PicoBlog

In 1998, a group of scholars calling itself the Jesus Seminar published a list of its conclusions regarding the life of Yeshua ben Yosef, also known as Jesus Christ. Using a system of colored beads to rank their relative confidence in assertions made in scriptures, apocrypha, historical chronicles, letters, and archeological records, the Jesus Seminar had decided (quoting from Wikipedia):

Jesus of Nazareth was born during the reign of Herod the Great.

His mother's name was Mary, and he had a human father whose name may not have been Joseph.

Jesus was born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem.

Jesus was an itinerant sage who shared meals with social outcasts.

Jesus practiced faith healing without the use of ancient medicine or magic, relieving afflictions now modernly considered psychosomatic.

He did not walk on water, feed the multitude with loaves and fishes, change water into wine or raise Lazarus from the dead.

Jesus was arrested in Jerusalem and crucified by the Romans.

He was executed as a public nuisance, not for claiming to be the Son of God.

The empty tomb is a fiction – Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead.

Belief in the resurrection is based on the visionary experiences of Paul, Peter and Mary Magdalene.

Although these claims were instantly controversial with both practicing Christians and secular academics, the members of the Seminar stood their ground. The evidence, they claimed, was on their side: there was no proof to support the miracles, no non-Christian sources supporting the story of the Crucifixion, and not even enough compelling evidence to claim that Jesus believed himself to be the Son of God.

This clashes directly with what is written in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the oldest parts of the New Testament and thus closest to the oral traditions that circulated among Christians in the decades immediately after the death of Jesus. But these aren’t the only surviving gospels; they’re just the ones that the Church fathers chose to anthologize.

At the core of the Jesus Seminar’s work was what they called the “fifth Gospel,” or the Gospel of Thomas. Dating from no later than the mid 1st century AD, it is at least as old as the four canonical gospels, if not older. We know from letters of the Church Fathers that it was condemned as Gnostic heresy and banished from church libraries. For nearly two thousand years, it was considered lost. But in 1945, a complete copy was found in the buried Nag Hammadi library of Egypt, along with a dozen other early Christian codices, and we could read it for ourselves.

The Gospel of Thomas is very different from the other gospels. For one thing, it contains only 114 logia—sayings, in Greek—of Jesus, with no other context or explanation. If it is really older than the canonical gospels, as the Seminar’s philologists claimed, then it is the closest we can get to the real voice of the historical Jesus. What probably alarmed the ancient Church fathers, and intrigued the modern Seminar members, is that these early Christian logia don’t always sound very…well, Christian. This Jesus doesn’t seem to consider himself the Son of God at all, or seem especially concerned about the Kingdom of Heaven, the Day of Judgment, or theology at all. There are no miracles. There is no Paulism, no traces of the elaborate theology and convoluted hierarchy set in place by Paul and his heirs. There is no Christos, the Greek word for Messiah, only Yeshua ben Yosef, street preacher and philosopher.

As a layman, I am not even remotely qualified to step into the debates surrounding the Gospel of Thomas and the Jesus Seminar. As an impartial reader, I should mention that most biblical scholars of all religious stripes do not agree with the Seminar’s findings.

With that said, I’ve been intrigued by the apocryphal gospels and the ideas of the Jesus Seminar for a while. (My favorite reading here is Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia’s compilation of apocryphal sayings, The Logia of Yeshua.) They allow us, if only as an exercise, to imagine Jesus not as a religious leader, but as a philosopher and even a figure of folklore and myth—that is, as a literary character. I’m not alone here, either: the apocryphal Jesus is the Jesus of late Tolstoy, of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, of Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, of Jim Crace’s very underrated Quarantine. Everywhere artists and writers have tried to consider the world’s most famous man as a man, shorn of religious expectations, the apocryphal Jesus—let’s call him Yeshua, as his friends & family did—is not far away.

I’ve thought about Yeshua versus Jesus a lot while reading the first part of Tom Holland’s history of Christianity, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but one admirable goal of the first section is to push back against the idea that early Christianity erupted into the Greco-Roman world as a kind of hostile, occupying force that snuffed out the old culture. The idea is at least as old as Edward Gibbon, found its best expression in Nietzsche, and remains a common thread in popular histories. Christianity did radically transform the Roman Empire, it’s true—Holland points out that, for instance, the practice of exposing sick infants seems to have died out wherever Christianity took hold—but it’s also clear that between the apocalyptic Jewish cult of Yeshua in the 1st century AD and the adoption of the Nicene Creed in 325, Christianity was also transformed by its exposure to Greek and Roman culture.

