Platonism

121:6.3Though the Hel­le­nized Jew­ish be­liefs were very lit­tle in­flu­enced by the teach­ings of the Epi­cure­ans, they were very ma­te­ri­ally af­fected by the phi­los­o­phy of Plato and the self-ab­ne­ga­tion doc­trines of the Sto­ics. The great in­road of Sto­icism is ex­em­pli­fied by the Fourth Book of the Mac­cabees; the pen­e­tra­tion of both Pla­tonic phi­los­o­phy and Stoic doc­trines is ex­hib­ited in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon. The Hel­le­nized Jews brought to the He­brew scrip­tures such an al­le­gor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that they found no dif­fi­culty in con­form­ing He­brew the­ol­ogy with their revered Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. But this all led to dis­as­trous con­fu­sion un­til these prob­lems were taken in hand by Philo of Alexan­dria, who pro­ceeded to har­mo­nize and sys­tem­ize Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy into a com­pact and fairly con­sis­tent sys­tem of re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. And it was this later teach­ing of com­bined Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy that pre­vailed in Pales­tine when Je­sus lived and taught, and which Paul uti­lized as the foun­da­tion on which to build his more ad­vanced and en­light­en­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.

121:4.1The gen­tiles were, from a moral stand­point, some­what in­fe­rior to the Jews, but there was pres­ent in the hearts of the no­bler gen­tiles abun­dant soil of nat­u­ral good­ness and po­ten­tial hu­man af­fec­tion in which it was pos­si­ble for the seed of Chris­tian­ity to sprout and bring forth an abun­dant har­vest of moral char­ac­ter and spir­i­tual achieve­ment. The gen­tile world was then dom­i­nated by four great philoso­phies, all more or less de­rived from the ear­lier Pla­ton­ism of the Greeks. These schools of phi­los­o­phy were:

146:1.3Many of the bet­ter of the Baby­lo­nian and Per­sian ideas of light and dark­ness, good and evil, time and eter­nity, were later in­cor­po­rated in the doc­trines of so-called Chris­tian­ity, and their in­clu­sion ren­dered the Chris­tian teach­ings more im­me­di­ately ac­cept­able to the peo­ples of the Near East. In like man­ner, the in­clu­sion of many of Plato’s the­o­ries of the ideal spirit or in­vis­i­ble pat­terns of all things vis­i­ble and ma­te­rial, as later adapted by Philo to the He­brew the­ol­ogy, made Paul’s Chris­tian teach­ings more easy of ac­cep­tance by the west­ern Greeks.

94:6.10The Con­fu­cian preach­ment of moral­ity was pred­i­cated on the the­ory that the earthly way is the dis­torted shadow of the heav­enly way; that the true pat­tern of tem­po­ral civ­i­liza­tion is the mir­ror re­flec­tion of the eter­nal or­der of heaven. The po­ten­tial God con­cept in Con­fu­cian­ism was al­most com­pletely sub­or­di­nated to the em­pha­sis placed upon the Way of Heaven, the pat­tern of the cos­mos.

130:4.1The night be­fore they left Alexan­dria Ga­nid and Je­sus had a long visit with one of the gov­ern­ment pro­fes­sors at the uni­ver­sity who lec­tured on the teach­ings of Plato. Je­sus in­ter­preted for the learned Greek teacher but in­jected no teach­ing of his own in refu­ta­tion of the Greek phi­los­o­phy. Gonod was away on busi­ness that evening; so, af­ter the pro­fes­sor had de­parted, the teacher and his pupil had a long and heart-to-heart talk about Plato’s doc­trines. While Je­sus gave qual­i­fied ap­proval of some of the Greek teach­ings which had to do with the the­ory that the ma­te­rial things of the world are shad­owy re­flec­tions of in­vis­i­ble but more sub­stan­tial spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties, he sought to lay a more trust­wor­thy foun­da­tion for the lad’s think­ing; so he be­gan a long dis­ser­ta­tion con­cern­ing the na­ture of re­al­ity in the uni­verse. In sub­stance and in mod­ern phrase­ol­ogy Je­sus said to Ga­nid:

133:5.2A great uni­ver­sity still thrived in Athens, and the trio made fre­quent vis­its to its halls of learn­ing. Je­sus and Ga­nid had thor­oughly dis­cussed the teach­ings of Plato when they at­tended the lec­tures in the mu­seum at Alexan­dria. They all en­joyed the art of Greece, ex­am­ples of which were still to be found here and there about the city.

151:3.31. Je­sus ad­vised against the use of ei­ther fa­bles or al­le­gories in teach­ing the truths of the gospel. He did rec­om­mend the free use of para­bles, es­pe­cially na­ture para­bles. He em­pha­sized the value of uti­liz­ing the anal­ogy ex­ist­ing be­tween the nat­u­ral and the spir­i­tual worlds as a means of teach­ing truth. He fre­quently al­luded to the nat­u­ral as “the un­real and fleet­ing shadow of spirit re­al­i­ties.”

170:5.2Through­out the first cen­turies of the Chris­tian pro­pa­ganda, the idea of the king­dom of heaven was tremen­dously in­flu­enced by the then rapidly spread­ing no­tions of Greek ide­al­ism, the idea of the nat­u­ral as the shadow of the spir­i­tual—the tem­po­ral as the time shadow of the eter­nal.

164:3.4There was, through­out all these re­gions, a lin­ger­ing be­lief in rein­car­na­tion. The older Jew­ish teach­ers, to­gether with Plato, Philo, and many of the Es­senes, tol­er­ated the the­ory that men may reap in one in­car­na­tion what they have sown in a pre­vi­ous ex­is­tence; thus in one life they were be­lieved to be ex­pi­at­ing the sins com­mit­ted in pre­ced­ing lives. The Mas­ter found it dif­fi­cult to make men be­lieve that their souls had not had pre­vi­ous ex­is­tences.