I have decided to buy myself a week to get caught up on certain series that I am currently writing as school has begun in full swing and I find myself with less time to write generally (most of the extra time is spent tumbling about with the child or reviewing the all-important cultural resource of My Big Fat Greek Wedding with my spouse). With that week, I wanted to take a moment to write on an issue that continues to concern me the more I encounter it in various forms of popular Christian culture, a hydra, really, with three heads (to date): a certain form of anti-Judaism, which is unfortunately quite old in Christianity; a certain form of anti-Hellenism, which is just as old, and commonly embraced together with anti-Judaism; and a false restitution for these two sins in the form of a kind of “Hebraic renaissance” in some modern Christian circles, which seeks to rectify Christianity by a return to “Hebrew roots” and repudiation of “Hellenic heritage.”
I call these three heads of the same beast because, in general, they strike me as common failures to come to terms with the complexity of Christian Origins as a phenomenon both of the Jewish world but also, because Ancient Judaism was a Greco-Roman religion, of the Greco-Roman world, too. Anti-Judaism is an old problem in Christianity. It emerged first in the early second century as a strange mutation of the rhetoric of late first-century followers of Jesus, living in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and vying with other schools of Jewish thought for the right to determine the Jewish future, as practicing Jews against other practicing Jews, about the appropriate boundaries, aims, and expressions of Jewishness. But in the second century, when increasing numbers of Jesus-followers were gentiles, not Jews, reading the Jewish literature of the New Testament without the felt need to pay appropriate respect to Judaism, it became easy to read Pauline and Johannine rhetoric especially in anti-Jewish ways, as the grounds of an entirely new cultus and covenant, Christianismos, constructed in direct opposition to Ioudaismos, Judaism or Jewishness (the word is coined, after all, in Ignatius’s Epistle to the Magnesians 8.1-10.3)
Anti-Hellenism, of which I would count the common habit of Christian catechists, homilists, and apologists to reduce Greek polytheism to the most absurd portrait possible (often derived from a crude and simplistic understanding of Greek myth) and use it to contrast with the theoretically obvious superiority of Christianity, also has Second Temple and patristic roots, but for the Fathers it was more a rhetorical exercise than a real bias. All Jews after Alexander the Great were Hellenized; what varied was how they felt about it and to what degree, not the fact of it. Jews in Judea were Hellenized, even if they spoke only a little Greek and did not avail themselves of what Greek public institutions, like gymnasia, bathhouses, race tracks, and the like, could be found in Judea, Samaria, and Idumaea. Jews in the Diaspora were Hellenized, especially those living in the great cities of the Greco-Roman world like Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome. Given that more Ancient Jews lived in the Diaspora than in the holy land, more Jews were speaking Greek, reading and hearing their scriptures in Greek, and talking about their culture, including their theology, in Greek than were doing so in Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew or Aramaic. From one angle, then, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek as the Septuagint represents a cultural mutation from biblical literature’s origins, but on the other hand, the Septuagint stands as a testament to a Jewish world that was thoroughly ensconced in Hellenic cosmopolitanism. In Alexandria, people like Aristobulus and Philo were doing Greek philosophy as Jews and Jewish exegesis as Greek philosophers: they were apparently not the only ones, for Philo tells us that there were many Jews in Alexandria so given to Greek intellectualism around their own cultural traditions that they often did not observe the mandated customs at all upon working out their allegorical logic. (Philo, he tells us, was not among their number, believing that it was important to keep both to letter and to spirit on this point.)
The Church Fathers were almost to a man classically educated and often decorated humanists prior to their ecclesial services as deacons, priests, bishops, and monastics; Christian theology simply is the exercise of classical grammar, logic, and rhetoric in the reading of the Hebrew Bible as translated into Greek, the Septuagint, and of the New Testament, together with philosophical aids to help render the content of scripture agreeable to the rational mind, including multiple interpretive layers (most basically divided into ad litteram and ad spiritum, but also, in Origen, into the body, soul, and spirit of Scripture, or into the more familiar medieval “senses,” literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical; Jewish Tradition has its own form of this in the PaRDeS system). For ancient people, theologia could either mean doxology, hymnic “speech about god,” or philosophizing about the divine, trying to construct a rational account of the divine; for precisely none of the Fathers did doing theology mean simply “reading the Bible.” Augustine knew Cicero and Vergil long before he knew Colossians and Veritas liberabit vos; Nyssen is effectively the answer to the question of what would happen if Plato became a Christian, just as Ps.-Dionysios is the baptized Proclus. And in many ways, the Greek Christian tradition of biblical exegesis in particular was simply inherited from the older Hellenistic Jewish practice, insofar as Clement and Origen of Alexandria, in particular, were the heads of a Catechetical Academy whose library surely contained the whole Philonic corpus. The circumstances under which Christianity came to Alexandria remain intensely debated by scholars, but it seems minimally plausible that the kind of philosophically-minded Jesus-faith of people like Paul and John, and the schools that emerged in the wake of their efforts, would have found welcome reception among Greek-speaking Jews and Jewish-sympathetic gentiles there.
