Horatio Parker

Whether or not Mark used Homer as part of his central message or to relate to his readership is a matter of speculation.

This doesn't make sense.



I think that the Republics view's on poetry are among the less clear of Plato's writings and are appropriated by others to advance their own views.

I don't think Mark intended to show Jesus as a philosopher king. Jesus was too misanthropic for a philosopher king.

Elijah

So there is no actual ideological sharing between the two groups that you can see; there just may be some wordplay to help the Greek reader feel at ease with the story? That I could agree with.

What doesn't make sense to you?

I think it's pretty obvious what the problems were.

I don't know what you think the quotes are showing, but I also don't think you could find a worse character to point out as misanthropic. The guy in the story commands his followers to love one another, and that they should be willing to lay down their own life because of that love. That idea of willingness to die comes from who?

"For I deem that the true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he repine at the arrival of that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?" Phaedo

Horatio Parker

I'm not prepared to say that there is no ideological sharing. I would tend to suspect there is, if Mark was attempting to co-opt Homer. If there is no common ground, then his use of the stories is deceptive.

But this goes to the point of studying scriptures as literature. Dennis MacDonald stumbled on the Homerisms in Mark after comparing the Acts of Andrew the Homer. If MJ is adopted as a working hypothesis, other parallels and influences will probably come to light. Maybe Mark or another Gospel author knew Sophocles...

This: If you're going to take up Justin's line and blame poets and poetry for the nature of Greek Gods, that's a dead end IMO. The Greek Gods were in no way equivalent to Yahweh; they didn't create the universe and were not omniscient. They represented the vicissitudes of life, and their capricious actions and characters reflect that.

It differs from the Judaeo-Christian approach of making the cruel, heavy handed God of Job and the all-loving Jesus into one person. A God that's at once all loving and simultaneously rejecting without explanation the offerings of Cain requires a degree of cognitive dissonance.

The Greek solution holds certain advantages. There's a light hearted humorous approach to the inevitable questions of suffering, better to laugh than cry. On the other hand, questions relevant to the meaning of ultimate reality can only be answered by ideas that pass the scrutiny of dialectic. No gloomy pronouncements from authority in the name of the divine.

I think the contemporary Christian(and others) mind stands to learn a great deal from pagan thought. The idealogical and theological exclusionary attitude is not a happy recipe.

The quotes are inconsistent with a philosopher king. No interpretation or understanding of Plato that I've ever seen is consistent with a category of eternally damned or deliberately misled people. Misanthropic.

Even if one accepts the acceptance as death as equivalent, the mechanisms are entirely different. One is revelatory and the other is dialectical. One tells you what the truth is and the other urges you to search for it.

Elijah

Maybe one day you find the ideological influence that you suspect is there but until then hopefully you understand why others would be skeptical of that assertion.

Do you know of any ideas that anyone demonstrated about those figures that could have influence the formation of Christianity? Or are the similarities limited to plot similarities between two men’s history?
Not inline the poets' understanding of the Greek gods, but if you read Philo then you will see that there was an attempt to align the Jewish understanding of God with the platonic understanding. Christianity is a byproduct of Jewish thought aligning with the Greek philosophers thinking… not the poets. The same criticism that the philosophers applied to the poets representation of God was applied to Moses' representation in the Torah. People like Marcion criticized Moses for making the same mistakes as the Greek poets, while people like Philo and the early Christians interpreted the texts allegorically, in an attempt to align it with the philosophical outlook. I think they even went as far as to say that Plato got his ideas from Moses while in Egypt.

The Republic ends with myth of Er so let’s not assume that the Greeks believed in something completely different. Now there is deviation with the philosophers believing in reincarnation and not permanent staying in a spiritual realm while the Christians believe in the resurrection of the dead because of their interaction with Zoroastrianism. The Christians saw the way to bring about the resurrection, was to establish the Republic Plato was talking about, and that they saw as Moses working towards with his nation. Both afterlife theories have consequence for the actions in this life, found in the next though.

He’s warning the people about a threat he sees for their action and inaction in this life. The person who doesn’t care about the fate of the people around them will concern themselves about being accepted in the community, more than looking to warn them. If anyone is misanthropic it is the person who doesn’t warn others about the consequence to their actions, if that is what they believe in.

