governorship, to which Daniel managed fully to attain.

Who better than Daniel, anyway, would have qualified for Plato’s philosopher-statesman!

Here is the account of his marvellous statesman-like ability in Daniel 6:3-4:

Now Daniel so distinguished himself among the administrators and the satraps by his exceptional qualities that the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom. At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.

IMAGE ONE: NEBUCHEDNEZZAR’S STATUE

OF VARIOUS METALS (Daniel 2)

Daniel was, like Joseph in Egypt, an interpreter of dreams (another Platonic feature). But, whereas the seemingly benign ‘Pharaoh’ had actually told Joseph of what his dreams had consisted, King “Nebuchednezzar” had demanded that his wise men both recall the Dream and then interpret it: a seemingly impossible task, and one well beyond the powers of the Chaldean sages. But Daniel was up to it (Daniel 2:31-33):

‘You were looking, O king, and lo! there was a great statue, its brilliance extraordinary; it was standing before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. …’.

Such was the Dream. Daniel then interpreted it for the king as representing successive kingdoms, with Nebuchednezzar’s present Chaldean kingdom being the head of gold.

Similarly Plato, but in far less dramatic circumstances once again, proposes this very same sequence of metals; but he applies them to classes of men, not kingdoms. Plato does not actually call this a Dream, but “a fairy story like those the poets tell about”. Here is how it goes (Republic, Bk. 3, 415):

‘You are, all of you in this land, brothers. But when God fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is the greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and the rest. Now since you are all of the same stock, though children will commonly resemble their parents, occasionally a silver child will be born of golden parents, or a golden child of silver parents, and so on. Therefore the first and most important of God’s commandments to the Rulers is that they must exercise the function as Guardians with particular care in watching the mixture of metals in the characters of their children. If one of their own children has bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs: similarly, if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its nature, they will promote it appropriately to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. For they know that there is a prophecy that the State will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze’.

[End of quote]

Surely King Nebuchednezzar himself was being entirely Platonic in his command for the selection of the ‘golden boys’ of Israelite youth for education towards their holding a position in the king’s court! Similarly, too (cf. use of “promote” and “degrade” in Plato above), Nebuchednezzar “honoured those he wanted to honour, and degraded those he wanted to degrade” (Daniel 5:19).

Perhaps Plato derived the classes of descending order of metal refinement from an interpretation of Nebuchednezzar’s statue that would suggest that the lower down the statue one goes, the less superior the kingdom. But what is sometimes translated as “inferior” may not necessarily be the correct interpretation, given for instance the might of the later Persian Empire. So perhaps the Dream should be interpreted as meaning, not inferior, but lower down on the statue, and thus pertaining to chronology. This would be a tactful way to explain it to King Nebuchednezzar, at least, who would assuredly not want to have heard that any subsequent kingdom might turn out to be superior to his own. But note the “prophecy” in Plato above (Nebuchednezzar’s Dream entailed a prophecy of future history) that “the State” – currently the golden head – can “be ruined” by the “silver” and “bronze” entities.

Daniel, but also Plato according to his biography, had contact with a succession of powerful kings. These they tried to influence for good, with greater or lesser success.

Daniel’s kings, real historical characters, belonged to the successive Chaldean, Median and Persian empires that featured as metals (yet to be conclusively identified, I think) in Nebuchednezzar’s statue.

Plato’s kings were, typically in relation to the Greeks, situated further westwards on the Mediterranean, in Sicily. Arguments might be advanced for Plato’s kings, Dionysius I and II, and the chief minister, Dion, to represent either the Judean or the Mesopotamian rulers (Dion being an official) of Daniel’s era. Their similarity of names could perhaps suggest the Judean succession of similar names: Jehoiakim and his son, Jehoiachin, and the relative Zedekiah (= Jehozedek). But it might be rather hard to identify amongst these Chaldeans Plato’s Dion, who quite enthusiastically, apparently, embraced Plato’s blueprint for rulership, and who, according to Guthrie, “invited [Plato] to come and train Dionysus II … as a philosopher-statesman” (op. cit., p. 16).

Or the Platonic succession of rulers could represent Nebuchednezzar and Belshazzar, with perhaps Darius the Mede included. For example, Dionysius I, from whom Plato “learned something of tyranny at first hand”, might well stand for Nebuchednezzar, “an unjust king, the most wicked in all the world” (Daniel 3:32). The brother-in-law, Dion, may have been a Median king, such as Darius the Mede, with whose nation the Chaldean line had intermarried. Darius, like Dion, was favourable to Daniel. Dionysius II, of whom Plato completely despaired, could then be Belshazzar of the ‘Writing on the Wall’ notoriety, whom Daniel took to task for not learning from his father’s mistakes.

What’s in a Name?

 

So far, I have historically identified Daniel in Babylon as the long-ruling governor of that city, Nabu-ahhe-bullit, with Daniel’s Babylonian name, Belteshazzar, having been derived, in part, from the bullit element in that name.

And, taking that first element of Belteshazzar, Belte-, I have suggested that this might be from where was derived the mysterious name (likely a given name) of “Plato”.

And I am in the process of showing that some of the key images of Plato’s dialogues are reminiscent of some of the most famous incidents in the Book of Daniel.

Daniel’s given name, Belteshazzar, which is not in fact a Bel- name, appears to me to be a very poor foreign reconstruction of an original Babylonian name. Just like in the case of St. Paul’s Jannes and Mambres, in which it is very hard to discern the original Egyptian names.

 

IMAGE TWO: KING BELSHAZZAR AND

THE WRITING ON THE WALL (Daniel 5)

The Chaldean rulers of Babylon, as they are presented in the Book of Daniel, are a most interesting psychological study. The autocratic and tyrannical Nebuchednezzar eventually goes mad (4:28-33), but later returns to his senses and is said to have exalted the Most High God (vv. 34-37). His son, Belshazzar, however, is a ne’er do well from beginning to end, whom Daniel reprimands for his stubbornness and pride.