Jesus’s very first followers were Aramaic-speaking Jews following their rabbi, but to his first audiences in Greece and Rome, he was received as a Greek-speaking philosophos.

You can find a little bit of every major Greek philosophy in early Christianity. Some of these were obvious even then. Augustine himself said that Plato was the single pagan “who comes nearest to us” for his late dialogues like The Timeaus, which argued three centuries before Christ that the universe is the perfectly rational creation of a perfect, supreme Maker. Platonic Forms, which are unchanging and absolute ideas that are superior in every way to the material world, furnished early Christians with much of their language of Heaven and the immortal soul. And even the Allegory of the Cave, in Republic, was intriguingly similar to the story of Christ, down the hostile reaction of the cave-dwellers when the enlightened philosopher returns to tell them the good news about the world above.

Then there is Aristotle, who more than any other Greek cemented the idea of natural law—that nature necessarily behaved in certain ways, and that it was incumbent on humans to understand and follow these laws. Following Plato, these laws were the product of a cosmic nous, or mind. “Only the law that pervaded the universe, and was equivalent to the divine nous could truly provide a city with proper governance,” Holland writes of Aristotle’s thinking. Jesus, in his humbler, earthy way, told his followers that it was better to be like the lilies of the field.

But it was the Stoics, coming slightly after Aristotle, who really supercharged Christian theology. Besides praising chastity, cosmopolitanism, and humility, Stoicism lent Christianity one of its favorite terms: “Animating the entire universe,” Holland says of Stoic beliefs, “God was active reason: the Logos.” The divine word, divine reason, underlying everything and—crucially for Christians in their evangelizing—available to all human beings. Holland quotes the Stoic Cleanthes: “Alone of all creatures alive and treading the earth, it is we who bear a likeness to a god.” The Stoics practiced what they preached, too: just as Christianity was a religion of slaves and emperors alike, the greatest Stoics were not only oligarchs (Seneca) and politicians (Marcus Aurelius), but also rebels (Gaius Musonius Rufus), slaves (Epictetus), and entertainers (Cleanthes).

Then there are the Cynics, the peripatetic hobo-philosophers of the Hellenistic world. Jesus’s poverty, cutting wit, and hatred of idolatry find direct parallels in Cynics like the homeless Diogenes, who spat on the floors of rich people, chided priests who mistook carvings and pictures for actual gods, and declared that his great goal in life was to find a single honest man. Diogenes and Jesus both spoke in parables, confronted the hypocrisies of their age, embraced poverty, and seemed to have a special ire toward money: Diogenes defaced currency to prove its arbitrariness, while Christ overturned the tables of the moneylenders.

None of this is to say that Jesus was an expert in Greek philosophy. We aren’t even sure that he spoke Greek, and in all the gospels, canonical or otherwise, there are much more direct parallels to Jewish traditions. Then again, by the time of Jesus’s birth, there was a rich Hellenistic Jewish tradition across the Eastern Mediterranean. In Holland’s telling, the Jews of Alexandria had become to thoroughly Hellenized that they needed a Greek translation of the Torah—the Septuagint—in order to practice their faith. Even in the very early days of Christianity, when it was a Jewish cult, its followers probably spoke Koine Greek and knew at least a little philosophy.

More importantly, we may not know if Jesus was a fan of Greek philosophy, but we know that most of the Church Fathers were: the apostle Paul’s letters are full of approving references to Stoic philosophy; Origen was widely acknowledged as one of the greatest scholars of philosophy in the known world, even writing that “No one can truly do duty to God who does not think like a philosopher,” teaching his students Greek, Jewish, and Christian literature alike; and there is of course Augustine, who confessed to having followed just about every school of philosophy he could find before settling on Christianity.

All this is to say that even in the earliest days of its spread, Christianity encountered Greek and Roman philosophy, and may very well have picked up elements of its theology and attitude from its traditions. And its spread was almost certainly helped by the fact that Yeshua ben Yosef spoke an awful lot like a philosopher. But that depends on what evidence you’re willing to accept.

I haven’t written much about Greek philosophy in this space, even though it’s one of the great passions of my reading life. You can get more of my thinking on Cynic philosophy in particular here:

And that’s all for this week. Happy reading!

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