The third head of the beast I have imagined may seem an unlikely candidate as their middle term: a kind of philosemitic or, really, philhebraic form of Christianity particularly popular in Protestantism but also more recently popular in Catholicism. I have to be careful about what I mean here, both because the phenomenon is complicated and because the language can easily get dicey. The historical origins of the sort of thing I’m talking about come in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and the United States, when Christian missions to Jewish communities created the various Hebrew Christian associations and when novel forms of Christian apocalypticism espousing a religious form of the Zionistic vision then being espoused by Theodor Herzl in secular form (1860-1904) was picking up steam; in the mid-twentieth century, this phenomenon was reborn in the American evangelical world as Messianic Judaism, itself a varied, complex, and anything but uniform collection of individual congregations, federations, and movements that stand awkwardly between a Christian world that still, for the most part, does not acknowledge them as fully legitimate and a Jewish world that, for all of its interior diversity, agrees across sectarian identities that it is not really Judaism (though the statistics on that may be slowly shifting; it’s hard to tell). As though this wasn’t a differentiated enough phenomenon, the sort of Christianity I have in mind—one that capitalizes heavily on the drama of Israel, sometimes on the aesthetics (but rarely the practice) of Judaism, and often turns to the Hebrew Bible as a “pure” source of theological truth as opposed to the obvious “Greek” impurities of classical Christianity, or that looks to “restore” or renew in some sense the “original” Church, sometimes imagining that this includes its Jewish rites, however conceived (often quite fancifully)—can also be found to varying extents in non-Christian, para-Christian, and new Christian movements that are also distinctly American: Joseph Smith and the various Mormon communities; the Millerites and their descendants, most prominently the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and notoriously from the stock of the former, albeit by a somewhat tortured lineage, the Branch Davidians and David Koresh; Pentecostalism, especially in charismatic forms; and the relatively new species of “Hebrew Christian,” but not Messianic Jewish, forms of Christian community, both those attached to mainstream sects (“Hebrew Catholics” come to mind) and those not (especially the “Sacred Name” folks). This is a world that, often, exists more on the Internet than in real life.
Now, I want to be clear that in a strange way I owe a kind of debt to this historical phenomenon, insofar as various forms of it were ubiquitous in the environment I was raised in. I was not intentionally or consciously raised an evangelical, and my earliest religious days were spent in the company of people whose thinking was really quite fringe from any mainstream Christian perspective, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, infused with certain Pentecostal and charismatic beliefs, with sometimes feverish apocalyptic beliefs in the end of the world, and mystical expectations of visions and the sacred significance of nearly every mundane event. On the television in the makeshift homes that I spent some time in were people like the late Kim Clement, who made the nation-state of Israel a fairly large part of the focus of his ministry, both believing that its existence was a proof of biblical prophecy and that the language and aura of Israel could be appropriated by Christians in the (affluent) United States. While I look back on this time of my life and find almost nothing that I appreciate theologically about it—with the sole exception that I was exposed to universalism first in the writings of one Elwin Roach, when I was no older than a seventh grader, and yet the sort of universalism I now espouse is quite different from that—I can acknowledge how some of my enduring academic and theological interests were in fact born then. To wit: I learned the Hebrew alphabet, and a good number of Hebrew words, before I got to high school; my perennial interests in all things Judaism-oriented, as well as my theological conviction that Christianity does not constitute a rupture in God’s covenant with the Jewish people, however that is understood (by Jews or by Christians); my interests in apocalypticism, messianism, and mysticism; and my fundamental sense that biblical literature is often read carelessly and lazily by the people theoretically most committed to it in American society. All of these things drove me in high school to start engaging with biblical scholarship (N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, and Michael Gorman were all on my radar by sophomore year), to explore other forms of Christianity and even other religions (especially Judaism) in person, and sent me to college with a clear vision of what I wanted to study (but not, of course, with a clear idea of what I would then do with it).
