At 12:03 PM 2/7/02 -0500, Jan de Koning wrote:
>Seeking the counsel in history is good, but then you should not go to the
>earliest Christian philosophers, but to early "theologians" like Paul,
>Peter, John, etc. The earliest Christian philosophers were more going
>back to Aristotle than to Plato. They certainly were not very unified in
>their thinking. Also, Dogmatics only started in the second century, not
>in the first century. Right from the start they had rather severe
>disagreements: Origines contra Celsus. (I looked that up again.)
Two quick points: Origen is a third century Christian apologist; and his
disagreement with Celsus was not a dispute between Christians, since Celsus
was a pagan -- the thrust of *Contra Celsus* is a Christian apologetic
directed against an unbeliever.
And one more substantial point, I think: The recommendation to return to
the earliest Christian theologians (such as Paul, Peter, John, etc.) does
not at all liberate us from the influence of Greek thought. Israel at the
time of Jesus had been under Greek and Roman occupation for more than 300
years; the Jews, in varying degrees (depending on the particular sectarian
Jewish group), were a thoroughly Hellenized people. It is no stretch of
the imagination to see that the first century AD Christians were already
possessed of a basic Greek worldview, and indeed, there is a good deal of
evidence pointing to this. For starters, take a look at the research of
Martin Hengel and his school, available in several books by Hengel from as
early as the 1970s. From what I can tell, the evidence continues to mount
for a deep Hellenistic influence on the writers and the text of the New
Testament. The pluriform character of Greek thought does not suddenly
emerge within Christianity during the second century A.D. -- it has been
there all along.
Tom Pearson
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______________________________________________________________
Thomas D. Pearson
Department of History & Philosophy
The University of Texas-Pan American
Edinburg, Texas
e-mail: pearson@panam1.panam.edu
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