General Platonism/Hellenism History

[jaybreak]

Vox Day referenced the post that contained these comments, here. There are some interesting claims re: Platonism and Hellenization in general.

This question isn't directed to anyone in particular. Possibly Ed more than anyone, since he has the most suited background for discerning this stuff. And it's not even a question--it's more just a presentation of ideas.

Original link for this comment. I'm well aware he's addressing Hellenized Christianity more so, but interesting claim nonetheless:

I’m well aware that Christian believers will find this unacceptable, but I’ve long since come to an unoriginal conclusion: Christianity is triumphant renovated Zoroastrianism. It is not a continuation of Judaism mixed with some Hellenic ideas derived from Neoplatonism & Orphism.

Ideologically, Christians owe most of their world-view to Zarathustra & his followers: 1) dualism (not di-theism), 2) angelology, 3) World Savior, not a local Messiah, 4) figure of the Evil One, who is more like Zoroastrians’ Ahriman than traditional Jewish Satan, 5) great final conflagration, very visual & scary apocalypse- again, more Persian than Judaic, 6) fierce sense of election of God’s favorite group of people, which dwarfs Jewish chosen people story- again, Zoroastrian, 7) image of Heaven & Hell, which is absent in classical Judaism, 8) resurrection of the dead.

Of course, Christians don’t care – theologically- for fire; they have a strong sense of guilt (unlike classic Zoroastrians); phraseologically & iconographically, Christians derive their mythology from Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, but: take away Zoroastrian ideas from Christianity & you’ll be left with zero, zippo, zilch.

Normative Judaism is not the birth place of Christianity; Essenes & other intertestamental pro-Persian sectarians are.

Original link here:

Judaism is ethical henotheism which became ethical monotheism. It is a this-wordly religion focused primarily on covenant with God & ethical behavior, the purpose of human life being in fulfilling God’s commandments. From ca. 500 BC to 300 AD, many foreign elements, chiefly from Zoroastrianism (angels, resurrection of the body, Messiah, Hell as the state of divine retribution post-mortem, the end of times,..) & Hellenic (immortality of the soul, Plato’s concept of spiritual cultivation through learning, Neo-Platonic idea of unicity of Being & man’s possibility of direct communion with God, erotic love as the metaphor for God’s love,..) have been assimilated, theoretically, in Judaism’s religious practice, but the stress remains on this life with meager interest in metaphysical & otherworldly dimensions of religion.

This comment has a quote from someone named Harold Bloom:

One is that nowhere in the whole of the Tanakh does it say that a whole people can make themselves holy through study of texts. That’s a purely Platonic idea, and comes out of Plato’s Laws. That simply shows how thoroughly Platonized the rabbis of the second century were. The other one, which I say in this book and it has already given some offense, is that in fact not only is Judaism, which is a product of the second century of the common era—and it’s worked out by people like you know Akiba and his friends and opponents like Ishmael and Tarphon and the others, is a younger religion than Christianity is. Christianity in some form exists in the first century of the common era. What we now call Judaism comes along in the second century of the common era. Christianity is actually the older religion, though it infuriates Jews when you say that to them.