But study changes a person, and one of the fundamental ways it changed me was to help me see the intellectual and cultural genealogy of so much of the religious world I grew up in. Critical study helped me not only to answer certain basic questions I had—such as the meaning of Jesus’s Judaism, for instance, or the role that the Greeks and the Romans played in Jewish history—but also to form questions that I did not know previously to ask. Why, for example, did Christianity cease to be a form of Judaism, and when? Why is there no Hebrew or Aramaic original for the New Testament—despite the fact that the Hebrew Bible was exclusively written in Hebrew and Aramaic? And why does Christian theology proceed on seemingly such different principles than those that helped to form later Judaism?
Of course, even the way I articulate these questions here reflects around a decade further of study, contemplation, teaching, and daily work since I first entered college—it took a long time, more explorations, and, though it is strange perhaps to put it this way, the process of becoming a fully independent adult that helped me put such matters into the frame of reference I think of them in now. (I am sure in another decade, I shall find all kinds of new contours to my vision still yet.) But I hope the point comes across sufficiently that I know what I’m talking about when I describe this multifaceted posture of Modern Christianity, both firsthand and as a scholar; so I also know what I’m talking about when I offer it this critique, which I consider its most devastating deficiency: the “Judaism,” whether of the Bible, or of Jesus, or of the earliest followers of Jesus, that it imagines, is a construct; and as constructs go, it is almost entirely fictional.
I do not mean that there is nothing of “Judaism” in these sources, if we understand by Judaism the ethnoreligion of a specific people, Jews or Judeans, the biological and cultural descendants of the Ancient Judahites of the Iron Age. The literature of the Hebrew Bible was composed and redacted into its current anthological form specifically as an act of cultural reform; while it was not ratified as formal legislation for the Judean community, probably, for several centuries after it first appeared as a scribal compilation, produced by and for other scribes, it remains the case that the Bible is among the first artifacts of “Jewishness” or “Judaism” that we can identify. Jesus was certainly a Jew: he was born a Jew, he was circumcised a Jew, he lived a Jew, he died a Jew, even died for Judaism. And Jesus’s original followers were certainly Jews: like him, Second Temple Jews, constituting a new sect in some sense between the concerns of the Essenes and the Pharisees, skewing somewhat closer to the latter and encompassing members from many different schools and social classes in Ancient Judaism (Acts insists to us that Pharisees, priests, and more became followers of the Way). And it is true that the most formative layers of Christianity were being worked out contemporaneously with the formation of rabbinic society from the first century to the fourth, with some Jews still followers of Jesus, some gentile Christians sympathetic to Jewish ritual and practices, and gentile Christian intellectuals often articulating their vision of Christianity precisely by way of rejecting Judaism, its theoretical antonym.
It’s not that any of this is questionable; it’s that the way the “Hebrew Christian” crowd, in all its different manifestations, think about Judaism is usually just the abstract shadow of their own prejudices against later Christianity, and rarely has much to do with what the historical data tell us the Judaism of antiquity was really like. The clearest indication of this is the speed with which this kind of abstraction is presented as a “Hebrew” rather than “Hellenic” understanding of Christianity: as though Chrsitianity’s Judaism were in fact something contradictory to its Hellenism. In reality, Christianity’s Judaism and Hellenism are coextensively mixed, in the most complete synkrisis: they are distinguishable in the earliest centuries only conceptually. Christianity is in fact only possible as a phenomenon of Judaism’s mingling with the Hellenic world, especially under Roman administration: only there could the unique blend of apocalypticism, messianism, mysticism, philosophy, and cultural pluralism that would become Chrsitianity from Judaism in the second through the fourth centuries have emerged as such a potent synthesis.