Lost me. Both die by accepting a death sentence at a trial. The Jews were expecting a messiah to lead them and they got one who thought the ideal thing to do would be to show that he was willing to die.

The Statesman is the text Plato talks about the ideal king.

“STRANGER: And the myth was introduced in order to show, not only that all others are rivals of the true shepherd who is the object of our search, but in order that we might have a clearer view of him who is alone worthy to receive this appellation, because he alone of shepherds and herdsmen, according to the image which we have employed, has the care of human beings.

YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true.

STRANGER: And I cannot help thinking, Socrates, that the form of the divine shepherd is even higher than that of a king; whereas the statesmen who are now on earth seem to be much more like their subjects in character, and much more nearly to partake of their breeding and education.
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“STRANGER: And if we call the management of violent rulers tyranny, and the voluntary management of herds of voluntary bipeds politics, may we not further assert that he who has this latter art of management is the true king and statesman?”
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“STRANGER: There may be something strange in any servant pretending to be a ruler, and yet I do not think that I could have been dreaming when I imagined that the principal claimants to political science would be found somewhere in this neighbourhood.”
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“STRANGER: Because the law does not perfectly comprehend what is noblest and most just for all and therefore cannot enforce what is best.”
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“No one who really had the royal science, if he had been able to do this, would have imposed upon himself the restriction of a written law.”
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“But we are certain of this,—that no one will raise a similar claim as against the herdsman, who is allowed on all hands to be the sole and only feeder and physician of his herd;”

Assuming the MJ theory; it is inconceivable to me that a person familiar with the Greek language didn’t have this text or Socrates' trial in mind when writing the story of their opinion of the ideal Jewish king.

Horatio Parker

These two statements are to the same point.

A&O represent the courage to maintain a higher vision. Or, in Christian terms, faith in a higher power. For Achilles, it was glory, for Odysseus it was the justice of returning home.


And should be applied to the NT as well.

I'd be careful with Plato's myths. We don't know why he used them any more than we know why he wrote in dialogue. I would not make the assumption that they were an article of religious faith.

Which quote are you talking about? Presumably you don't take them literally.

Dialectic is the process of examining ideas. Myth is an abstract truth presented as drama. The setting of Phaedo contains drama, but there's nothing mythical about the theory of recollection or opposites. The Jesus stories are myth.

I'm not so sure. It's pretty esoteric stuff even now with universal literacy.

GakuseiDon

A good article on Plato, Rhetoric and Poetry is here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/

One of the most famous lines in the culminating sections of one of his most famous dialogues announces that “there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Rep. 607b5–6), in support of which Plato quotes bits of several obscure but furious polemics—presumably directed by poets against philosophers—such as the accusation that the opponent is a “yelping bitch shrieking at her master” and “great in the empty eloquence of fools”. [3] Indeed, much of the final book of the Republic is an attack on poetry, and there is no question but that a quarrel between philosophy and poetry is a continuing theme throughout Plato's corpus.

The comment “there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” brings to mind Tertullian's comment about Athens and Jerusalem.

The article continues (my emphasis):

The scope of the quarrel, especially in the Republic, also indicates that for Plato what is at stake is a clash between what we might call comprehensive world-views; it seems that matters of grave importance in ethics, politics, metaphysics, theology, and epistemology are at stake. He leads up to the famous line about the quarrel by identifying the addressees of his critique as the “praisers of Homer who say that this poet educated Greece, and that in the management and education of human affairs it is worthwhile to take him up for study and for living, by arranging one's whole life according to this poet” (606e1–5). The praisers of Homer treat him as the font of wisdom. Plato agrees that Homer is indeed the educator of Greece, and immediately adds that Homer is “the most poetic and first of the tragic poets.” Plato is setting himself against what he takes to be the entire outlook—in contemporary but not Plato's parlance, the entire “philosophy of life”—he believes Homer and his followers have successfully propagated. And since Homer shaped the popular culture of the times, Plato is setting himself against popular culture as he knew it. Not just that: the quarrel is not simply between philosophy and Homer, but philosophy and poetry. Plato has in his sights all of “poetry,” contending that its influence is pervasive and often harmful, and that its premises about nature and the divine are mistaken. He is addressing not just fans of Homer but fans of the sort of thing that Homer does and conveys. The critique is presented as a trans-historical one. It seems that Plato was the first to articulate the quarrel in so sweeping a fashion.[4] It is noteworthy that in the Apology (23e), Socrates' accusers are said to include the poets, whose cause Meletus represents.

