An excerpt from From Jesus to Christ by Paula Fredriksen

Index

• The Legacy of Alexander
• Hellenistic Paganism
• Hellenistic Judaism

The Legacy of Alexander

To his Logos, his chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same Logos both pleads with the Immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject. He glories in the prerogative and proudly describes it in these words: "I stood between the Lord and you." (Phil, quis rerum divinarum heres 42.205)

The man who penned these words was no Christian theologian meditating on the Gospel of John. He was Philo Judeaeus of Alexandria, and when he died in the mid-first century the movement that was to become Christianity was just finding its way into the households of Mediterranean port cities. Philo died never having heard of Christianity. How as it then that he, an observant Jew, wrote in Greek about the scriptures concerning the Logos of God?

In part because of the dissemination of Greek civilization that had followed in the wake of Alexander the Great. By 323 B.C., Alexander had conquered the lands from the Peloponnesus in the west to the northern regions of India. The political unity of this vast territory survived only as long as its master: when Alexander died, his conquests fractured into a dozen smaller empires, kingdoms, and city-states. But a greater underlying cultural unity, Hellenism, endured.

The matrix of Hellenism was the city. Wherever Alexander conquered, he established cities and left behind resident Macedonian populations of soldiers, officials, and merchants. The first practical consequence of this policy was that Greek became the language of trade and government – not the high Greek of classical literary convention, but a flexible spoken Greek, "common" Greek, koine. The degree to which the conquered participated in their new political situation and took advantage of the international field fro commerce was the degree to which they learned koine.

The conquerors also offered a second type of international horizon, that of their intellectual culture, paideia. The new foreign ruling class established its traditional institutions of education -- the school (for primary education), the gymnasium (for athletics, literature, music, and philosophy), the public library – and so maintained its Greek identity. But native elites with access to the gymnasium could also, through paideia, take on a Greek identity and self-consciousness and so enter into the classical heritage of the conquerors. One could transcend the accident of birth through education.

The particular genius of cultural Hellenism lay in its ability to translate the mythical into the philosophical, to take the divinities of all cultures and, through allegory, translate them into the larger syncretistic religious system of Hellenistic philosophy. Such a highly evolved and ecumenical intellectual vision held enormous appeal: one need not renounce one's heritage, merely see through it. Indeed in the fourth century B.C., the Greeks had done the same thing with their own heritage, allegorizing the ancient poetry of Hesiod and Homer, those singers of incest, rape, murder, cannibalism (and that was divine behavior!). Myth demanded allegory: the stories' surface meanings were too clearly an affront to common decency to take them literally. So, for example, Chronos' devouring his children is really an allegory for the division of time into subunits; Zeus' rape of Ganymede really an expression of the soul's rapture when seized by the power of the divine, and so on. So, too, through allegory, could the mythology of other cultures be sublimated, their various gods made into particular manifestations of general philosophical truths. The physical representation of the luminous unity of the True Being, the divine One. Hellenistic reinterpretation, by thus "modernizing" ancient religious texts, reconciled them intellectually to a new age, and so created from previous heterogeny a cultural unity.

The Legacy of Alexander | Hellenistic Paganism | Hellenistic Judaism

• Read more in From Jesus to Christ by Paula Fredriksen
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:35:09 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:37:16 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:35:09 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:37:16 PM - -76.30.20.161