It is in this sense that the most responsible forms of Messianic Judaism that I’m aware of—for example, Mark Kinzer and David Rudolph’s respective theologies and practices of it—are those that take seriously the Hellenic influences on Christianity as fundamentally compatible with Christianity’s Jewishness and therefore take Christian tradition as an authority alongside the authority of the Jewish sages that became traditional for the synagogue; it is in this sense, too, that Catholicism’s choice to renew its acknowledgment of Judaism’s legitimacy and to seek to embrace an increasingly positive evaluation of Jewish belief, behavior, and belonging as divinely inspired and covenantally valid without disregarding its own contextually Greco-Roman tradition and practice of Christianity is a much more historically honest approach to the issue than, say, the American restorationist impulse to simply burn it all down and start again. These are more responsible approaches not only because they take seriously that Hellenism is just as much a part of Christianity as is Judaism, refusing to discriminate between the two in the ingredients of the younger Abrahamic sister, but also because they take seriously the historical evolution of Christianity and Judaism into separate communities who are now engaged in trying to heal a traumatic past together (in which one is the clear perpetrator, imperial Christendom, and the other the traditional victim, even if one prefers not to succumb to lachrymose readings of Jewish history, or at least to revise or qualify them, as some Jewish scholars have done). Christians can only, from within Christianity as it now exists, look back at their shared history with Jews, and then across the aisles into the face of their Jewish siblings now, in order to imagine all the different futures there might be together, in our separate communities, and in those special corners within our communities where there may be sympathizers who do not so easily acknowledge the boundary. This is a sensitive issue, one that cannot have a uniform rule neatly applied in most circumstances.
Anyway, the real point of this extended chain of observations is to say that Christianity is unintelligible apart from a thorough knowledge of both Classics and Jewish Studies, particularly if one’s interest is the New Testament. There is no way to extricate the one influence without also dismissing the other; it is this precisely which makes Christians a tertium genus between Hellenism and Judaism. To comprehend Early Christian literature is a process of being able to trace one’s path in a labyrinthine spiral out from the event of the experiences of Jesus and his first followers into the swirl of the early Jesus Movement and the communities who solidified into the Christian Churches over many centuries, staying within the lines sketched by Jewish and Greco-Roman boundaries while also tracing original paths that allowed their strict division in some sense to be reconciled in a larger horizon (from the Christian point of view, anyway). That Christian history trended so much towards assimilation to Roman values and the weaponization of Hellenic learning against Jewish origins is more than regrettable—it reaches damnable fever-pitches in Christian history, as a matter of fact—but that it was so easily able to become of a piece with Greco-Roman society, as collegium, as philosophical schola, as mysteria, and then finally as state cultus is a potency inherited as much from more cosmopolitan forms of Ancient Judaism as it was a byproduct of reconstitution by affiliating Greeks and Romans, just as the recurrence within Christianity of antisocial, antistate, and ascetical, anti-world attitudes is a matter of its genetically Jewish apocalypticism. Christianity is neither Judaism nor Hellenism itself, and yet it is both: it is for better or worse what survives of the Hellenistic Diaspora that it absorbed, attracted, assimilated, and annihilated, just as it became the primary heir of the texts and culture of Classical, Hellenistic, and Imperial Greece and Rome. That we can read Plato or Homer we owe to Christian monks as much as to Hellenistic scholars.
But conversely, we need Plato to read Paul. Had the kerygma of the Kingdom of God and Jesus as crucified and risen Messiah, Son of God, and Lord never made it to the ears of Greek-speaking Jews outside of Judea, the Movement would have died in the flames that consumed the Temple Mount or beneath the swords of Simon Bar Kokhba or Sextus Julius Severus. And that means had Jews knowledgeable about and participant in Greek culture, as well as Romans, Greeks, and Near Eastern people knowledgeable about and sympathetic to Judaism, never heard about Jesus, never filtered him through the categories not only of their Judaisms but also of their Hellenism, and found means of community that could be credible and resilient for members in Greco-Roman society, then Christianity wouldn’t exist. The New Testament wouldn’t exist: no letters of the very Jewish, very Hellenistic, Roman citizen Saul/Paul of Tarsus, with his Pharisaic halakha and his apocalyptic Christology and eschatology and his philosophical Stoicism; no Gospels, Synoptic, Johannine, or gnostic, with their complex biographical, literary, and mythically historiographic accounts of the life, ministry, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus; no Deutero-Paulines, no Pastorals, no Catholic Epistles, no Johannine Epistles, no Revelation. And, again, no Church Fathers.
