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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I'm fairly skeptical of "Western Tradition" as a thing to be worshipped the way it is in some circles (not here). Socrates and Jesus were not at all the same. There is the historical point that Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem often had influence on the same cultures, but even then it's not as if that was always the same thing, or always some even mix of the various traditions.

In any case, where would Jesus have quoted Homer or Aeschylus? I've never heard of that. The closest I've seen is Paul quoting I-forget-whom in Acts.

But I do agree with the overall point that this is not exactly a place full of traditional conservatives.

where would Jesus have quoted Homer or Aeschylus?

"As a dog returns to it's vomit a fool returns to his folly"...

"By the sword you have made your living, and by a sword you will meet your end"...

...and "faithful are the wounds of a friend"

Are literary aphorisms that significantly predate their appearances in the bible and would've presumably been familiar to a Greek speaking audience through the Iliad and the great Tragedians. Ditto "having sown a wind we will reap the whirlwind" though there is no independent attestation for that one. Something that's easy to forget these days is that the Gospels (if you accept that they happened) are not happening in isolation but within the context of a wider culture.

So the first and third of those are from Proverbs. The fourth is from Ecclesiastes. The second alone is from the New Testament, from Jesus.

I'm not sure what Greek influence it might have, but the quote by Jesus could plausibly be influenced by Genesis 9 (which, of course, by no means excludes the possibility of Greek influence, or influence from both).

But for the others, I'm really not sure how that would be understood to be from the Greeks, since my understanding was that they antedated them.

Of course, there was a good deal of Greek influence on things (the New Testament is written in Greek after all!), but I'm not sure that that influence is necessarily from the things that we ordinarily think of as classical Greek—Plato, the tragedians, Herodotus, and so on. But I'm really not adequately read up on this.

I'd heard that the Sadducees were considered to be more influenced by the Greeks, what with a denial of the resurrection and so on.

Also, I was wrong, it wasn't Ecclesiastes but actually Hosea, which is certainly pre-Greek. (this is what I get for going with vibes instead of checking)

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