Obsolete Philosophy: Stoicism and Judaism

As I mentioned in the kickoff post, I wrote a lot of papers in college.

This one was for one of my religion classes, if I recall correctly. I really enjoyed reading this one as well. I have some criticisms, though. I didn’t do a good enough job of making distinctions between early Christian thought and Jewish thought but, hey, for the first fifty years or so, there was a non-zero amount of overlap. If I were to rewrite it, I’d probably hammer on Stoicism, Early Christianity, and Judaism instead of squashing everything together.

And, not that you’d believe me, but the opening of “Since the beginning of time” was a deliberate joke mocking the whole “opening essays with ‘since the beginning of time’ thing”. If I recall correctly, the professor circled it and said “funny, but don’t do this.”

A Rabbi and an Orthodox Priest walk into a bar…
Or
Stoics and Jews: Together Again for the First Time

By
Jaybird

Since the beginning of time, mankind has reflected upon his own thoughts, and sought to refine them. It is argued that no group had come so close to perfecting their tightness of logic and consistency of argument as the Stoics. On the flip side of the coin, mankind has also yearned to be close to God, and to have a blameless systematic theology. Toward this end, no group has been striving longer than the Jews while having their theology remain largely unchanged by time while also remaining fresh and consistent. Knowing that these two groups were contemporaries, and that they did, in fact, come into contact with each other, one wishes to know what they had in common, and how they influenced each other. This paper will look at the writings of several Stoic thinkers (specifically Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus), and compare them with several Jewish texts and some of the sayings surrounding Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels. Having compared and contrasted the writings, this paper will then analyze the reasons that the two traditions are similar, and attempt to explain why.

The best place to begin is, of course, the beginning. Both the Jews and Stoics have similar concepts for the origin of the world, where one sees the foreshadowing for the rest of creation. The Stoics assert that the universe (nature) is composed of logos. In Diogenes Laertius 7. 134, Diogenes explains that the cosmos is made of two principles– the active and the passive. The passive is mere matter (“unqualified substance”), while the active is the rational principal behind it or the logos (also referred to as “god”). He explains that “God and mind and fate and Zeus are one thing, but called by many different names.” Diogenes asserts that Zeus (logos, or god) was primordial fire, and out of this primordial fire came primordial air and water, and out of the mixing of primordial air and primordial water came all of the elements (air, fire, earth, and water), and from them came everything that is.

An analogous statement is found in the first three verses of the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word (the word used in Greek is logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (New King James Version).

The writer of John makes the assertion that logos is identical to God. While Diogenes makes a distinction between raw matter and logos, he still makes the same assertion: Zeus and logos are identical, and both are the causes at “the beginning.” (It should be noted that Christianity was not a religion in its own right until the middle of the second century. Until that point, it was seen as nothing more than a Jewish sect. If it is true, as many scholars say, that the gospels can be dated from 80 C.E. to 120 C.E. then they are not necessarily “Christian” thought, but Jewish thought that later became assimilated by the Pauline school of theology.)
The fact that both the Jews and Stoics used the same Greek word to describe their respective gods does not seem to be a co-incidence. It can be safely assumed that one of the two groups influenced the other’s idea of God. But, one cannot come to a conclusion on the influence of one of the groups upon the other by only the use of one word in two separate writing. A researcher must move to another attitude shared by both groups in the hope of finding more similarities between the two, luckily, there are several.

One of the many other areas of similarity is that of the philosophy of loss, and of grief. Epictetus and the writer of the book of Job both have some interesting (and almost identical) things to say. In section 11 of the Handbook of Epictetus, Epictetus says: “Never say about anything ‘I have lost it’ but instead, ‘I have given it back.’ Did your child die? It was given back. Did your wife die? She was given back. ‘My land was taken.’ So this too was given back. ‘But the person who took it was bad!’ How does the way the giver asked for it back concern you? As long as he gives it, take care of it as something that is not your own, just as travelers treat an inn.” (A footnote points out that the giver is synonymous with nature, the natural order of the cosmos, and with god.)