That’s not to say that there would have been no literature of the Movement; the Gospels, for instance, borrow from sources that no longer exist; these could have been Greek or Aramaic or maybe even Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew, but we wouldn’t know about them except by some happy archaeological accident (which might happen anyway) and we wouldn’t care about them because no emergent Christianity would connect us cultural and ethnic descendants of the Greeks and the Romans to the first-century Jewish sect of Jesus and his followers. This is the opportunity to register another observation: Christianity is not exactly the religion of the apostles. The apostles were practicing Jews; their religion was recognizable to other Jews as Judaism. Their heirs that survived the Temple’s destruction were also Jews: not in a way generally acceptable to the rabbis, but then again, without an emergent Christianity against which rabbinic exegesis could react, it is likely as not that if this small community continued to exist at all they would have been a tolerated minority, and in all likelihood would have simply melted back into the Jewish collective. It is likely as not that their beliefs in Jesus’s prophetic and glorified status, in fact, may well have proven acceptable to mainstream Judaism, and that Jesus and John the Baptist may have found their places as Jewish sages in the revisionist rabbinic lineup, looking back to the first century; not all Jews would believe that Jesus had risen in this contrafactual anymore than today all of them believe Rabbi Akiva went to paradise or that Honi the Circle Drawer could summon rain, but some would, and it would prove inoffensive generally to the collective as an acceptable but unnecessary feature of Jewish identity; John and Jesus’s takes would be included in the growing anthology of Jewish teaching about how to live the Torah, put into conversation with many others. (In some ways, this is what modern Jewish scholars of the historical Jesus and the New Testament already do.)
But this would be of little to no significance to a world that had never inherited Christianity without a Hellenistic faculty of the earliest movement to include Greek-speakers and ethnic others in its ranks. It’s difficult to extend contrafactuals too far—they end up quickly becoming presumptions about what one thinks would have happened purely on instinct rather than trained historical reasoning—but we can say safely that Christians would not have become such a substantial minority of the empire as to warrant polemical counterargument from professional philosophers and occasional censure by imperial authorities (they wouldn’t have existed); the empire would not have converted; Judaism would have been unlikely to be officially proscribed, which would have perhaps meant an eventual rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple with Roman support or at least aid, as Julian the Apostate (who wouldn’t be apostate) attempted (though without Christianity as his target it is unclear if he would have taken interest in the Temple at all). No Christian civilization would have connected Central and East Asia by means of Syriac, just as no Christian oikoumene or ecclesia gentium would have emerged in Greek East and Latin West to create Europe as it was. Much of the worst of Christendom would never have occurred—but also, those values genuinely given to the world by the Gospels are unlikely to have made the progress that they did. There probably would have been no Islam. It would be a different and poorer world for the loss, however much richer for the unrealized gains.
Christianity also had the (from the Christian point of view) unintentional effect of serving as a catalyst for Jewish reconceptualization and strengthening of Jewish identity to resist assimilation. Tempting as it is to believe that Jews have always been and will always be committed to those things that make them fundamentally Jewish (however they understand them), the situation of Judaism in the contemporary secular world is surely a witness that Jews, like any other people group, are as capable of assimilation as entrenchment, of conforming to the world as of standing apart from it. As Ross Shepard Kramer has phrased it, “What Christianity Cost the Jews” is incalculable, from what the Christianized Rome did to Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean to the latent anti-Judaism in a post-Christian Nazi Germany that brought about the Shoah, but it is also surely true, on some level, that the threat of absorption into the Christian (or Muslim) worlds created in some sense a more intense degree of self-understanding and identity enactment for Jewish communities than might have existed otherwise. There is something in our siblings, in our childhood friends and close companions, that can bring out our strictest self-assertion as well as our greatest ease; there is something about the vulnerability they posit to us and the reasons for that vulnerability that can make the relationship volatile, even when it’s one we have positive associations with. Christians certainly felt this way in late antiquity about Judaism; it is surely true that Christianity provoked similar attitudes in Jews, attitudes that have helped Jews to flourish and thrive as a culture. Yet here I wish to be exceedingly careful: I am not trying to justify Christian persecution of Jews and Judaism, which is unjustifiable, still less to exonerate history of the suffering of Jews at Christian hands because it made Judaism a stronger ethnoreligious culture in Diaspora; I am simply observing that the world, including the Jewish world, might be a very different place had the world of Hellenistic Judaism not morphed, in some places and times willingly, in others unwillingly, into Christianity.
