Gmirkin, Plato, Moses
Oct. 10th, 2023 07:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readoldthingsMaybe I should have mentioned that we'd be closed for Columbus Day. But I suppose I'm a creature of an older world, one in which heroes were not despised as being subject to the same evils as the rest of us, but honored for achieving greatness despite being subject to the same evils as the rest of us.
In any case, what I want to talk about today is something quite different.
A few months ago I became aware of a scholar named Russel Gmirkin, and his theories on the origin of the Bible. These pertain directly to this blog and to what has become its main focus. In this post I want to briefly outline Gmirkin's ideas, my take on them, and why I felt it was important to open the discussion today. This post is necessarily going to skim the surface of some very deep waters. I'd ask readers familiar with these ideas to be patient, as I'll need to introduce them in a rather simplified form and it will take some time to fill them out.
Who Wrote the Pentateuch?
In the standard interpretation, the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible, were written over several centuries, starting around 1000 B.C. and winding up no later than 450 B.C. This interpretation itself is revisionist. Traditionally, these books were believed to have been written by Moses himself sometime shortly after the exodus from Egypt. Some people still believe this. The sorts of circles that believe in "Biblical inerrancy," profession of Mosaic authorship is a kind of test of faith. I don't personally understand this form of Christianity, and every encounter I've ever had with it has left me shaking my head and wondering what the appeal could possibly be. And so I won't say much more of it. The 1000-500 B.C. interpretation was the one that I learned, and I was unaware until this past Summer that it had been challenged in a serious way. But challenged it has been.
One of the major themes, or perhaps the major theme, I've been developing on this blog has been the application of the ideas found in Plato and his successors to the spiritual traditions into which I've personally been initaited, be it Roman Catholicism or Revival Druidry. The ease with which this can be done shouldn't surprise us. The parallels between the ideas of Plato and those found in the Bible were obvious to the ancients. As the books of the Pentateuch were ascribed to Moses, who had lived a thousand years before Plato, it seemed obvious that Plato and other Greek philosophers had studied with Jewish teachers and been influenced by the Mosaic writings. This is discussed by various Church Fathers, including Origen, who mentions in his Contra Celsum that Pythagoras and Plato had both been influenced by Moses; Eusebius, who wrote, "What is Plato but Moses writing in Attic Greek?"; and others. It was this idea that allowed Philo of Alexandria to contribute to the development of Middle Platonism, despite being a Jew and not a pagan.
But what if the chain of influence actually went in the other direction? Apparently, no one thought of this until 1993, when a scholar named Niels Peter Lemche noted that external evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch only appears in the record after the Third Century B.C. Following Lemche, Gmirkin undertook to date the Pentateuch based on available evidence, and concluded that it was in fact written by Jewish scholars in Alexandria around the year 270 B.C.
Caveats
Now, "No one noticed it until smart people like us finally evolved 2,000 years later" is an enormous red flag, and it's the sort of thing that we find all over historical scholarship, archaeology, and, above all, anything having to do with the origins of Christianity. Gmirkin's works are only available at academic prices, and so in order to figure out what he has to say, it's necessary for most of us without access to university libraries to follow the old workaround of reading the introductions and summaries on Amazon and listening to as many podcast interviews with the author as we can. If you do this, you'll find that Gmirkin's interviewers regularly reveal themselves to be totally insincere, more interested in pushing "New Atheist" propaganda than seriously thinking about these issues. Podcasts like "MythVision" on YouTube combine occasionally interesting scholarship with an obvious agenda and a deeply unpleasant attitude. In many of these interviews, one is reminded very much of the work of Morton Smith, whose book Jesus the Magician combines a very interesting discussion of ancient magic with obvious anti-Christian bigotry and the constant oozings of Smith's own deeply unpleasant personality.
And so the first caveat in approaching Gmirkin's work is that he is working in a field with an agenda, and that it isn't too much to call that agenda is the "deconstruction" and destruction of traditional Western culture, and Christianity above all.
The second caveat is simply to always bear in mind the problem of fraud and dishonesty in the academy. It's simply the case that, at this moment in time, much of what comes out of the academy is nonsense and deliberate lies. I don't know Mr. Gmirkin and I won't libel him here. He seems sincere. But I simply don't trust professors on principle, and I don't recommend that you do either.