On Plato's Republic:

In book II the critique of poetry focused on mimesis understood as representation; the fundamental point was that poets misrepresent the nature of the subjects about which they write (e.g., the gods)...

Book X starts us off with a reaffirmation of a main deficiency of poets: their products “maim the thought of those who hear them.” And by means of the following schema, this is now connected to a development of the allegation (repeated at 602b6–8) that poets do not know what they are talking about. Socrates posits that there are Forms (or Ideas) of beds and tables, the maker of which is a god; there are imitations thereof, namely beds and tables, produced by craftsmen (such as carpenters) who behold the Forms (as though they were looking at blueprints); thirdly, there are imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create a kind of image of these objects in the world of becoming. The tripartite schema presents the interpreter with many problems.[13] Certainly, Socrates does not literally mean that poets paint verbal pictures of beds and tables. Subsequently, the scheme is elaborated so as to replace the craftsmen with those who produce opinion in the city (legislators, educators, military commanders, among others), and the painters with “the first teacher and leader of all these fine tragic things” (595b10-c2), that is, Homer. The poets are therefore “at the third generation from nature” or “third from a king and the truth” (597e3–4, 6–7).

I think this helps to explain the background of Second Century apologists attacks on the Roman gods in their apologies to the Romans, even Roman emperor and Senate, where they criticized Roman myths as being lies of poets influenced by bad daemons. At the same time, they appealed to the support of Plato and other popular philosophers to show that Christianity was consistent with current philosophical notions.

Elijah

If that kind of extremely vague similarity between the individuals is all you can produce then that makes a good example of why you shouldn’t compare Jesus to A&O.
Criticism sure, but if you apply the same criticism to the NT as the OT then you are failing to realize that the NT has already recognized that criticism and adjusted the ideology. This is the problem that I think a lot of people run into. They don’t recognize the difference between what Homer and Plato was saying about Gods, so end up incorrectly interpreting the NT as if it was similar to Homer. Which is why I’m saying that Homer can only help you understand the scripture incorrectly, because if someone interprets the story of Jesus like the story of a poetic representation of God then they are interpreting the texts completely incorrect. Plato is doing something completely different.
Are you skeptical about him being a reincarnation guy? Or is it you don’t think that he believed how we lived our lives had an effect on the next life?
The one he is warning people about being damned to hell, which you were using as the example for why the writer of the Jesus story isn’t trying to depict a Jewish king from a platonic ideal.
I’m still not seeing your point on what makes you think the deaths of the two individuals are so different that there couldn’t be an influence there.
Back then it wasn’t like it is today, where you are more likely to be talking to someone with your birthday than someone familiar with Plato. Even if he didn’t take the time to read the text, he was familiar with the ideas, just like someone would be familiar with General relativity, even though they never read Einstein’s actual papers.

So in the end you can’t find any significant ideological sharing between A&O and Jesus but suspect that there is some, while on the other hand, Plato is describing the character Jesus is portraying in the Gospels, as a figure necessary to establish the ideal kingdom, and you don’t think a story about his death in trying to establish an ideal society was influenced by those texts, simply because you think they are too hard to read?

Horatio Parker

It's unusual to hear a Christian dismiss faith as trivial.

I can only speculate about Mark's intentions, but it's easy to say what I think, namely, the NT has much more in common with Homer than Plato, absolutely. Granted there are bits of dialogue and wisdom sayings, but the central messages are expressed in myth and as such is poetry not dialectic.

A comparison with Plato can only hold up because the general view of that message is similar to Platonic ideas. The Hebrew god resembles the Pythogaroean-Platonic One more than do the Olympians. That does not make them the same.

Jesus is a cynic sage, not a philosopher king.