So it is not just that we must read Plato to understand Paul; it is that without Plato there is no Paul, and without Paul no world as we now know it and understand it, with all of its real merits and flaws, all of its glorious failures and dark successes. Christians are the heirs whether they like it or not of an apocalypic Judaism that survived as a new form of Greek philosophy in the Roman world; unless they belong to one of the Christian communities that mostly developed outside of that world, or that has been born very recently, this is their origin story, and in fact, even if they belong to one of those communities they still owe something to that memory (the Church of the East counts Greeks as its holy doctors, Diodore, Theodore, and Nestorius; the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is miaphysite because of debates that were happening in the Eastern Roman Empire, not in East Africa, about Christology).
There are as far as I can tell three corollaries of import to this conclusion. The first is that a sine qua non of Christianity is the fundamental validity of Judaism, as an ethnoreligious way of life in some sense revealed by God. Christianity only exists insofar as it is a kind of “Judaism for gentiles,” as many scholars and theologians who have engaged Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity and today have long posited: it is a community in which non-Jews may, without becoming Jews, worship the Jewish God and faithfully obey Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, God’s chosen and vindicated Son, and the world’s final Lord. When Christians insult Jews or attack Judaism, they do no service to Christianity, even when they are theoretically trying to boost Christianity’s covenantal street cred. After all, if it really were the case that God had abandoned the Jews and Judaism—God forbid!—then the ground of Christian confidence that God has not abandoned Christianity for Islam or some other faith tradition, or will not do so in the future, is comically slippery. Christianity can only be true to the extent that its own Judaism, and therefore Judaism of all kinds, is true: insofar as the revelation of the One God as Yhwh, the God of Israel, is indeed a genuine revelation of the One within history to human minds and bodies, insofar as Judaism itself is a genuine heir with the patriarchs, people, and prophets of Israel. (And one can see how this line of thinking would also logically encompass Samaritans, too, as fellow children of this lineage; and one can see how this logic still leaves room for seeing Muslims as our brothers and sisters in the larger Abrahamic family.) Whatever the eschatological future for Christians, it is one that includes Jews and Judaism, not one that elides them.
Another sine qua non, though, is that Christianity must acknowledge at a minimum the cultural potency of Hellenism. Such is a sorely needed attitude, both in terms of Hellenism as a historical phenomenon of “Greekness” exported by Alexander and his successors to the non-Greek world but also in the form of a certain intellectual tradition of humanism and universalism that is endemic to what it is to be Christian as much as what it is to be classically educated. This means, in turn, a free embrace of the Greek philosophical tradition as a fundamental ingredient in how we do Christian theology. Reticence about this is admittedly more a problem in Protestant circles than in Catholic or Orthodox ones, where the teaching of Classics as a sign of a Christian education is not quite as common or popular, but it is certainly easy to walk into, say, an evangelical service where the sermon on the docket is going to make some kind of mention of how Greek religion and philosophy were inherently stupid at best and only occasionally capable of truth, and only insofar as it “pointed to Jesus.” I once sat through a sermon, for instance, where the preacher had the utter unawareness of self to suggest that an example of Greek mythology’s moral inferiority to Christianity was that Zeus floods the whole world because no one other than Deucalion shows him hospitality—to which I did not know whether to respond with a mocking laugh or a growl of anger, given that the Greek version of the tale is a clear parallel to the flood myths of the Mediterranean and Near East generally, including the biblical story of the flood, and that any moral or theological criticism one makes of one of these stories logically carries over to the others. If the man in question had in fact been educated enough to know that no learned Greek or Roman seriously believed that, say, Zeus was a philanderer or that Hermes was a thief and a liar or that gods in general were prone to vice or caprice, but assumed that the divine is by its very nature good and not simply by participation, and therefore that the gods in their ranks, the World Soul, the Intellect, and the One God are all incapable of the anthropopathic misfortunes that myth attributes to them in the literal sense, then he may have made a more careful and useful observation, which is that reason itself is enough to tell us that belief in a god who punishes capriciously and disproportionately is morally vile and certainly untrue (or, if untrue, then it should inspire in us a kind of gnostic rebelliousness against the powers that be). There are many Christians whose theology would improve overnight, for example, if they would seriously read Plutarch’s De Superstitione, and realize that while the existence, goodness, and providence of the divine is one of the hallmarks of reason’s light shed on the darkness of sense experience, it is far superior to be an atheist than to believe in an evil god whose behavior we would not tolerate in any man.