Back to Gmirkin
All that said, the evidence that Gmirkin has gathered is compelling. And to be quite honest with you, the most compelling evidence of all is simply to read Plato, already being acquainted with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It becomes clear that either Plato was indeed influenced by Moses, as both ancient authorities and modern scholars like Margaret Barker (a very interesting woman, deserving a post of her own at some point) believe, or that Gmirkin and his school is right.
Both the theological and moral innovations attributed to Christianity and Judaism are equally present in the works of Plato.
In Plato's Crito, Socrates, in prison awaiting execution, is given the chance to escape. His friends have bribed the guards; there is a ship waiting. Won't he come to safety? Socrates refuses, teaching that one must never return injustice for injustice. In this he anticipates both the moral core and the narrative climax of the New Testament.
In I Alcibiades, we learn that to follow the rule of the passions is to be identical with a slave. In Theaetetus, we learn that our goal should be to become like God. In the Republic, we are taught to see this world as a cave of shadows, and the real world as a spiritual reality brought into being by the Idea of the Good, which is an image or Son of the Good Itself. We are also taught that God can only be seen as good and unchangeable; an ideal society would abandon the teaching of Homer and Hesiod because they portray the gods and heroes as evil and given to change. In the Timaeus, we learn of the Demiurge, a good deity who created the universe and who gave the rule of the material world to his offspring, the secondary gods. In the Laws, we are given the constitution of an ideal society. This society venerates its traditional gods with temples and festivals, but looks to the One God above all. In Laws we are given a definition of love: "To will the good of another"; this is the definition preserved in the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. We are given a law for marriage: A man should have one wife, and if he is caught with anyone else, including another man or a slave, he should be punished with a loss of citizenship. Again and again, the moral teachings of Christianity are anticipated by Plato.
Wild Speculations
For some time I've been wondering whether Christianity were not deliberately created by Platonist philosophers in late Antiquity, rather than evolving naturally out of Judaism as we've been told. I had been considering this, and whether I should talk about it, before I encountered Gmirkin. I was planning on writing a post entitled "Wild Speculations," which would go over the evidence, and conclude by saying, "I don't think that this is true. But I think that htere is a 10% chance it is true." Gmirkin's work would seem to bolster the case. And so I still don't know that I think it's true, but now I think that there is a 20% chance it is true.
But here is where Gmirkin's take and mine differ. In his iterviews, Gmirkin portrays Plato as a kind of great historical supervillain, a "dark genius" (actual quote) secretly manipulating us all from behind the scenes.
The reason that I felt compelled to post this today is that I logged onto JMG's blog this morning and saw that there was a lengthy discussion of Gmirkin and the possibilities he has raised there yesterday. These sorts of things happen very often-- I write something, or I come up with an idea, and then I find that other people with whom I share a connection are talking about the same thing at the same time or just before or just after, but unconnected with me. These sorts of synchronicities are the traces of forces moving in the higher worlds, like ripples in the water.
In the last few years, Plato has exploded; I see people talking about him everywhere, when I never used to. And now the conversation, guided by unseen hands, has moved in this direction. In the unseen world, something is moving, and it's telling me that we need to talk about this now. But why? That's what I want to explore this week.
In any case, what I want to talk about today is something quite different.
A few months ago I became aware of a scholar named Russel Gmirkin, and his theories on the origin of the Bible. These pertain directly to this blog and to what has become its main focus. In this post I want to briefly outline Gmirkin's ideas, my take on them, and why I felt it was important to open the discussion today. This post is necessarily going to skim the surface of some very deep waters. I'd ask readers familiar with these ideas to be patient, as I'll need to introduce them in a rather simplified form and it will take some time to fill them out.
Who Wrote the Pentateuch?
