I agree but I think civil discourse is the only way to deal with issues regarding politics. Trump did fo some positive things with the economy but handled several other things horribly. Biden promises things but seemingly can’t get them done. I’m happy he was the first president to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as true but this I feel didn’t get enough coverage.

Interesting… When exactly was the Jewish Canon actually formalized or closed? I’ve heard that the Council of Jamnia in the 2nd century was the official date but some scholars debate this.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the Biblical canon at least somewhat “defined” by Christ’s day? Or are you just saying people do naturally pick and choose what they want to read because that is also very true.

I agree. All the evidence points to the concerns of Jesus caring about issues within Judaism and among Jewish society whether he was influenced by Hellenic thought or not. I like Grimes but I think he has a tendency to insert his opinion too much. For example I once listened to him say that logos actually means “self” or “whole” rather than “the Word, reason, or rationality.” I don’t speak Greek (maybe someday soon) but to my knowledge it doesn’t mean any of these. He likes to say that St. Paul “cut out” the Greek tradition from Christianity but says 20-25 years earlier in the 90’s that the similarities between St. Paul and Seneca the Younger are remarkable.

I never would have thought that the Jews living in Galilee were “less observant and less literal” than others. Could this have been because of the presence of other groups of people that weren’t Jewish? Greeks of course but Samaritans were at least similar to Jews because of their reverence for the Torah (despite the differences between Judaism’s version).

I have seen a few publications in theology journals from Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics attempting to revive this kind of movement. What I enjoy about it is the “bridge” between east and west, an attempt to reconcile the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition with Palamism’s focus on the essence-energies distinction and deification.

If sufficient evidence appeared proving Grimes’ thesis then yes, I would not have a problem with that.

Currently re-reading

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

An Inquiry into the Good, Kitaro Nishida.

Love and St. Augustine, Hannah Arendt.

The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt.

Currently reading

Lots of stuff by Kierkegaard: The Present Age, The Sickness Unto Death, On the Concept of Irony, Attack Upon Christendom, Fear and Trembling along with his early journals. I’ve also been reading up on Thomism too, namely Orthodox Readings of Aquinas by Marcus Plested and Person and Act by John Paul II.

We simply don't know if he actually did have an education like that. Perhaps the “lost years” may suggest he went to a Greek gymnasium in order to receive a correct education. This can be mixed with the tenets of faith, however. I am convinced, by my own experiences and intellectual pursuits, that Christianity is true. I just think that a certain strand of it is very misguided in the modern age. But this does not make other religions or philosophies any less true than Christianity.

Sorry, it’s hard to follow all this at work.

I never considered the actual change in dialect of Aramaic in the region of Galilee. To my knowledge Hebrew was whitewashed in various parts of Judea by Jesus’ day hence why I strongly believe the lingua franca of religion during the time of Christ was Greek (at least in his circle). I like to think that Jesus was somewhat familiar with the Septuagint but I’m sure there is debate regarding this.

Perhaps you would find this passage from Mack’s book The Lost Gospel interesting:

“We tend to think of Galilee as a natural part of the land of Israel because the kingdoms of David and Solomon included it, and because the extent of their kingdoms became the ideal realm for any Jewish state centered in Jerusalem. But Galilee belonged to the kingdom of David and Solomon for less than one hundred years. After that it was part of the kingdom of Israel with its own ‘northern’ traditions and its capital at Shechem, the provincial center later to be known as Samaria. Then it was annexed as a province by Assyria, transferred to Neo-Babylonia, and invaded by the Persians. The stories of the Jews who returned from deportation to Babylon belong to the history of Jerusalem and Judea, not to Samaria and the district of Galilee. The stories say that the Jews found the Samaritans unworthy to help build the temple at Jerusalem because they had intermarried with the people of other cultures. And as for Galilee, it was known among Jews as ‘the land of the gentiles.’