The writer of Job gives the character Job this to say when he has lost his wealth, his cattle, and his children: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21 NKJV). Later, when Job has lost his health as well, his wife comes out to chastise Job, telling him to curse God and die. Job responds, “Shall we indeed accept good from God, and should we not accept adversity?” (Job 2:10 NKJV).

This is another startling similarity. In both cases, we are told that we are not the owners of the things we think we possess, but merely the stewards of them until the giver asks for them back. This applies not only to such things as cattle, or material wealth, but to wives, children, and even our own lives.

Perhaps the areas within which the most overlap can be found is in the attitudes on fate, morality, and the meaning of life. Marcus Aurelius has this to say in his meditations (book six, section 37): “He who has seen the present has seen everything, all that from eternity has come to pass, and all that will come to be in infinite time.” One can hardly miss the comparison with Ecclesiastes 1:9 which says, “That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” It can safely be said that there is no difference between these two statements. (However, it should be noted that Marcus Aurelius contains a degree of pessimism not found in other Stoic writings, and the same can be said of Ecclesiastes in regard to Jewish philosophy.)

When one reads Jesus in the New Testament, one sees more of the wisdom tradition existing in both Judaism and Stoicism, and the beginnings of what is perhaps the biggest rift between the Near-Eastern wisdom tradition and that of the Greeks. Epictetus says that one of the thoughts that we should have ready before us for every occasion is “Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they can’t harm me.” This is analogous to Jesus’s quotation in Matthew 10:28a “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Both seem to be saying that killing doesn’t touch the essential part of a person. Another area of overlap is where Jesus warns against making oaths in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:34a, 37a) saying “Do not swear at all… but let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.'” This is the same as when Epictetus says in Section 33 of his Handbook, “Refuse to swear oaths, altogether if possible, or otherwise if circumstances allow.”

Piety is another area where Jesus and Stoic thought agree. Jesus says in Matthew 6:16-18, “Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they appear to men to be fasting… But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting…” Epictetus says something analogous regarding living simply: “When you have become adapted to living cheaply as far as your body is concerned, do not make a show of it…If you wish to train yourself to hardship, do it for yourself, and not for those outside.”

The closest analogy between Jesus and Stoic thought is found in what they both have to say in living by example. Epictetus says “Never call yourself a philosopher and do not talk a great deal among non-philosophers about philosophical propositions, but do what follows from them. For example, at a banquet do not say how a person ought to eat, but eat as a person ought to” (emphasis added.) Jesus teaches the same lesson in the negative in his tirades against the pharisees and sadducees (Matthew 23) where he chastises them for being “blind guides” and hypocrites when they teach how one should live, but live exactly opposite, or where he tells people to remove the log from their own eye before attempting to remove the mote from their brother’s.

However, there is tension between Jesus’s teachings and Stoic tenets: one of the essential tenets of Stoicism is a skepticism regarding the afterlife, which is a trait not embraced by Jesus. In Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations the point is made again and again that the afterlife is something unverifiable, and as such no time should be spent wondering about it, but one should live well in this life. On the one hand, Marcus Aurelius, in Book 4, Section 21, asks where the Universe has room for all of these dead souls that have passed on. Epictetus doesn’t make any mention of the afterlife at all, it is not even a consideration for him. On the other hand, Jesus makes many claims to an afterlife, to the many mansions in his Father’s house being prepared for Jesus’s followers, and to Jesus warning about the punishments being reserved for the unjust in the afterlife. Jesus strays from the tradition that he has in common with the Stoics with this, and also with his views on non-resistance in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus teaches that the self should be neglected in order to give to our fellow man. He teaches that when someone asks for one’s tunic, one should give the cloak as well. In fact, in Matthew 5:39a, he says “But I tell you not to resist an evil person.” and goes on to say “turn the other cheek.” This view would have been violently opposed by the Stoics, who felt that injustice was something to act against, (although one should not let it ruin one’s mood).

This indicates that either Palestine has moved away from the tradition regarding skepticism about the immortal soul and resisting injustice, or that Jesus began a movement doing the same. In either case, it can be argued that the Jewish traditions that held so closely to the traditions of Ecclesiastes, and of Job, were loosening around the time of Christ. This can be attributed to the Hellenistic occupation of Palestine beginning with Alexander, and continuing well past the time of Jesus. The fact that the Christians embraced Paul, and eventually anti-Stoic views, may have had much to do with the fact that the Gnostics (the quintessential anti-Christians) had so much in common with Stoicism (but that is outside the scope of this paper).