 

Plato’s Meno

It seems to me that the evil Chaldean king, Belshazzar, might find an echo in the person of Meno, in Plato’s Meno. He is not a king there, but a man of some power, nonetheless, a friend of the ruling family of Thessaly, and he has connections interestingly with the king of Persia (read Media?).

Guthrie tells of Meno as follows (Introduction to Plato. Protagoras and Meno, Penguin, 1968, pp. 101-102):

… The character of Meno, as a wealthy, handsome and imperious young aristocrat, visiting Athens from his native Thessaly, is well brought out in the dialogue itself. He is a friend of Aristippus, the head of the Aleuadae who were the ruling family in Thessaly, and his own family are xenoi (hereditary guest-friends) of the Persian king, a tie which must have dated from the time of Xerxes, who made use of Thessalian hospitality on his expedition against Greece. He knows the famous Sophist and rhetorician Gorgias, who had stayed at Larissa in Thessaly as well as meeting him in Athens. From Gorgias he has acquired a taste for the intellectual questions of the day, as seen through the eyes of the Sophists, whose trick question about the impossibility of knowledge comes readily to his lips.

Xenophon tells of his career as one of the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus and gives him a bad character, describing him as greedy, power-loving, and incapable of understanding the meaning of friendship. This account is probably prejudiced by Xenophon’s admiration for the Greek leader Clearchus, a grim and hardly likeable character, whose rival and personal enemy Meno was. There were rumours that Meno entered into treacherous relations with the Great King [of Persia], but he appears to have been finally put to death by him after the failure of the expedition, though possibly later than his fellow-prisoners.

[End of quote]

‘Bad character’, ‘greedy’, ‘power-loving’ ‘unloyal friend’, ‘connected with a Persian (Median) king’, but then ‘slain and replaced by the king of the Persians (Medes)’, all of this fits King Belshazzar and his replacement by Darius the Mede (Daniel 5:30-31). Belshazzar’s greed and his love of power and flattery is clearly manifest in this description of his great feast, one of the most celebrated feasts in history and in the Old Testament (Daniel 5:1-4):

King Belshazzar made a great festival for a thousand of his lords, and he was drinking wine in the presence of the thousand.

Under the influence of the wine, Belshazzar commanded that they bring in the vessels of gold and silver that his father Nebuchednezzar had taken out of the Temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his lords, his wives, his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the vessels of gold and silver that had been taken out of the Temple, the House of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them. They drank the wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

Obviously Meno could not match this sort of opulence and grandeur; but Socrates does say of him – and this is immediately before Socrates begins to write in the sand: “I see that you have a large number of retainers here” (Meno, 82).

We can gain some impression of King Belshazzar’s treacherous nature from Daniel’s pointed address to him (vv. 18-23):

‘O king, the Most High God gave your father Nebuchednezzar kingship, greatness, glory, and majesty. And because of the greatness that He gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. He killed those he wanted to kill, kept alive those he wanted to keep alive, honoured those he wanted to honour, and degraded those he wanted to degrade. But when his heart was lifted up his spirit was hardened so that he acted proudly, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory was stripped from him. He was driven from human society, and his mind was made like that of an animal. His dwelling was with the wild asses, he was fed grass like an oxen, and his body was bathed with the dew of heaven, until he learned that the Most High God has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals, and sets over it whomever He will. And you, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, even though you knew all this! You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven! The vessels of his Temple have been brought in before you, and you and your lords, your wives and your concubines have been drinking wine from them. You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know; but the God in whose power is your very breath, and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honoured.

Daniel would on this occasion have had the full attention of the whole company since these words of his were spoken just after King Belshazzar and his court had witnessed the terrifying apparition of the ‘Writing on the Wall’ whilst in the midst of their blasphemous celebration. Here is the description of it. And does it have a resonance anywhere in Plato? (vv. 5-9):

[As they were drinking the wine and praising their gods]:

Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote. Then the king’s face turned pale, and his thoughts terrified him. His limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. The king cried aloud to bring in the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the diviners; and the king said to the wise men of Babylon, ‘Whoever can read this writing and tell me its interpretation shall be clothed in purple, have a chain of gold around his neck, and rank third in the kingdom’. Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king the interpretation. Then King Belshazzar became greatly terrified and his face turned pale, and his lords were perplexed.

This fascinating life and death encounter I think may have inspired the whole drama of the (albeit pale by comparison) Meno.

Instead of the miraculous ‘Writing on the Wall’ of the Chaldean king’s palace, though, we get Socrates writing in the sand. Instead of the words that name weights and measures indicating the overthrow of a great kingdom, we get a detailed lesson in geometry. Instead of the stunned and terrified Chaldean king, we get Meno, who tends to be similarly passive in the face of the Socratic lesson. Instead of the exile, Daniel, we get Meno’s slave boy seemingly providing a confirmation of the matter, under the skilful prompting of Socrates.

Daniel enters the palace’s banquetting hall preceded by his reputation, though now somewhat faded from memory (as in the case of Joseph with the Oppressor Pharaoh). And Meno is aware of the legendary reputation of Socrates.

Let us compare the two accounts, taking firstly the biblical one (vv. 10-16):

The queen, when she heard the discussion of the king and his lords, came into the banquetting hall. The queen said, ‘O king, live forever! Do not let your thoughts terrify you or your face grow pale. There is a man in your kingdom who is endowed with a spirit of the holy gods. In the days of your father he was found to have enlightenment, understanding, and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods. Your father, King Nebuchednezzar, made him chief of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans, and diviners, because an excellent spirit, and understanding to interpret dreams, explain riddles, and solve problems were found in this Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar. Now let Daniel be called, and he will give the interpretation.

Then Daniel was brought in before the king. The king said to Daniel, ‘So you are Daniel, one of the exiles of Judah, whom my father the king brought from Judah? I have heard of you that a spirit of the gods is in you, and that enlightenment, understanding, and excellent wisdom are found in you. Now the wise men, the enchanters, have been brought in before me to read this writing and tell me its interpretation, but they were not able to give the interpretation of the matter. But I have heard that you can give interpretations and solve problems. Now if you are able to read the writing and tell me its interpretation, you shall be clothed in purple, have a chain of gold around your neck, and rank third in the kingdom’.

