An excerpt from From Jesus to Christ by Paula Fredriksen

Index

• The Legacy of Alexander
• Hellenistic Paganism
• Hellenistic Judaism

Hellenistic Judaism

Judaism both resisted and embraced the seductive reasonableness of syncretistic Hellenism. It too preserved an ancient authoritative text full of now-unacceptable descriptions of divinity, of a God who loved, or grew angry, or changed his mind; who concerned himself immediately with the affairs of men; and who, worse yet, seemed directly involved with the ordering of the physical universe, and hence implicated in the problem of evil. Such a God, in such an age, was no longer intellectually coherent. Could he too be made respectable, demythologized according to the universalist principles of paideia? And if he were, what warrant would there be for the existence of a particular people, Israel? This, in brief, was the cultural and religious quandary of Hellenistic Judaism.

Jews had encountered various Eastern cultures at other periods in their history, through conquest or by living abroad in the Diaspora, that is, outside of Palestine. At least since the sixth century B.C., a large community had thrived in Babylon, speaking Aramaic, the Semitic language of its captors, but preserving its national and religious identity. But in the Western Diaspora, the Jews of the Mediterranean territories – though eventually those in all the lands Alexander conquered, including Babylon and Palestine itself -- faced a very different cultural situation. The first language of this Western Jewish community became an Indo-European tongue, Greek. By the early third century B.C. familiarity with Hebrew had faded to such a degree that anonymous Jewish translators in Alexandria produced a written Greek version of the five books of Moses, the Torah (Teaching), so that the scriptures would be accessible during public worship. The Greek version of the entire Bible, the Septuagint (Seventy, hence the academic shorthand LXX) was available by the end of the second century B.C. in a divinely authorized translation. Seventy-two sages had been appointed to render the Bible in Greek; when they emerged from their task, it was discovered that, working independently, they had all produced identical translations. A miracle!

The translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek both echoed and facilitated a translation of ideas from one cultural system to the other. With the Greek language came paideia. When, for example, the Jewish God revealed his name to Moses as the burning bush (Ex 3:14), the Hebrew ehyeh (I am) became in the LXX ho on (the Being): anyone with even a rudimentary Hellenistic education would recognize in this designation the High God of philosophy. Similarly, when the Lord established the heavens "by a word" (Ps 33:6), the Hebrew davar became the Greek logos: the Creator had suddenly acquired a very Hellenistic factotum. Greek concepts, in brief, did not need to be read into scripture. They were already there, by virtue of the new language of the text.

Hellenistic Judaism did not appreciate Greek culture so much as appropriate it. Jews praised paideia and the wisdom of the Greeks to the degree that they perceived them as Jewish. For Judaism began with the same intellectual premise as Hellenistic syncretism: that Truth is One, and there can be no contradiction between the true things. Torah was true; philosophy was true; therefore any contradiction was only apparent. But in a world where ancient was better, Torah was superior, for (as Hellenistic Jews expended great energy and ingenuity arguing) Jewish wisdom was of much greater antiquity than Greek. The Greek world had hungered for this ancient Jewish wisdom: this is why Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-46 B.C.) had commissioned the LXX translation of the scriptures for his library at Alexandria. Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato had all known Torah from an earlier Greek translation predating the sixth-century Persian conquest of Egypt. So effectively did Jewish apologetic make its case that one pagan, Numenius of Apamaea, finally asked, "What is Plato but Moses speaking in Greek?"

The work of Philo of Alexandia (c. 20 B.C. – 50 B.C.) is a literary monument to Jewish-Hellenistic paideia. A man of extensive and impressive Greek learning and a committed and observant Jew, Philo dedicated himself to the exposition of the LXX. He saw therein the very best philosophical thought of his day – no small intellectual feat, given the nature of biblical narrative and its involved and active God. How can story become philosophy? Again, through allegory. Allegory preserved the dignity and vitality of the scriptures by making them relevant to the new cultural situation of Hellenistic Jews. It freed the biblical text, as it had earlier the text of Homer, from the limitations of its original historical context and the affront of a literal reading. The literal, surface meaning of the narrative, which might give philosophical offense – God concerning himself about fruit trees, deceitful serpents, and expulsions – obviously was not its true, essential meaning. This was available only through the spiritual interpretation of allegory, whereby Adam was revealed to stand for Reason and Even for the labile part of the soul and sensory component of the mind which, if distracted by lower things (the snake), will pull even Reason down with her.

A literal reading of the sacred text indicted the reader's ignorance, not the scriptures' validity and meaningfulness. Obviously, maintained Philo, the changeless, transcendendent God did not directly involve himself in the ordering of the cosmos. Rather, he shaped it by his Word, the divine Logos, the first-born of God and Image of God who "stands on the border" between Creator and creation. The Logos thus represents the point of contact between the human and divine realms, the agent who ordered the world according to divine Law, nomos. And what is divine Law if not Torah? Through the Logos, too, the soul could return to God: "For if we have not yet become sons of God, yet we may be sons of his invisible Image, the most holy Logos" (de confusione linguarum 28.147).