In the standard interpretation, the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible, were written over several centuries, starting around 1000 B.C. and winding up no later than 450 B.C. This interpretation itself is revisionist. Traditionally, these books were believed to have been written by Moses himself sometime shortly after the exodus from Egypt. Some people still believe this. The sorts of circles that believe in "Biblical inerrancy," profession of Mosaic authorship is a kind of test of faith. I don't personally understand this form of Christianity, and every encounter I've ever had with it has left me shaking my head and wondering what the appeal could possibly be. And so I won't say much more of it. The 1000-500 B.C. interpretation was the one that I learned, and I was unaware until this past Summer that it had been challenged in a serious way. But challenged it has been.
One of the major themes, or perhaps the major theme, I've been developing on this blog has been the application of the ideas found in Plato and his successors to the spiritual traditions into which I've personally been initaited, be it Roman Catholicism or Revival Druidry. The ease with which this can be done shouldn't surprise us. The parallels between the ideas of Plato and those found in the Bible were obvious to the ancients. As the books of the Pentateuch were ascribed to Moses, who had lived a thousand years before Plato, it seemed obvious that Plato and other Greek philosophers had studied with Jewish teachers and been influenced by the Mosaic writings. This is discussed by various Church Fathers, including Origen, who mentions in his Contra Celsum that Pythagoras and Plato had both been influenced by Moses; Eusebius, who wrote, "What is Plato but Moses writing in Attic Greek?"; and others. It was this idea that allowed Philo of Alexandria to contribute to the development of Middle Platonism, despite being a Jew and not a pagan.
But what if the chain of influence actually went in the other direction? Apparently, no one thought of this until 1993, when a scholar named Niels Peter Lemche noted that external evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch only appears in the record after the Third Century B.C. Following Lemche, Gmirkin undertook to date the Pentateuch based on available evidence, and concluded that it was in fact written by Jewish scholars in Alexandria around the year 270 B.C.
Caveats
Now, "No one noticed it until smart people like us finally evolved 2,000 years later" is an enormous red flag, and it's the sort of thing that we find all over historical scholarship, archaeology, and, above all, anything having to do with the origins of Christianity. Gmirkin's works are only available at academic prices, and so in order to figure out what he has to say, it's necessary for most of us without access to university libraries to follow the old workaround of reading the introductions and summaries on Amazon and listening to as many podcast interviews with the author as we can. If you do this, you'll find that Gmirkin's interviewers regularly reveal themselves to be totally insincere, more interested in pushing "New Atheist" propaganda than seriously thinking about these issues. Podcasts like "MythVision" on YouTube combine occasionally interesting scholarship with an obvious agenda and a deeply unpleasant attitude. In many of these interviews, one is reminded very much of the work of Morton Smith, whose book Jesus the Magician combines a very interesting discussion of ancient magic with obvious anti-Christian bigotry and the constant oozings of Smith's own deeply unpleasant personality.
And so the first caveat in approaching Gmirkin's work is that he is working in a field with an agenda, and that it isn't too much to call that agenda is the "deconstruction" and destruction of traditional Western culture, and Christianity above all.
The second caveat is simply to always bear in mind the problem of fraud and dishonesty in the academy. It's simply the case that, at this moment in time, much of what comes out of the academy is nonsense and deliberate lies. I don't know Mr. Gmirkin and I won't libel him here. He seems sincere. But I simply don't trust professors on principle, and I don't recommend that you do either.
Back to Gmirkin
All that said, the evidence that Gmirkin has gathered is compelling. And to be quite honest with you, the most compelling evidence of all is simply to read Plato, already being acquainted with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It becomes clear that either Plato was indeed influenced by Moses, as both ancient authorities and modern scholars like Margaret Barker (a very interesting woman, deserving a post of her own at some point) believe, or that Gmirkin and his school is right.
Both the theological and moral innovations attributed to Christianity and Judaism are equally present in the works of Plato.
In Plato's Crito, Socrates, in prison awaiting execution, is given the chance to escape. His friends have bribed the guards; there is a ship waiting. Won't he come to safety? Socrates refuses, teaching that one must never return injustice for injustice. In this he anticipates both the moral core and the narrative climax of the New Testament.
