Plato's Fear as a Topic in Early Christian Apologetics

One of the greatest problems of early Christianity in its confrontation with Graeco-Roman culture was the fact that this religion was a new phenomenon. “New” may nowadays imply recommendation, in the ancient world it definitely did not. Aristotle’s well-known adage . . . (Metaphysica Alpha 3, 983b32), i.e., “what is oldest is most venerable” or “the older the better,” is an utterance which gives voice to a sentiment that was widespread in antiquity. Modernism or innovation () was, according to the ancients, something reprehensible in many respects, also as far as religion was concerned. The fact that Christianity could not lay claim to ancient credentials—after all, its founder’s activities took place only very recently, in the time of Tiberius—militated against the dignity, the venerability and the credibility of this new religion. The opponents of Christianity could and did not fail to point out this weakness. Celsus writes in the late seventies of the second century in his True Doctrine that Christians can only answer the question of who is the author of their ancestral laws (patrioi nomoi) by saying: “Nobody!” Their claim to have roots in the old traditions of Judaism is not to be believed because they have broken their ties with Judaism, with the result that the authority of their doctrines has been completely undermined (ap. Origen, Contra Celsum 5.33; cf. 5.65). Celsus himself certainly does believe in a “true doctrine,” but it is a very old one and is held in honor by the most ancient and pious nations of humanity (CC 1.14: “There is an ancient doctrine which has existed from the beginning, which has always been maintained by the wisest nations and cities and wise men”); but it is a doctrine which has subsequently been misunderstood by the Jews and finally still further corrupted and perverted by the Christians.¹ Also Porphyry and Julian the Apostate repeatedly say that the abandonment of the patrioi nomoi—the traditional customs and laws, which formed a central notion in the ancient world—is something for which the Christians should be heavily censured. In Epistula 20, directed to the pagan high-priest and philosopher Theodorus, Julian expresses this very pithily: there is hardly anything with regard to traditional religion that I loathe more than modernism (); the only thing that counts is sticking to the patrioi nomoi.² It therefore mattered a great deal to the apologists of early Christianity to demonstrate that their religion was of ancient origin indeed.

Of course, Christian theologians did not need to re-invent the wheel in this respect. As early as the last two centuries b.c.e. and the first century c.e. Jewish thinkers had faced a comparable problem. From a chronological point of view they were not as hard put to it as the early Christians—it was clear, of course, that Moses had lived many centuries earlier than Jesus³—but still they needed and wanted to persuade the sceptical Greeks with valid arguments that their Lawgiver had indeed lived many centuries before the great Greek thinkers, poets and lawgivers: he had even lived before the Trojan war.⁴ Hence the work of Jewish chronographers such as Demetrius⁵ and the long chronological considerations by Josephus in his Contra Apionem.⁶ Often, however, yet another motive lurks in the background: in addition to the chronological aspect they also wanted to demonstrate that these same great Greek thinkers had borrowed their best ideas from Moses’ Torah. That was a tour de force, but with great ingenuity and inventiveness a number of Jewish writers argued that not only Homer and the classical tragedians, but also no less a person than the great Plato had borrowed a good many of their essential concepts from Moses. Since in the Hellenistic period many still knew that the Greek translation of Moses’ Torah (the LXX) was relatively recent, they had to find a way out, and they did so by postulating the existence of a pre-LXX translation of the Torah. We can see this, for...