The kind of Christian Hellenist I have in mind is really a Christian humanist. I acknowledge that the vita in litteris is not the vocation for all, nor is it ever so important as humanists ourselves tend to assume, nor does it convey every virtue. I do not mean to suggest that it does. But I do mean to suggest that the tradition of Christian humanism from Paul to Origen to Nyssen to Dionysios to Boethius to Eriugena to Aquinas to Nicholas Cusanus to the Inklings and so on (I also realize I’m skipping about, but there it is) is the only one capable of producing a theology that can successfully account for the witness of scripture and tradition in the light of reason and in a way that takes in the widest possible databank of the human experience diachronically and synchronically, and cross-culturally. That is why the true Christian Hellenist is also the Christian Egyptologist, Indologist, Sinologist, seeker of indigenous wisdom, of African wisdom (ancient and modern, indigenous and Diasporic), and so forth: just as the Hellenic aspiration at its best was to find a way to put into dialogue and unite all the forms of wisdom of the world into a common library, a common school, a common language of the sacred character of reality itself, so the Christian intellectual has the same task, to clarify the gospel by the same means, albeit chastened enough to be mindful not to try and reduce the wonderful pluralism of cultures and their hard-earned wisdom into some common soup of thought-stuff that nullifies the unique witness of each.
And this is why, third, I think Christianity is also indisputably Roman. Latin is the third of the languages of the titulus crucis, the first message of the gospel inscribed by hand, and I think with good reason: it is to the imperial might, the administrative powerhouse of the Romans that the message of Jesus is ultimately aimed, just as Paul was commanded to testify before Caesar (Acts 27:24). Christianity is the kind of synthesis of Judaism and Hellenism, as an interval between the two, only possible in the Roman world in particular. It is one thing for Jews to Hellenize: that was going on long before Rome. It’s another thing for Greeks to Judaize: that, too, was happening before Rome. It is only within the altae moenia Romae that a new form of “Judaism for gentiles” that is simultaneously fully Greek could emerge, a new entity that effectively invented “religion” as a concept the way we know it today. I think Christians can and should regret the sins that Roman power encouraged their ancestors to commit and the way Roman power continues to tempt them to impose their will on others today, to the harm not only of their intellectual credibility but also to the force of the gospel’s innermost soul or spirit. But I also think that Christians should rightly see the Roman ideals at their best—the notion of a cosmopolitan society in which every human being is a free citizen of the universe, called upon to model the rationality that structures the cosmos and to cultivate and act with virtue for the common good, ideally in the form of a res publica that exists for and as manifestation of the common good—as something that their own tradition acknowledged and attached itself to even as it sought to challenge those values of Roman society deemed at odds with the teachings of Jesus. The New Testament and the earliest Christians have a lot of fairly negative things to say about empire in general and, at least coded, about Rome in particular, but they also seem to have expended a great deal of effort historically to prove to Roman onlookers (including Hellenic Romans) that they, too, were good Roman citizens, and that Christianitas was a boon to Romanitas. These can never finally be the same concept of citizenship—that is the fundamental mistake of Christendom—but they can be, and often have been, fruitful dialogue partners. Beneath that Roman umbrella, Christians did not choose between “Hebrew” and “Hellenic,” “Jewish” and “Greek,” but acknowledged both as their own identity, all the while seeking to fulfill that audience with Caesar that Paul himself never had (but that Plato, albeit from beyond the grave, certainly did).
This is great stuff, but I want to pick up your concession at the end that a life of letters cannot (and should not) be everyone's calling. If the kind of cosmopolitan Christianity you present is so critical for realizing the potency of the gospel in the post-Christendom world --- and I agree that it is --- how does one communicate these things to the average pew-sitting Christian who, for very legitimate reasons, will never be a classicist (or even a dilettantish reader of classicist Substacks). I ask this as a friendly dissident within the evangelical low church world, which I know you understand. Where, in pastoral terms, does the rubber meet the road?
I love seeing Plutarch’s Moralia referenced out in the wild.