In I Alcibiades, we learn that to follow the rule of the passions is to be identical with a slave. In Theaetetus, we learn that our goal should be to become like God. In the Republic, we are taught to see this world as a cave of shadows, and the real world as a spiritual reality brought into being by the Idea of the Good, which is an image or Son of the Good Itself. We are also taught that God can only be seen as good and unchangeable; an ideal society would abandon the teaching of Homer and Hesiod because they portray the gods and heroes as evil and given to change. In the Timaeus, we learn of the Demiurge, a good deity who created the universe and who gave the rule of the material world to his offspring, the secondary gods. In the Laws, we are given the constitution of an ideal society. This society venerates its traditional gods with temples and festivals, but looks to the One God above all. In Laws we are given a definition of love: "To will the good of another"; this is the definition preserved in the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. We are given a law for marriage: A man should have one wife, and if he is caught with anyone else, including another man or a slave, he should be punished with a loss of citizenship. Again and again, the moral teachings of Christianity are anticipated by Plato.
Wild Speculations
For some time I've been wondering whether Christianity were not deliberately created by Platonist philosophers in late Antiquity, rather than evolving naturally out of Judaism as we've been told. I had been considering this, and whether I should talk about it, before I encountered Gmirkin. I was planning on writing a post entitled "Wild Speculations," which would go over the evidence, and conclude by saying, "I don't think that this is true. But I think that htere is a 10% chance it is true." Gmirkin's work would seem to bolster the case. And so I still don't know that I think it's true, but now I think that there is a 20% chance it is true.
But here is where Gmirkin's take and mine differ. In his iterviews, Gmirkin portrays Plato as a kind of great historical supervillain, a "dark genius" (actual quote) secretly manipulating us all from behind the scenes.
He never stops to ask what seems to be the obvious question:
What if Platonism is true?
It never seems to occur to him to notice that the world into which Plato was born was one in which people were regularly sacrificed to the gods, in which killing babies was perfectly normal, genocide was the standard way of war, and in which "goodness" and "brute, physical strength" were more or less identical. Into that world Plato introduced the idea that justice is not the same as taking what one wants, happiness is not identical with pleasure, and the sort of courage that leads to success in war is the least of the virtues. Plato's world was emphatically not ours.
And so my view is that, if this theory is correct, then we have Plato and his followers to thank for the fact that we live in a world in which most of us don't believe that we ought to regularly ought to barbecue human beings or leave babies to be devoured by wolves, and in which we have some knowledge, however partial, of the existence of the God of the Universe, and not merely the particular gods of the Earth. Raise a statue to the Divine Plato, pour out some beer in his name, because it may be ultimately due to him that you won't have to worry about being speared and hung from a tree in honor of Odin or eaten at a feast of Huitzilipochtli.
Something Is Moving
The reason that I felt compelled to post this today is that I logged onto JMG's blog this morning and saw that there was a lengthy discussion of Gmirkin and the possibilities he has raised there yesterday. These sorts of things happen very often-- I write something, or I come up with an idea, and then I find that other people with whom I share a connection are talking about the same thing at the same time or just before or just after, but unconnected with me. These sorts of synchronicities are the traces of forces moving in the higher worlds, like ripples in the water.
In the last few years, Plato has exploded; I see people talking about him everywhere, when I never used to. And now the conversation, guided by unseen hands, has moved in this direction. In the unseen world, something is moving, and it's telling me that we need to talk about this now. But why? That's what I want to explore this week.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-10 07:45 pm (UTC)To respond to your caveats section, I have to say I broadly agree with the observations you make about the MythVision community being a gaggle of New Atheists with an ax to grind. I've watched many hours of content from that channel and this seems right on the money. Dr. Robert M. Price would (IMO) be the glaring exception to this; his writings and ideas seem quite insightful and though-provoking, without any of the usual animus expressed toward Christians. Despite being an atheist and ex-Christian he his still quite found of Christianity and Christians from a cultural standpoint. Too bad his many copycats in that community ganged up on him and cancelled him for the irredeemable crime of being an unapologetic Trump supporter. Anyway, I digress.