This researcher finds it difficult to believe that the many analogies between the Jewish philosophy found in Job, Ecclesiastes, the teachings of Jesus, and the beginning of the Gospel of John and the sayings of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and others could be happenstance. To be sure, if there really is an immanent logos, it would be available to any who search for it, and since both the Jews and the Stoics worked so hard at refining their thoughts, both could have certainly tapped into this immanent reason and come to the same conclusions regarding the origins of the universe, the nature of possessions, the meaning of life, etc… But taking this logos for granted would be too easy of a way out of the problem of why there are so many similarities.

There are two remaining solutions: Either one tradition influenced the other, or both come from a common tradition that bifurcated. Marcus Aurelius is dated between 121 and 180 C.E., which is not that long after the Handbook of Epictetus, which is dated between 50 and 130 C.E. The Jewish writings, however, date back much further. Job is dated as being translated (as it has too many non-Hebraic words to be originally Hebrew) during the patriarchal period (between 2000 and 1000 B.C.E.) and contains hints that it belongs to an oral tradition that would date it to be even earlier. Ecclesiastes dates back to the third, or second century B.C.E. (although it is conceivable that it was written/edited by Hezekiah in the seventh century, there is precious little evidence to support this), and this would put it before the time of the Stoics, but not by much.

The Jews would have had access to Hellenistic thought through their occupation beginning from the time of Alexander, and they would have had opportunity to refine it in their own way, yielding the peculiar outlook of Ecclesiastes, and perhaps some of the views of Jesus and of the writer of John, but this doesn’t explain the similarities between Job and the Stoics.

In conclusion, the best explanation is one that explains the similarities as not one influencing the other, but as both coming from a similar philosophy of wisdom, which culminates in Palestine as Judaism, and in Greece as Stoicism. The earliest document is Job, so it should be investigated as being closest to the source of the bifurcation. According to Professor Redacted, one third of the words in the book of Job are not Hebraic, and one third of those are uncertain. It seems that the book of Job isn’t a Jewish work at all, but an oral tradition work that dates back much further than the date it was translated into Hebrew, back all the way to the Phoenicians.

Phoenicia was the hub of the world well before the wisdom literature of Palestine was written down, and certainly before the time of the Greeks. At least two groups of people moved from this area, one eventually to Greece, one eventually to Palestine. The experiences each group met caused each philosophy to evolve and mature in two different ways, but both held on to the basic tenet of the underlying logos of the universe. The Jews had such things to deal with as slavery, horrible kings, foreign occupation, and the fact that the writings were not made by the leisure class: these circumstances are conducive to religious talk. This leads to the logos concept evolving into where it did with Ecclesiastes and the theological foundation upon which Jesus stood.

The Greeks had a great deal of prosperity, a relatively significant leisure class (at the least, the leisure class was the one leaving the writings), and occupation of other countries, instead of the other way around. This would lead to the logos evolving into a concept of “The way we should ideally live”. But when times started getting tough, around the decline of the Empire with Marcus Aurelius, one cannot help but notice the bitter taste beginning to appear in the Stoic writings.

The two traditions have much in common, but it is not because the Jews influenced the Greeks or vice versa, but because both traditions have the same common ancestor, and natural selection turned one tradition into a religion, and one tradition into a philosophy of life.

The Believer’s Study Bible
W.A. Criswell-Editor. Thomas Nelson Publishers,
Nashville 1991

Handbook of Epictetus
Nicholas White-Translated. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge 1992

Marcus Aurelius: The Meditations
G.M.A. Grube-Translated. Hackett Publishing Company,
Indianapolis 1983

Hellenistic Philosophy
Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson-Translated. Hackett Publishing Company,
Indianapolis/Cambridge 1988

What the Bible Really Says
Manfred Barthel-Wrote Mark Howson-Translated. Wings Books,
New York/Avanel, New Jersey 1992