Now Meno, supposedly focussing on the subject of virtue, tells of what he knows of Socrates’ enigmatic reputation, and it, too, like Daniel’s, has connection with “magic” (see quote above and 4:9), and Meno himself feels numb and weak, just like Belshazzar, so lacking in virtue (or “moral goodness” as in quote below) (Meno, 80):

Meno. Socrates, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel that you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat sting-ray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you. Yet I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times, held forth often on the subject in front of large audiences, and very well too, or so I thought. Now I can’t even say what it is. In my opinion you are well advised not to leave Athens and live abroad. If you behave like this as a foreigner in another country, you would most likely be arrested as a wizard.

Socrates. You’re a real rascal, Meno.

On the occasion of Socrates’ writing in the sand, which I think must have originated from the ‘Writing on the Wall’ in the Book of Daniel, we have as the audience, Meno (whom I am equating with King Belshazzar), and his “large number of retainers” (Belshazzar’s large court), and the writing about to be effected due to a query from Meno. And, in a sense to interpret it, we get, not Daniel a former exiled slave, but Meno’s own slave boy, a foreigner (like Daniel) who however speaks the native language (like Daniel). The issue has become the immortality of the soul and whether it pre-exists the body, as manifest in someone’s being able to recall knowledge. Socrates will attempt to demonstrate this supposed pre-knowledge using the young slave boy – but perhaps this, too, is built upon Daniel’s God-given ability to arrive at entirely new knowledge without any human instruction (as in the case of his recalling Nebuchednezzar’s Dream).

Anyway, here is the dialogue (ibid.):

Meno. …. If in any way you can make clear to me that what you say is true, please do.

Socrates. It isn’t an easy thing, but still I should like to do what I can since you ask me. I see you have a large number of retainers here. Call one of them, anyone you like, and I will use him to demonstrate it to you.

Meno. Certainly. (To a slave-boy). Come here.

Socrates. He is a Greek and speaks our language?

Meno. Indeed yes – born and bred in the house.

Socrates. Listen carefully then, and see whether it seems to you that he is learning from me or simply being reminded.

Meno. I will.

Socrates. Now boy, you know that a square is a figure like this?

(Socrates begins to draw figures in the sand at his feet. He points to the square ABCD)

Boy. Yes.

Socrates. It has all these four sides equal?

Boy. Yes.

Socrates. And these lines which go though the middle of it are also equal? (The lines EF, GH).

Boy. Yes.

….

And so on.

Such apparently is how the life and death biblical account becomes gentlemanly and tamed, and indeed trivialised, in the Greek version! Daniel is not a passive slave, like the boy, supposedly recalling pre-existent knowledge, but a Jewish wise man, a sure Oracle to kings under the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God.

The ‘Writing on the Wall’ contains, like Socrates’ writing in the sand, division, and measure, but adds weighing. There is nothing Protagorean or Sophistic here. God, not man, is indeed the measure of kings and kingdoms according to the biblical account (vv. 24-28):

‘So from [God’s] presence the hand was sent and this writing was inscribed. And this is the writing that was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin. This is the interpretation of the matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; and Peres [the singular of Parsin], your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians’.

Russian Orthodox priest Fr. Sergei Sveshnikov has likewise, in his Internet article, “The Sovereignty of God”, made a Platonic connection with this very biblical incident (http://frsergei.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/the-sovereignty-of-god):

….

The yearning for Goodness has been with us through the recorded history of humanity. In the words of Plato, Good, “is that which every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does all that it does …”. (Republic 505 …). Men have been striving to do what is good, and not always selfishly what is good for them. Every new philosophy tried to market itself by appealing to some universal good to be achieved. And yet the result of all our intense labors has horrified us in the twentieth century, and the twenty-first one is up to no good start. Good appears to be other than sovereign in our hearts. And if not there, can it find refuge anywhere in a godless world?

Murdoch writes that “the chief enemy of excellence in morality … is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams, which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” …. This personal fantasy, or in patristic terms, logos fantastikon, also and perhaps most importantly, prevents one from seeing what is there inside one. And if we humble ourselves enough to see our true state, then would we not cry out with Apostle Paul: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24 NRSV) If Good is merely a concept, a creation of the human mind, then there can be no hope. If man is the measure of all things, then “mene, mene, tekel u-parsin” (Dan. 5:25).

One thinks that King Belshazzar, who was apparently incapable of humbling himself to recognise his true state, as Daniel had said of him, ‘You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven!’, would have been perfectly at home therefore with man, and not God, as the measure. Hence, when he was weighed, he was found wanting.

Now, could the very name Meno have arisen from the Mene, ‘God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end’? Certainly Fr. L. Hartman (C.SS.R), commenting on “Daniel” for The Jerome Biblical Commentary (26:22), connects the Mene (or half of it) to King Belshazzar (on whom I think this Meno was based):

…. Daniel must first say what words were written on the wall; evidently no one else could even decipher the script. His interpretation involves a play on words that is possible only in a purely consonantal script, such as Hebrew or Aramaic. The three words that were written in the consonantal script would be mn’, tql, and prs, which could be read, as Daniel apparently first read them, menê’, teqal, and peres – i.e., as three monetary values, the mina (equivalent at different times to 50 or 60 shekels, and mentioned in Lk 19:12-25), the shekel (the basic unit of weight), and the half-mina. Daniel, however, “interpreted” the writing by reading the three words as verbs, mena’, “he counted”, teqal, “he weighed”, and peras, “he divided”, with God understood as the subject and Belshazzar and his kingdom understood as the object. Thus, God has “numbered” the days of Belshazzar’s reign. (Things that can be counted are few in number). God has “weighed” the king in the balance of justice and found him lacking in moral goodness. (The idea of the “scales” of justice, which goes back to an old Egyptian concept, is met with elsewhere in the OT: Jb 31:6; Ps 62:10; Prv 16:11, etc.). God has “divided” Belshazzar’s kingdom among the Medes and the Persians. For good measure, there is an additional pun on the last of the three words, prs, which is also read as pãras, “Persia”, “Persians”.