Having said all of that, I don't think this overall character assessment of this particular corner of academia is itself an argument against Gmirkin's theory, nor do I think the "everyone before us was dumb" mentality (Whig revisionism) so commonplace among progressives is the reason why this and similar theories are now seeing play in academia. Rather I think this is a product of academia becoming less and less Christian, and more and more secular over time. Within any institution there is an "Overton Window" which dictates which ideas can and cannot be expressed at a given time. I think the window has gradually shifted far enough in the secular/progressive direction that now in recent decades it's become "politically correct" to finally throw the entire "Bible = history" chronological assumption out the window. Prior to this paradigm, the status quo seemed to be what they call "minimalism", which is the idea that much of the bible's chronology is open to reinterpretation, but some semblance of the old dating must be maintained for posterity. Not anymore. We're now in the age where divinity schools are full of atheists, agnostics, or those who are otherwise not heartfelt believers in the old creeds.
I do have a copy of Gmirkin's first book on his core idea, though I'm still somewhat agnostic when it comes to many of the points he makes, as I find myself too unknowledgeable on many of the primary sources Gmirkin cites to form a strong opinion either way. However, the core thesis seems rather compelling, as (as you and other have pointed out) he's certainly not the only person to notice an uncanny resemblance
between parts of the Pentateuch and Plato's writings. What leans me toward Gmirkin's position is the logistical "slim-to-none" probability of 5th century Judeans (whatever their religion may have been at that time) having had any sort of significant cultural influence over the Greek world of that time. Prior to the Alexandrian conquests the Greeks and Judeans would have had very little contact, if any at all. In his extensive travels around the known world of his time, Herodotus accounted for myriad lands, cultures, ethnic groups, ect. and nowhere does he mention Jews or Judeans; the people of the Levant region are simply Syrians. Thus it seems unlikely that a people too marginal to even get a mention by Herodotus would have some sort of noticeable influence on the ideas of a Greek philosophical great like Plato. Funny enough, he doesn't mention Rome either. And this I think is to due both Rome and Judea both sharing the same marginal nature during the 400s BC. And I believe both Rome and Judea have similar stories of rising up out of almost complete obscurity and then later, after coming to prominence, each writing up fanciful (but mythically-valuable and numinous) origin stories for their respective peoples.
On the position of Origen and other sectarians with a faith to defend, that take seems like standard apologia. The desire is there to try and integrate what he saw as the beneficial parts of Plato's teachings (and from other corners of Hellenic philosophy), while still maintaining the posture of his tradition originating in Moses. Very easy to understand these motivations, in my view.
Finally, on Plato, I'm in broad agreement with your observations and insights here. I too have noticed that it's become trendy for the aforementioned New Atheist types to constantly crap on Plato and pretend he was some sort of evil mastermind behind every totalitarian project on this planet. Actually reading Plato and understanding his core teachings I think is something that both Christian dogmatists, atheists, and Neopagans alike, might be to be quite unsettling. The ancient polytheism of the Iron Age is not at all what modern romantic revisionists crack it up to be; there were many gruesome and degenerate aspects to those cultures. I'd say, the so-called Axial Age rose up in multiple places as a spiritual response to the utter state of depravity and fatalistic hopelessness that was a social fact of much of the world after the Bronze Age collapse. We see the birth pangs of this new thought revolution in the pre-Socratics, the Orphic theogonies, and in eastern new religious movements like Zoroastrianism (and probably Chaldaean mystery sects). The idea that "the gods" were these capricious celestial big cats that needed to be appeased (or else!) started to gradually get replaced with concepts of a transcendent big-G God, the idea of human agency being a thing (and not just blindly worshipping nature), and with philosophical doctrines and spiritual practices meant to bring the individual closer to God. And then, right there in Plato, is a not-so-subtle castigation of the older traditions. And of course the revolution steadily marched on. The observations you make here coincide with my own reservations on adopting an ancient "polytheism" wholesale, despite my firm belief that multiple gods do indeed exist. I'll take Porphyry's position on the gods any day over that of Homer and Hesiod.
Sorry I rambled on so long. And once again, I have to say that your post was most thought-provoking!
no subject
Date: 2023-10-11 01:49 pm (UTC)I probably won't have time today, but I want to respond to your comment in detail-- and I might just do it in another post.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-12 01:09 am (UTC)I greatly look forward to your response.