As I said, I'm skeptical that Plato's myths were ever articles of religious faith for anyone. Of course he was a reincarnation guy.
Yes, absolutely. A most un-Platonic sentiment. The degree to which the Gospel writers speak for God is presumptuous in the extreme. Any Platonist knows that the supreme mystery is the nature of the One in itself.

I find it difficult to believe that you don't understand the difference between dialectic and revelation. The Gospels are not dialectic, they are inspired religious writings. Jesus death expresses an abstract idea that says more about life than death. Socrates death gives us an example, through it's dialogue, of how to approach death. Socrates death in itself means nothing, it's just an old guy sentenced to death. Not so for Jesus.

That's possible, but we don't know enough about how people were educated. Homer is a much safer bet than Plato. Surely Mark knew Homer.

The idea that Jesus was trying to establish the Kallipolis is absurd. Jesus' kingdom is not of this world, as he said. Plato regarded the worldly realization of the Kallipolis as unlikely, but not impossible.

I think your comparisons of Plato to Jesus are as superficial as the early church fathers.

The message of the Passion is similar to Plato in this way: the death and resurrection of Jesus is an expression that discernment, cognition, and judgement are divine gifts that enable us to seek meaning from suffering and consequently transcend it.

Plato, in the Republic approaches the same concept but from another direction: understanding what justice is. Too detailed to go into here, but the divided nature of the soul, the cardinal virtues, the dual nature of reality etc all point to an altered state of mind that communes with the divine. The resulting inspirations give rise to expressions of justice. To my mind, similar to a state of grace in Christianity:

Horatio Parker

I read abut half and scanned the rest. The article concentrates on the differences between rhetoric and philosophy and in that respect yes it's a well argued interesting article.

But there's no mention of the aspect I mentioned before which is the division between purely oral and written cultures, covered in Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Here's a column on the subject:

This adds a new dimension to the question.

Elijah

No, the comparison of Christian faith to a quest for glory or a return home is trivial.
What do you think is the central message that is expressed in myth and why?
There may be some difference but it is a fact that they tried to harmonize their understanding of God with Plato’s.
What is the difference that makes that an either/or deal?
What do you mean by “articles of religious faith”?

And he believed in consequence to his actions which he warned people about in his writings, so he is no different than Jesus warning people about their fates for their behavior.
Not at all, as we see Socrates do the same ethical thing and warn people about their fate.

What do you think is said that is presumptuous in your opinion?
Well I’m not playing dumb. I don’t understand how you think the idea of Socrates’ death couldn’t have influenced a guy writing a fictional story of a Jewish messiah in Greek.

Yes Jesus’ death has more significance because he is doing it as the identified king of the Jews and he is doing it with purpose. He is trying to establish a new kind of king for the people to worship and to unify around, which hopefully is what is necessary for the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth, which brings about the resurrection of the dead.
For me, an explanation for where the different take on the Jewish messiah came from needs to be explained and Plato’s divine shepherd is too similar for me to think it is a coincidence.
Yes it’s of the world to come. Missing the political ramifications of what Jesus is doing is another good example of why trying to understand it from the context of Homer is going to give you an understanding that is nowhere near correct.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
Huh? Where is this coming from?
Plato’s philosophy covers a lot of areas but the characteristic that ties him to Jesus is that he was a nation builder. Like Moses, Muhammad and Jefferson, the concept of working towards an ideal society was seen to be within their ability of influence. What Plato and Moses was attempting isn’t that different, other than Moses decides to create a separate society, while Plato and Socrates don’t see that option as being available, so work on changing the society they are in. Both are dealing with the superstition created by Egyptian mythology and Greek poetry.

And more importantly, both are dealing with what to do about men ruling over other men, and come to the same conclusion of building a Republic (Rule by Law) as the key to building the ideal society. They are different kinds of republics though, with one of the key difference was that the written law was seen as being flawed by the Greeks, which went against the idea of the written law in the Torah as acceptable. This is what leads Jesus and Paul to interpret the Law in a more spiritual way after the Jews are exposed to Greek philosophy. They also picked up the idea of the philosopher king who accepts his own death, which is obviously an influence on the Jesus story.