Three Jews

By Olivia Pierson

For those who have suddenly developed a knee-jerk hatred of the term "Judeo-Christian" because a maniacal kook like Candace Owens told you to, the following is for you.

Christianity began as a Jewish sect in a Jewish nation that was steeped in Greco-Roman influence. By the time that Jesus started his wandering ministry in the lush and fertile hills of Galilee, Judea had been under Roman occupation for 90 years. The undisputed heart of intellectual and cultural development of this ancient world was practically next door in the city of Alexandria, Egypt also being a conquered Roman province.

Philo of Alexandria was a Hellenised Jewish philosopher who walked the earth during the same time as Jesus and Saul of Tarsus. Though none of these three men ever met in the flesh, all three Jews in their markedly different ways formed the very zeitgeist of what would later become known as Christianity.

In Alexandria, the home of the Great Library where the ancient classical texts were preserved, Philo spent his life studying Greek philosophy, especially Platonism and Stoicism, while remaining deeply loyal to the faith of his Jewish forebears. Alexandria held the largest population of Jews outside of Judea. Even before the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Jewish diaspora had made their homes in all the major pagan cities sprinkled around the Mediterranean. Greek and Jewish thought had already been well acquainted for centuries; the Septuagint - the Jewish Tanakh or Old Testament translated into Greek for a non-Hebrew audience, had been in existence since the rule of Ptolemy II (3rd Century BC).

Philo blended Torah with philosophy. He saw the Logos as God’s eternal “Word” - a divine intermediary, the pattern of creation and source of human reason. He considered Moses to be the greatest lawgiver, prophet and priest of all time, superior to any Greek or barbarian. Philo had developed a method of reading scripture allegorically, not just literally and historically (e.g., Genesis as philosophy), in order to interpret scripture to find deeper, more universal truths, as the ancient Greeks had done with the writings of Homer. This allegorical approach was to become standard in Christian biblical exegesis, especially in Alexandria during the Patristic Era. Even St. Augustine of Hippo used it to interpret spiritual meanings beneath the literal texts.

Forty years after Philo’s death and drawing on the central tenet of Stoicism, i.e., that the whole cosmos was a single, living, intelligent organism permeated by the divine spark of reason, the writer of St. John’s gospel used Philo’s language to convey his own personal commentary on Christ: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh.”  What was only abstract in Philo’s mind became concrete in the living person of Jesus according to St. John, creating a bridge between heaven and earth - an “intermediary” as Philo had understood Logos to mean. Early Christian thinkers in Alexandria, like Clement and Origen Adamantius, carried Philo’s ideas forward, shaping how the Church understood Christ’s divine nature. Though Philo, as a devout Jew, never conceived of something as odd and repulsive as a crucified Messiah, his concept of Logos helped early Christians express the idea that God had physically entered creation through the incarnation at a specific time in history. Philo’s philosophical influence, indirect yet deep, became not only foundational for Christian metaphysical beliefs, but the very beating heart of the doctrine of Christ itself. That’s pure Judeo-Christian influence from the very outset of the faith.

Saul of Tarsus, born in Asia Minor and a highly educated Pharisee, was one of the worst persecutors of the early Christians living in Jerusalem after the asserted resurrection of Jesus. He was a Jew through-and-through before his dramatic conversion to Christ on the road to Damascus saw him renamed as Paul. He spoke Hebrew, Greek and probably Latin, was steeped in Jewish Torah and Greek philosophy, as most well-educated, Hellenised Jews were. He made a personal appearance in the Areopagus of Athens to comment about their strange monument bearing the inscription “To the Unknown God”.  Paul, “a bond-servant of Jesus Christ,” gave them the gospel message claiming that this unknown god was not one of their many gods confined to temples and built by human hands, but the creator of all life who sent his son Jesus to die in Jerusalem and then be resurrected in order to reconcile the world to his divine, eternal Self.  Athens too, had long been conquered by Rome.

When Paul sought to make his case to whichever company of pagans he happened to be preaching before, he often used the vocabulary of the Stoics. This was a natural overlap to be relatable because in the classical world, Stoicism had developed the concept of the divine spark of reason, Logos, existing in all of creation. Stoicism also taught that conscience - awareness or attention to the inner self to bring it into alignment with the principles of virtue and reason - was essential to the good life, hence Paul tells the Athenians: “For in Him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘we are his offspring.’”

But nothing could compare to the radical message Paul preached to the status-conscious, competitive classical world, both the pagan and Jewish communities, when he told the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” That’s pure Judeo-Christian influence from the very outset of the faith.

And so it came to pass that the greatest of the Jewish-Christian apostles, the undisputed author of at least seven of the books of the New Testament, preached the kind of radical equality that the world would only get little glimpses of here and there, but not become civilisationally normal until well into the 20th Century. After a diabolical Holocaust saw Christian Europe turn on the Jews in the most evil way that could possibly be imagined, it also saw them rescued and restored by the other half of the Christian world.

The classical world was shockingly violent, it was built on the ownership and sweat of slaves taken captive from every corner of empire. It practiced crucifixions and impalements as normalised forms of public torture and it glorified bloody and voyeuristic, gladiatorial butchery for family entertainment, including the devouring of women and children by wild beasts. It was a time of perpetual war and unconscionable genocide - and these were the times that the Christian world came to inherit as the Roman Empire slowly crumbled into decay and poverty.

So the next time the phrase “Judeo-Christian” is scorned by some twisted antisemite as just a nonsense in your earshot, try to remember it is a very accurate term to describe a very peculiar phenomenon that transformed a crucified provincial into the most historically significant figure - and the world was never quite the same again. Three Jews: a kindhearted Rabbi from Judea, a Hellenised Jew from Egypt and a repentant Pharisee from Turkey, set the world on a radically new trajectory still holding its place in civilisation after two millennia.