Fr. Hartman continues speculatively, and he concludes by equating King Belshazzar to the half-mina:

An older form of the conundrum may also have connected the word mãday, “Media”, “Medes”, with the root mdd, “measure”. The conundrum seems to have existed in an older form, independently of its present context. The statement that Belshazzar’s “kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians” does not fit well with the statement at the end of the story, according to which Belshazzar’s whole kingdom was handed over to the Medes, with no mention of the Persians. Ginsberg even opines that the conundrum was originally applied to the only three Babylonian kings who were known to the Jews of the Hellenistic period: the mina would stand for the great Nebuchadnezzar, the shekel for the insignificant Evil-merodach, and the half-mina for Belshazzar.

According to my revision of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, Evil-merodach was Belshazzar.

 

A Beastly Comparison

 

IMAGE THREE: THE FOUR BEASTS – THE LION MAN (Daniel 7)

The scribal Daniel tells of the Dream (his own) that he wrote down (Daniel 7:1-4):

In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then, as I watched, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a human being. ….

Needless to say these “four great beasts” are up to no good.

Now Plato seems to have absorbed this lion-man image and located it in his ‘imperfect societies’ (Republic, Bk. 9, 588):

‘Let us show him what his assertion really implies, by comparing the human personality to one of those composite beasts in the old myths, Chimaera and Scylla and Cerberus and all the rest’.

‘I know the stories’.

‘Imagine a very complicated, many-headed sort of beast, with heads of wild and tame animals all around it, which it can produce and change at will’.

‘Quite a feat of modelling’, he replied; ‘but fortunately it’s easier to imagine than it would be to make’.

‘Imagine next a lion, and next a man. And let the many-headed creature be by far the largest, and the lion the next largest’.

‘That’s rather easier to imagine’.

….

Ezekiel, whose vision also, like Daniel’s, was preceded by a great rush of wind, or whirlwind, opens with (Ezekiel 1:5, 10):

… four living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form. …. As for the appearance of their faces: they four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion, on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle; such were their faces. ….

Here is that lion-man (‘leonine’ man) combination again, plus the eagle.

Sts. Paul, Justin Martyr, Augustine

 

Saints Paul and Augustine

 

Part Three (i):

Paul and Justin Martyr

  

 

“When [Justin] contrasts the life that they led in paganism with their Christian life (I Apol., xiv), he expresses the same feeling of deliverance and exaltation as did

St. Paul (1 Corinthians 6:11)”.

 

newadvent.org

 

 

 

James A. Kelhoffer has recognised certain similarities between the thinking of Sts. Paul and Justin, in “The Apostle Paul and Justin Martyr on the Miraculous: A Comparison of Appeals to Authority”: http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:385562/FULLTEXT01.pdf

At the very beginning of this article, he writes:

 

THE SUBJECT OF MIRACLES has too often been ignored or overlooked in scholarly discussions of early Christian ity.1 This article focuses on the writings of Paul and Justin Martyr, in part because these authors exemplify points of both continuity and development from the writings of the NT to the early patristic literature.2 Although these authors employ different genres,3 there is no reason to suspect that either author’s choice(s) of genre has necessarily limited what he wished to write concerning the miraculous. Part of what is to be offered here is a subtle argument that Paul and Justin did, in fact, have true, then, whether explicitly or implicitly, it is an oversimplification to interpret Paul solely as a herald of the word of the gospel, or Justin only as a rationally-minded apologist.

 

The analysis to follow builds upon a seminal essay by Paul Achtemeier,5 as well as more recent analyses by Ramsay MacMullen,6 Bernd Kollmann,7 Stefan Schreiber,8 and others,9

and focuses on three questions: In what ways do Paul and Justin Martyr refer to miraculous phenomena? What common assumptions do these authors hold about the performing of miracles, especially with regard to appeals to authority? To what ends, or with what goals, do Paul and Justin refer, usually in passing, to the miraculous? ….

[End of quote]

 

Some further comparisons can be found in Thomas V. Mirus’ article, “Church Fathers: St. Justin Martyr”: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=645

 

The Dialogue, by far Justin’s longest work, can be divided roughly into three parts. In the first, Justin shows the temporary and symbolic nature of the old Law. In the second, he shows how adoration of Christ as God is consistent with monotheism. In the third, he proves that Christians, not Jews, are the new Israel and the recipients of the promises of God’s covenant.

Some of the points touched on again and again throughout the Dialogue are as follows: Justin contrasts physical circumcision (which he says was to set the Jews apart for suffering!) with circumcision of the heart, which is an attribute of Christians. He finds in the Jewish prophecies two advents of Christ, the first dishonorable and the second glorious, and points out symbolism of the Cross in the Old Testament. He echoes the teaching of St. Paul that the Jewish Law was given as a burden because of the hardness of hearts. He finds many names given to the Son of God in the Old Testament: Angel, Wisdom, Day, East, Sword, Stone, Rod, Jacob, Israel.

Justin gives a detailed exegesis of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”), showing how it applies to Christ and why Christ quoted it on the Cross.

As St. Paul parallels Christ with Adam, St. Justin parallels Mary with Eve (according to Quasten he is the first Christian writer to do so):

 

[Christ] became man by the Virgin, in order that the disobedience which proceeded from the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her that the Spirit of the Lord would come upon her, and the power of the Highest would overshadow her: wherefore also the Holy Thing begotten of her is the Son of God; and she replied, ‘Be it unto me according to thy word.’

