I’ve heard this argument made before by historians and I’ve recently crossed the same argument in Peter Watson’s book Ideas. Do you find merit in the argument?
Read until you have something to write...Write until you have nothing to write...when you have nothing to write, read...read until you have something to write...Jeremiah
You might want to elaborate, but Plato was born long after Christianity was founded, so I don't see how the new testament could be influenced by Plato at all. You must be talking about influences after the new testament was written... Right?
Plato: 428 BC - 348 BC
The church fathers, like Paul who was well trained in philosophy, used Plato and the Stoics to get their ideas across to the Romans, etc. but I don't agree that it is just that.
I dont know if that was how the 'creators' of the religion thought that Christianity was (Old testament + Plato). But Platonism may be part of it. if you read St. Augustine, it is obvious that he is highly influenced by Plato, and he is often credited as the person who 'christianized' Plato.
But there has also been Platonic leaders that have been opposed to Christianity... For example, Porphyry thought thought that platonism was the opposition to Christianity.
My Blog: http://www.anarchico.net/
Production is 'anarchistic' - Ludwig von Mises
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2643/Default.aspx
This may be somewhat relevant, but very interesting. Skip down to the part by Nicholas Capaldi.
Also from http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/plato.php
"It was Middle Platonism that provided Philo and the Christian writers, such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen with what they considered to be the
best available instrument for understanding and defending the teachings of Scripture and Church tradition… like Philo, they did not believe that truth could conflict with truth and were confident that all that was rationally certain in Platonic speculation would prove to be in perfect accordance wit the Christian revelation. Their unhistorical approach and unscholarly methods of exegesis of texts, both pagan and Christian, facilitated this confidence.[23]"
Plato: 428 BC - 348 BC Wow, I was way off. I stand corrected. I don't doubt there was an influence.
A large portion of the whole Bible is a pretty revisionist (in the negative sense) book. A lot of the New Testament we know is pseudepigraphal (not written by the author it is supposed to have been written by) and probably came into being as various camps within Christianity were jockeying for power after Constantine had elevated Christianity to the status of the official religion of the Roman Empire - a classic example of "if you can't lick 'em, join 'em." The oldest autographs of the Hebrew scriptures are surprisingly recent (the Dead Sea Scrolls date at most in the 2nd century BC, fully 1200 years after Moses supposedly lived and wrote the Torah).
In the Hebrew scriptures themselves there is significant evidence of priestly revisionism of all the chronicles of the Israelite and Judean monarchies, most likely during the period of Babylonian capitivity. Ironically, the Hebrew scripture documents one instance of its own revision! (2 Kings 22:8ff, et. al.) This account of revisionism is particularly remarkable because it establishes the earliest possible date for all modern copies of the Torah... mid-7th century BC since the Torah had been "lost" for so long that people had actually completely forgotten what it said! So, clearly, there weren't any other copies floating around and then this copy gets magically discovered in the temple.
I'm still studying (at a very relaxed pace) the origins and history of the Bible because it is such an incredibly important force in the modern West. The Christian Bible (to be more accurate, Bibles) is comprised of a version of the Hebrew scriptures (slightly different from what Jews consider canonical - some of the best "Old Testament proofs" that Jesus was prophesied - i.e. some verses from Isaiah 53 - are considered apocryphal by Jewish scholars) and a significant variety of New Testament canons. The New Testament canon had pretty much hardened down to a core set of books with only minor variations by the time of St. Augustine (fourth century) but there isn't any good historical documentation of the status of a "canon" prior to this that I'm aware of. The impression given off by sympathetic Biblical scholars is that the books of the Bible were written when they purport to have been written (during the lifteimes of the apostles, i.e. during the first century) and were immediately and universally recognized at the time by more or less all Christians as the inspired Word of God. The documentary evidence of this is non-existent but what we do find is evidence of significant amounts of plagiarism, editorialization, alteration and all manner of fabrication. People - especially literate people who, at the time, were high-earning professionals - don't waste time making forgeries and altering or fabricating documents unless it serves a purpose and this tells me that the stakes must have been high to motivate the large volume of fabrication that was going on... so I think a great deal of the pseudepigraphal documents actually originated after Constantine and even some of the now "canonical" books of the New Testament were themselves altered or forged and all competing documents were destroyed (or filed somewhere in the Vatican Secret Archives).
Clayton -