After Alexander, the hellenizing programs of the Ptolemies and Seleucids dotted the landscape on all sides of Galilee with newly founded cities on the Greek model. Greek cities were founded in Phoenicia, southern Syria, the Decapolis (region of ‘ten cities’ to the east of the Sea of Galilee), northern Palestine, and the coastlands to the west. Theaters, schools, stadia, porticoed markets, administrative offices, foreign legions, and transplanted people with franchise as ‘citizens’ took their place as signs of the hellenistic age. Samaritans and Galileans did not resist. They did not generate a revolution like that of the Maccabees in Judea.”

I think the idea that Galilee was a melting pot in the Middle East makes the connection between Jesus and the Hellenic tradition much more interesting.

This is an interesting theory. Truthfully I have never ever in my life believed in the whole substitutionary view of atonement, where Jesus gets what we deserve, a punishment by God and, if we don’t accept Jesus’ death in our place, we end up in Hell. David Bentley Hart, despite his brash and at times crude attitude, suggests that Patristic Christianity did not believe in an eternal Hell; it was temporal. It is probably because of my interest in ancient history and ancient philosophy (in this case Greek thought) that I can’t believe in substitutionary atonement. The Bible condemns the very idea: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16).

This of course does not make the death of Jesus irrelevant. There just needs to be a different view in agreement with what ancient historians and biblical scholars find.

I wonder how many observers of Jewish orthodoxy condemned the works of people like Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, and the Stoics. Perhaps very few due to the majority of the Middle East being Hellenized?

What do you think of the idea that Jesus was influenced by Greek philosophy? I mean Hillel must have been influenced by it. So perhaps Jesus was influenced by Greek thought through Hillel? I find a lot of his teachings similar to Stoicism and Cynicism. Buton Mack’s book The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins along with John Dominic Crossan’s book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant both suggest that he was a Jewish Cynic.

Well seeing as how he grew up in a very Hellenistic society he must’ve been familiar with the kind of philosophy accessible to the every day man. The ascetic commands of Jesus to the apostles do resemble the practices of the Cynics. But I like to think that Stoicism had a huge influence on him; this was the philosophy of the working man, a man that lived in society.

Pierre Grimes is an insightful man. However due to my piety as a Christian, I must disagree with him when he says that the teaching of Jesus comes directly from the “Greek tradition.” There is a clear observable synthesis of Judaism and Hellenistic philosophy going on. What bugs me is fellow Christians, minus those of the eastern flavor (Orthodoxy, Eastern Catholics), do not take this kind of scholarship seriously.

Very true. I like to think that Yamamoto is probably one of the most influential figures of Bushido other than Miyamoto Musashi.

Could you possibly tell me more about this “Neo-Classical God?” First time I’ve ever heard of it.

There is nothing like the Hagakure.

I appreciate the input. Which work is this from? I’m primarily using Robert Bretall’s A Kierkegaard Anthology when it comes to mapping his works out.

Maybe I could get your opinion on this… Could you potentially break down for his idea of the “teleological suspension of the ethical?” I find it to be a difficult concept to understand.

He’s an unbelievably profound thinker; I'm writing my graduate thesis on him. I think he’s one of the most important modern philosophers to read. Unfortunately I feel many circles of academia don’t give him much attention (at least in my experience).

Let me rephrase this: He believed that faith in God (“The Religious Life”) was the answer to a persons battle with anxiety and despair, leading to sin. He did believe that society was full of absurdity, though.

These four have a tendency to try and stick with a classical view of virtue ethics, stemming from an Aristotelian and Confucian-Buddhist background, while attempting to combine this with the deontological theory of ethics as discussed by Kant. I will note that they stick with the traditional Kierkegaardian view of life being totally absurd without a concept of God and just about all of the, stuck with divine command theory (ethics come from God). Hajime Tanabe formulated his philosophy, what he calls Metanoetics, from the idea that one needs to experience nihilism in its purest form in order to realize that God is the only source of salvation for the human person. I don’t know if this is a convincing argument for God because of its subjectivity but it’s definitely interesting.