[End of quotes]

 

And Robert M. Haddad tells of this, in “The Appropriateness of the Apologetical Arguments of Justin Martyr”:

https://researchbank.acu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=46&ved=2ahUKEwjCrb_p3bDkAhUMUI8KHTgEBkI4

 

Ever since Apostolic times, Apologetics has been a part of the life and mission of the Church. Luke–Acts was an attempt to provide an apologia to whoever Theophilus might have been. …. We read in Acts 28:23 how St. Paul, while in Rome, received people “… at his lodgings in great numbers. From morning until evening he explained the matter to them, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the Law of Moses and from thee prophets”. Justin inherited this spirit, at a time when those who knew the apostles were now advanced in years and new men with new thoughts needed to rise to engage with a Graeco-Roman world both more aware of and hostile towards Christianity. ….

 

Finally, Cullen I. K. Story, writing of “The Cross as Ultimate in the Writings of Justin Martyr, has this to say (Introduction, p. 18):

 

While it is true that his seaside friend had led Justin to know God, the Ultimate Reality, still that merely marked the beginning of Justin’s Christian experience. From his extensive works it is clear that in a way similar to the apostle Paul (Gal. 2:19-20; 6:14; I Cor. I :23-24; 2:2) Justin found life and its meaning to be centered in the crucifixion of Jesus. Biblical tradition, he affirmed, not only points to the ultimate truth that Gad is, but to the Cross as the ultimate truth that Gad becomes, i.e., the tradition points to a crucified Christ. ….

 

 

Part Three (ii):

Justin Martyr and Saint Augustine

 

 

 

 

“As St. Justin Martyr notes, free will has to exist for God’s rewards and punishments

 

to be Just. St. Augustine reaffirms this, and applies this principle, explaining that

 

those actions done to us that we do not will, cannot be imputed to us as sins”.

 

 

 

 

 

Sts. Justin and Augustine are commonly compared and contrasted.

 

For example, there is John Mark Reynolds’ “Justin Martyr: Not Just Dead, Just Not Augustine”:

 

https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/09/justin-martyr-not-just-dead-just-not-augustine

 

 

 

… Justin lacks Augustine’s rhetorical skill, but this can be a benefit. Augustine has left us countless memorable passages, but Justin provided the framework for arguments that Augustine will flesh out. Augustine’s rhetoric is from a very particular period of time, while Justin writes with a spare style that is never beautiful, but is always clear. Oddly, he is sometimes less dated than Augustine. ….

 

[End of quote]

 

 

 

Michael M. Christensen will trace the doctrine of “Original Sin from Justin Martyr to Augustine”:

 

https://www.academia.edu/7832147/Original_Sin_from_Justin_Martyr_to_Augustine

 

 

 

In an article, “Justin Martyr: Convert from Heathendom”, at:

 

http://www.reformedspokane.org/Doctrine_pages/Doctrine_Intro/Portraits%20of%20Faithful%20Saints/Portraits02.html we read:

 

 

 

Justin understood, after his conversion, that these questions and this deep unsatisfied longing for something he knew not what, was the work of Christ in his soul. It is doubtful that God ever brings anyone to salvation and the knowledge of Christ without creating in him a deep longing, an unsatisfied thirst, a hunger for something which one does not have. Augustine, three centuries later, put it this way in his Confessions: “My soul can find no rest until it rest in Thee.” This longing, finally, is born out of the knowledge of sin and the hopelessness and emptiness of one’s life brought about by the hopelessness of sin. Salvation is by faith in Christ; but only the empty sinner needs Christ; only the thirsty sinner drinks at The Fountain of Living Waters; only the hungry sinner eats The Bread of Life; only the laboring and heavy laden come to Christ to find rest for their souls. It is the general rule of the Holy Spirit to bring to faith in Christ by sovereignly showing the sinner the need for Christ.

 

 

 

That Justin had this deep longing is not strange. That it was a part of his life for ever so many years before peace came is a remarkable providence of God.

 

[End of quote]

 

 

 

Finally, in an article entitled “Luther and Calvin v. Augustine and Justin Martyr on Free Will”:

 

https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=639810

 

the following “Conclusion” is reached:

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

 

Admittedly, free will is a bit of a mystery. We don’t fully grasp what it is, or how it works. It puzzles theists and atheists alike. But we can be sure that it exists, in part because it is necessary for God’s Justice, and in part because we cannot coherently speak of it not existing (any more than we can coherently speak of a self-caused universe arising without God).

 

 

 

As St. Justin Martyr notes, free will has to exist for God’s rewards and punishments to be Just. St. Augustine reaffirms this, and applies this principle, explaining that those actions done to us that we do not will, cannot be imputed to us as sins. What matters is not what happens to us, but what we will. Thus, it is wrong to condemn the virgins of Rome as fornicators when they were raped. It would be infinitely more wrong to send them to Hell for being raped.

 

 

 

All of this, in addition to being logically necessary, is self-evident. That is, each of us experiences free will, even if we choose to deny it. It’s for this reason that even those, like Luther or Calvin, who set out to deny free will (at least as pertains to issues tied to salvation) cannot help but speak as if it exists. Because it does. And we can observe it does.

 

 

Hebrew Bible as an Inspiration for Ancient Greek Philosophy

by

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

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.

 

Introduction

 

In previous articles I have supported

 

1. St. Clement of Alexandria’s view that Plato’s writings took their inspiration from the Hebrew Moses, and
2. 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
3. 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 shall discuss this further below.

 

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 a stage further. Just as I have argued in my

 

Solomon and Sheba

 

https://www.academia.edu/3660164/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:

 

Joseph as Thales: Not an “Hellenic Gotterdamerung” but Israelite Wisdom

 

https://www.academia.edu/3690014/Joseph_as_Thales_Not_an_Hellenic_Gotterdamerung_but_Israelite_Wisdom

 

and, for Pythagoras:

Hebrew Foundations of Pythagoras

 

https://www.academia.edu/3690014/Joseph_as_Thales_Not_an_Hellenic_Gotterdamerung_but_Israelite_Wisdom

 

 

Now, getting back to the Church Fathers:

 

Three key figures who presented this thesis are Justin Martyr “The most important second­ century apologist” {50. Grant 1973}, Titus Flavius Clemens known as Clement of Alexandria “the illustrious head of the Catechetical School at Alexandria at the close of the second century, was originally a pagan philosopher” (11, Robert 1857) and is renowned as being possibly the teacher of Origen. He was born either in Alexandria or Athens {Epiphs Haer, xxii.6}. Our final giant who supports this thesis is Eusebius of Caesarea known as the father of Church history. Each of these in their defense of the Christian faith presented some form of the thesis that the philosophers of Greece learned from the prophets of Israel. Our interest in this paper is on the arguments of the earliest of these writers, Justin Martyr. He represents the position of Christian apology in the middle of the second century, as opposed to the later Clement of Alexandria and the even later Eusebius of Caesarea.