Despite Philo's predisposition as a Hellenistic philosopher to prefer the spiritual interpretation of the text to the literal, however, he never abandoned the literal meaning of the prescriptions of Torah, what the rabbis called halakic observance. The Law, he argued, did not consist of arbitrary prohibitions: these symbolized more profound moral commitments. Circumcision portrayed the excision of sexual passion; avoidance of pork, repudiation of the unsavory moral characteristics attributed to swine, and so on. Living according to the Law thus meant practicing virtue, the goal of true philosophy. But, cautioned Philo, to think that one could attain such a level of virtue without literal observance of the Law was a proud self-deception. Such men lived as though they were alone in the wilderness, or as if they were disembodied souls. "We shall be ignoring the sanctity of the Temple and of a thousand other things if we are going to pay heed to nothing except what is shown us by the inner meaning of things." Outward observance is like the body, inner meanings like the soul. As the wise man cares for the body because it is the home of the soul, so will he care for the letter of the Law. "If we keep and observe these laws, we shall gain a clearer concept of those things of which these are symbols" (de migr. Abr. 16.89-93).

Hence, despite the universalizing of its message by the transposition of biblical thought and religious practice into the categories of Hellenism, Judaism retained its sense of a unique and particular identity and mission. It claimed vis-à-vis Hellenism what Hellenism had claimed vis-à-vis all non-Greek, "barbarian" cultures: to represent the true religious destiny of humankind. Indeed, the huge body of Jewish apologetic in Greek and the extensive corpus of law concerning proselytism in the rabbinic writings attest to the fact that Judaism in both its branches was at this time an active religion of conversion. According to Philo, the proselyte, like Abraham, goes out from his native land – the false idols of paganism – to his true homeland, the One God. And the Matthean Jesus complains, "You Pharisees cross land and sea to make a single convert!" (Mt 23:15).

But Judaism did not need to be a missionary movement in order to be committed to conversion: its "missionaries" were the resident Diaspora communities themselves. The boundary between these communities and the outside world was a fluid one, and interested pagans could visit the synagogue as they would. Some, as the Greek magical papyri evince, came simply to acquire some knowledge of a powerful god in whose name they could command demons. Others – like those Gentiles who annually joined Alexandria's Jews in celebrating the miracle of the Torah's translation into Greek – attached themselves as God-fearers, often remaining pagans while assuming as much of the Law as they cared to. But many – including some of the most illustrious names of Hellenistic Judaism – apparently decided to take upon themselves full observance of the Law. They thus became proselytes and, according to Jewish tradition, full Jews. Jews by birth, such as Philo and later the rabbis, saw in Judaism's openness to sympathetic pagans, and especially in the successful proselytism of the synagogue, the answer to the question of Israel's continuing dispersion. God, by means of the Diaspora, was making good his promise to Abraham that "through him all the nations [Heb. Goyim, LXX ethne] of the earth will be blessed" (Gn 18:18). Israel was in exile in order to turn the Gentiles to God.

Once the movement that formed around the memory of Jesus spread from rural Palestine to the cities of the Roman Empire, it did not leave Judaism behind. On the contrary, it followed the lead of the Hellenistic synagogue both sociologically and theologically. Early Christian communities adopted the Jewish practice of meeting regularly once a week for group worship. They too established philanthropies for the needy, offered group support in time of persecution, and took responsibility for the burial of their dead. Such social structures sustained and gave expression to the strong sense of community and solidarity that distinguished these groups within their pagan environment.

But these social structures were the concrete expression of something even more fundamental, also assumed from Hellenistic Judaism: a strong sense of a distinct identity, religious mission, and divine destiny. And together with this – indeed, its literary and sacral expression – came the LXX, the divine warrant for an story of the history and purpose of the people of the Lord. For the new community, however, the Lord spoken of in the LXX was not always and only the High God, the Father. It could also be his Son, the Lord Jesus, who as a preexistent divine intermediary preserved the dignity of the perfect Father and separated him from imperfect creation. Finally, Hellenistic Christianity adopted allegorical interpretation as well as the Greek scriptures themselves. By these means it could redeem the Bible from its Jewish past and disclose its "true" meaning as the revelation of the New Israel, the church.

The starting point for this reinterpretation of the Bible was the figure of Jesus. Early Christians shared the conviction that, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God had uniquely revealed his plan of salvation. But different communities understood this revelation differently at different times. Their common conviction found a multiplicity of expressions in their various images of Jesus, to which we now turn ...

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
3/11/2008 2:20:36 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
3/11/2008 2:20:36 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:35:09 PM - -76.30.20.161