In light of the stature and the credibility of these three Church Fathers even if the idea that Plato learned from Moses seems far fetched we would do well to take a closer look at the argument and the evidence presented by such men of stature. Justin was a philosopher who came from a pagan background. He issued from Shechem in Palestine. He was a marvelous scholar in his own right well read and well qualified to make informed judgments in the arena of philosophy.

Our purpose is to briefly look at the theses presented by Justin Martyr and to try to discern the plausibility of the thesis.

 

 

Justin Martyr and the line Plato took from Moses.

 

My comment on this section: If the great Plato is to be restored as a (perhaps composite) biblical sage, as I think eventually he must be, then this would be not so much a case of Greeks plagiarising the Scriptures as of a biblical wise man (the original Plato) keeping alive the Mosaïc Law and Tradition.

The article continues with a biography of Justin Martyr:

 

Justin Martyr was a prolific second century Apologist. He was born in Flavia Neapolis (Shechem) in Samaria. Well known for the local Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim and a temple built by Hadrian to Zeus Hypsistos. He later passed through Stoicism and the way of Aristotle’s disciples the Peripatetics and was rejected as unqualified to study Pythagoreanism and finally he met a Platonist with whom he advanced in his studies. To him the goal of Platonism was “the vision of God”. One day he met a Christian on the beach and was converted to the faith. He did not become a priest or bishop but took to teaching and defending the faith.

Text

He wrote many works and many more bear his name. However modern scholarship has judged that of the many works that bear his name only three are considered genuine. These are 2 Apologies and the Dialogue with the Jew Trypho. They are preserved in one manuscript of the year 1364 (Cod Par, gr. 450).

Language

Justin wrote in Greek, and right in the middle of the period of philosophy called Middle Platonism. The book in which he outlines his thesis that Moses and the prophets were a source for the Greek Philosophers is his first Apology. It is dated to 155-157 BC and was addressed to “The Emperor Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antonius Pius Caesar Augustus, and the sons Verissimus, philosopher, philosopher, and Lucius” Grant (52, 1973).

 

My comment: I would seriously contest these conventional dates for Imperial Rome, given my view that the so-called ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Jewish revolts against Rome, separated by more than half a century, were the one and same revolt of 70 AD.

See also e.g. my:

 

Merging Maccabean and Herodian ages. Part Three: The “King” (iv) Antiochus/Herod merges into Hadrian

 

https://www.academia.edu/36396632/Merging_Maccabean_and_Herodian_ages._Part_Three_The_King_iv_Antiochus_Herod_merges_into_Hadrian

 

—————————————————————————————————————-

It is here that Justin makes a most interesting and intriguing statement rallying Plato to the side of Moses and Isaiah, in the eyes of the son of the Emperor whom he calls philosophers.

—————————————————————————————————————-

 

The article continues with the writings of Justin Martyr:

Context

Grant (1973) believes the reason which triggered the Apology was the martyrdom of Polycarp in 156 AD and the injustice of it during the bishopric of Anicetus. Even as this martyrdom and its report may have spurred Justin on to write so it had been that it was on seeing the fortitude of the Christian martyrs which had disposed him favorably towards the faith (Ap 2.12.1). ….

In the Apology 1 Justin gives the reason for his writing

“I, Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, present this address and petition on behalf of those of all nations who are unjustly hated and wantonly abused; my self being one of them” (Apology 1 chap).

The Apology 1 is divided into 60 chapters. The translation we are using is that of the Ante Nicene Fathers and can be seen at www.ccel.org

The topics covered are many. He starts in chapter 2 by demanding justice, he requires that before the Christians are condemned they should be given a fair trial to see if they have committed any crimes or not. They should not be condemned merely for being Christian. He covers many subjects including: the accusation Christians were Atheists, faith in God; the Kingdom of Christ; God’s service; demonic teachings; Christ’s teachings and heathen analogies to it; non Christian worship; magic; exposing children, the Hebrew prophets and their prophecies about Christ, types of prophetic words from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This brings us to about chapter 38. At this point Justin begins to cover the issue of determinism and free will. He argues that although the future was prophesied it does not mean everything is determined according to fate and man has no responsibility for he has no choice. Rather he points to Moses revealing God’s choice to Adam “Behold before thy face are good and evil: choose the good”. (Apol 1 44) And he quotes lsaiah’s appeal to Israel to wash and be clean and the consequences of doing so or not doing so. The consequences of disobedience are that the sword would devour Israel. Justin picks up on the statement regarding the sword and argues that it is not a literal sword which is referred to but “the sword of God is a fire, of which those who choose to do wickedly will become the fuel” (Apol 1 44). Justin having appealed to Moses and Isaiah as a warning to the Roman rulers now appeals to one with whom they are more familiar, Plato the philosopher, to support his case that man is free to choose good or evil.

It is here that Justin makes a most interesting and intriguing statement rallying Plato to the side of Moses and Isaiah, in the eyes of the son of the Emperor whom he calls philosophers.

And so, too, Plato, when he says, “The blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless” took this from the prophet Moses and uttered it.

For Moses is more ancient than all the Greek writers. And whatever both philosophers and poets have said concerning the immortality of the soul, or punishments after death, or contemplation of things heavenly, or doctrines of the like kind, they have received such suggestions from the prophets as have enabled them to understand and interpret these things. And hence there seem to be seeds of truth among all men; but they are charged with not accurately understanding [the truth] when they assert contradictories.

…. He appears to be making the claim that Plato who has “exerted a greater influence over human thought than any other individual with the possible exception of Aristotle” (Demos, 1927.vi) was dependent for his understanding of freewill and responsibility on Moses. The saying “the blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless (Aitia helomenou Theos d’ anaios) {Joann. Mdcccxlii, 224}” was taken from Moses by Plato and uttered it {eipe}”.

[End of quote]

 

Plato and Job

 

The combined story of Job and his alter ego, Tobias, son of Tobit

 

Job’s Life and Times

 

https://www.academia.edu/3787850/Jobs_Life_and_Times

 

has had a profound influence upon worldwide literature, both ancient and modern. To give just one example, see my:

 

Similarities to The Odyssey of the Books of Job and Tobit

 

https://www.academia.edu/8914220/Similarities_to_The_Odyssey_of_the_Books_of_Job_and_Tobit

 

And, as already implied, I believe that this biblical story has also had a huge influence upon ancient (supposedly Greco-Roman) philosophy, which, however, significantly alters the original version. For, whilst there can be a similarity in thought between Plato and, for example, the Book of Job, the tone may be quite different. Plato’s Republic, and his other dialogues such as Protagoras and Meno, brilliant though they may be in places, when compared with the intense atmosphere of the drama of the Book of Job, come across sometimes as a bit like a gentlemen’s discussion over a glass of port. W. Guthrie may have captured something of this general tone in his Introduction to Plato. Protagoras and Meno (Penguin, 1968), when he wrote (p. 20, emphasis added):

 

… a feature of the conversation which cannot fail to strike a reader is its unbroken urbanity and good temper. The keynote is courtesy and forbearance, though these are not always forthcoming without a struggle. Socrates is constantly on the alert for the signs of displeasure on the part of Protagoras, and when he detects them, is careful not to press his point, and the dialogue ends with mutual expressions of esteem. ….

 

[End of quote]

 

Now compare this gentlemanly tone with Job’s ‘How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me?’ (19:1-3), and Eliphaz’s accusations of the holy man: ‘Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities [which supposed types of injustice on the part of Job Eliphaz then proceeds to itemise]’ (22:5).

 

In Plato’s dialogues, by way of complete contrast, we get pages and pages of the following sort of amicable discussion as taken from The Republic (Bk. 2, 368-369):

 

[Socrates] ‘Justice can be a characteristic of an individual or of a community, can it not?’

 

[Adeimantus] ‘Yes’.

 

[Socrates] ‘And a community is larger than an individual?’

 

[Adeimantus] ‘It is”.

 

[Socrates] ‘We may therefore find that the amount of justice in the larger entity is greater, and so easier to recognize. I accordingly propose that we start our enquiry …’.

 

[Adeimantus] ‘That seems a good idea’, he agreed.

….

 

 

God’s army is rising up…will you join us?

Church At The Gates Of Hell! Hello friends! How much do you genuinely believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to tear down strongholds? So many of us have rolled over and played dead in the face of the horrific slaughter and dehumanization of the unborn over the last four decades. This is changing. Revival is spreading across our nation, and let me tell you, God’s people are moving mightily to put an end to the bloodshed in His name. This is what my family and I saw first-hand during our trip out West this month, where we had the privilege to worship, pray, and do battle alongside some of these warriors. Pastor Ken Peters has planted a church on the frontlines of the Spokane, Washington Planned Parenthood, where hundreds of believers gather together for just this. The experience was beyond words. This is the frontlines of the battle to end abortion, and if we keep doing this, the Lord WILL end it in Jesus name!! Folks, this is the passion each and every one of us need to have for life. The Spirit is moving on God’s people to join together in worship and spiritual battle in a way He never has before. God’s army is rising up…will you join us? As you know, I was able to take this trip and bring 9 of my 10 children along thanks to your prayers and generosity. There are movements like this rising up all over the country, and we want to go encourage as many of them as we can. But we can’t do this without your help. We need to join together as the Body of Christ to continue this fight, which is far from over. If you are willing to do battle with me, please consider giving to our ministry. We are so grateful for those who stand with us in the fight to end the bloody practice of child sacrifice. Just as slavery is now unthinkable to us today, one day abortion will be illegal and just as unimaginable as slavery! This is our moment. It’s time to end abortion once and for all. In Jesus’ name! For Christ and His Children, Elizabeth Johnston The Activist Mommy

Yale Uni. professor Doctor David Gelernter renounces Darwinism

 

“My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it’s widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it’s an absolutely serious scientific argument…. In fact it’s the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It’s got to be dealt with intellectually”.

Dr. David Gelernter

 

 

One reads at: https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/famed-yale-professor-quits-darwin

 

Renowned Yale Professor

Quits Darwin

 

by Stephen Wynne  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  August 8, 2019

 

Dr. David Gelernter: Darwinism can’t explain origin of species

 

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (ChurchMilitant.com) – Famed Yale University computer science professor Dr. David Gelernter has renounced Darwinism.
In a column for the spring edition of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter announced that he is no longer a disciple of Darwin, saying the English naturalist’s theory has been disproven.

“Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory,” he wrote. “Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview.”

“Accepting the theory as settled truth … certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life,” he added. “But what if Darwin was wrong?”In his seminal work The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin proposed that all life forms have descended from a common ancestor, suggesting that over time, random variation coupled with natural selection gives rise to entirely new species.

But, Gelernter wrote, “The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.”

“Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape,” he noted. “Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture — not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones.”

Dr. Stephen Meyer A key problem for Darwinism, Gelernter said, is the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record reveals that “a striking variety of new organisms — including the first-ever animals — pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years,” which contradicts Darwin’s assumption that “new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life.”

Chief among the flaws undermining Darwinism, he wrote, is molecular biology, which in recent decades has demonstrated that random mutation plus natural selection cannot give rise to new, more complex species.

Gelernter credited three books for his shift in understanding: Dr. Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt (2013), Dr. David Berlinski’s The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009) and David Klinghoffer’s Debating Darwin’s Doubt (2015).

“These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore,” he wrote.
Gelernter singled out Meyer’s work as especially praiseworthy: “Meyer … disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece. Darwin’s Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact.”

 

Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one. ….

Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle-based think tank the Discovery Institute, is an advocate of a replacement theory, intelligent design (ID).

Biological life, ID proponents argue, is not the result of blind, undirected evolutionary processes, but the product of design by an intelligent entity.

Many adherents are religious. But, as Gelernter observed, “Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way.”

Still, as ID has grown as a theoretical alternative to Darwinism, it has been savaged as a pseudo-scientific appeal to religion by committed Darwinists within the scientific establishment. This, Gelernter pointed out, is because Darwinism serves as their de facto faith:

 

The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument — fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not — to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever. They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.

Critics have long argued that Darwinism is atheistic philosophy disguised as science. Since Darwin’s day, they note, it has been used to reject Christian orthodoxy and advance materialism, the view that human beings are merely the accidental results of unguided natural processes (as opposed to being purposefully created by God), and that the human mind is the only — and therefore, the supreme — consciousness that exists.

I am attacking their religion and I don’t blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them. ….

In a 1997 article for The New York Review of Books, leading evolutionist and atheist Dr. Richard C. Lewontin testified to the fact that materialists are committed to Darwinism, in spite of its myriad inconsistencies and flaws, because they are committed to the denial of God.

 

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori [pre-existing] adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

 

Gelernter worries that materialists’ philosophical/religious commitment to Darwinism is precluding genuine scientific inquiry. In an interview with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution last month, he expounded on this concern.

“My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it’s widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it’s an absolutely serious scientific argument,” he said. “In fact it’s the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It’s got to be dealt with intellectually.” ….

 

 

‘Momentary desires’: Vatican rejects gender fluidity as unnatural

Vatican City: The Vatican has issued an official document rejecting the idea that people can choose or change their genders and insisting on the sexual “complementarity” of men and women to make babies.
It said the idea of gender being determined by personal feeling rather than biology was an attempt to “annihilate nature”.

Pope Francis walks past cardinals after celebrating a Pentecost Mass in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Sunday.Credit:AP

Pope Francis has repeatedly argued the position that people cannot choose their genders. But the document represents the first attempt to put the Vatican’s position, first articulated fully by Pope Benedict XVI in a 2012 speech, into a comprehensive, official text.

The document, published during LGBT Pride Month, was immediately denounced by LGBT Catholics as contributing to bigotry and violence against gay and transgender people. Advocacy group New Ways Ministry said it would further confuse individuals questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation and at risk of self-harm.

The text, Male and Female He Created Them, was intended to help Catholic teachers, parents, students and clergy address what the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education called an “educational crisis” in the field of sex education.

It called for a “path of dialogue” and listening on the issue of “gender theory” in education. But even priestly advocates for LGBT Catholics noted that the text appeared to have relied entirely on previous papal pronouncements, Vatican documents and philosophers and theologians.

“The real-life experiences of LGBT people seem entirely absent from this document,” said the Reverend James Martin, a Jesuit priest who wrote a book on improving Catholic Church outreach to the LGBT community, titled Building a Bridge. “We should welcome the congregation’s call to dialogue and listening on gender, and I hope that conversation will now begin.”

Jay Brown of the Human Rights Campaign – the largest LGBT-rights group in the United States – said the Vatican’s stance “sends a dangerous message that anybody who experiences gender diversity is somehow less worthy.”

The document called for a new alliance among families, schools and society to offer a “positive and prudent sexual education” in Catholic schools so children learn the “full original truth of masculinity and femininity.”

It called gender fluidity a symptom of the “confused concept of freedom” and “momentary desires” that characterise post-modern culture. It rejected terms such as “intersex” and “transgender” and said the purpose of the biological complementarity of the male and female sex organs was to ensure procreation.

Francis DeBernardo, head of New Ways Ministry, said such concepts are outdated, misinformed and ignore contemporary science on factors beyond visible genitalia that determine gender.

“Gender is also biologically determined by genetics, hormones and brain chemistry – things not visible at birth,” DeBernardo said in a statement. “People do not choose their gender, as the Vatican claims, they discover it through their lived experiences.”

He said the Catholic Church should encourage this process of discovery, saying it’s “a process by which individuals discover the wonderful way that God has created them.”
“This casts everything back to the Dark Ages,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, a group that advocates for LGBT equality and inclusion in the church. “I think it is incredibly insensitive, to be talking still about gender and sexuality as a choice and a momentary whim rather than a fundamental God-given identity.”

The church’s retrenchment hints at one of the challenges it faces at a time of growing secularisation – when many of its teachings on sexuality are being ignored as out of date. Francis has expressed an interest in outreach to LGBT followers, but he has also taken a clear stance on gender identity, decrying the idea that children are taught in schools that “everyone can choose his or her sex.”

“And this is terrible,” Francis said in 2016.
The church on Monday said it was important to listen and “understand cultural events of recent decades,” but it also described a crisis in sexual education – a “disorientation” that was destabilising the family and cancelling out the differences between men and women.

The church made a case that children had the right to grow up in a family “with a father and a mother,” and the document quoted an earlier Francis speech about how children benefit from seeing masculinity represented by the father and femininity represented by the mother.
“It is precisely within the nucleus of the family unit that children can learn how to recognise the value and the beauty of the differences between the two sexes,” the document said.

Traditionalist groups lauded the 31-page Vatican document. CitizenGO, a conservative Madrid-based group that campaigns around the world, called the latest church teaching an “extraordinary guidebook.”

“This authoritative tool is quite clear in the condemnation of gender ideology and of the grave damage it wreaks inside society,” the group said. ….

AP, Washington Post

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/momentary-desires-vatican-rejects-gender-fluidity-as-unnatural-20190611-p51wh1.html