Hellenisys Analysis of Christianity

If there is anything traditional religious Judaism can't stand, Hellenism is that thing. The Greeks, despite having such gaffes as condemning Socrates for impiety, usually failed to take religion seriously. They would think of Zeus as a friend, a heavenly pal who sometime went crazy and threw thunderbolts on humans. They had sacrifices and ceremonies to placate the gods, but most of them, particularly in the Athenian democracy, performed those by rote, "just in case", and went on living worldly lives. That was in stark contrast to the solemn spirit with which Jews looked upon the doing of Jehova's will. A Hellene might make a presentation called "Piss Zeus" and get away with it, whereas a Jew doing so much as taking a chair out of his house on Saturday would be stoned to death (moving an object from the private realm to the public realm is one way of desecrating the Sabbath).

Having introduced this Hellenism/Judaism dichotomy, I now endeavour to show how Christianity, which may be regarded as Hellenized Judaism, is characterized by an incessant conflict between the Hellenic and the Judaic spirit from its inception to this day - from Jesus and Paul to the Polish Pope.

I suspect that Judaism (and Islam, which shares its spirit) does not abhor so much the concept of the Trinity as the humanization of the deity. Although the TaNaKh (Old Testament) frankly views Jehova as having human form, worshipping images of God is absolutely forbidden. The Greek philosophers developed the idea of an abstract, infinite, formless deity, but even they thought of the conventional gods as having human form and carved statues of them (much as Hindus believe in an abstract self, but carve out images of the gods - facets of that self). The Greek deities are portrayed in rigorous exactitude, stressing the muscles of the male gods and the gentle features of the godesses. In Judaic eyes there is little difference between the muscular, bare chest of Jesus upon the cross and Hermes, or between the subtle outlines of the Virgin Mary and Aphrodite. Traditional Judaism sees Christianity as a opportunistic fusion of the blasphemous spirit of Greece with the Hebrew epic. This has, though not for the reasons Jews give, much historical justification.

Son of Man

According to John 12:23, Jesus proclaimed the glorification of the Son of Man by his coming:

Ho de Iesous apokrinetai autois legon, elelythen he hora hina doxasthe ho hyios tou anthropou.
And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.

Now, it is clear that "Son of Man" is an epithet for Jesus, the Creator God according to Christianity. However, religious interpretation often makes allegorical stretches on what the people of the time took literally. "Son of Man" meant what it said: a human being, a son of Adam. Jesus, if he existed at all, probably did not see himself as divine, and the verses which say "I am He" must be interpolations. This verse, speaking of the glorification of man, although he is believed to be the Son of God, has cultural signifance. In the Jewish and Islamic worlds there is strictly no place for humanism, the worldview which places mankind at the centre of all things. Humanism, which takes God away from His place at the centre, is outright blasphemy. In Christianity, however, it can be justified: Word becoming flesh can be made central without blasphemy. Fundamentalist Christians combat the movement of secular humanism, but the European humanism of the Renaissance was thoroughly religious, and patronized by the clergy so long as the practitioners did not get kuffurous (infidelic).

Later, when Pontius Pilate presents Jesus with a crown of thorns, he makes the following reference, in John 19:5:

kai legei autois idou ho anthropos
And [Pilate] saith unto them, Behold the man

All eyes were focused on the man. He may be thought of as God, the Son of God, but his suffering was a parable of the suffering of humanity. Through the Middle Ages the believers of Europe were seized by the idea of man as a miserable in comparison to God, and the high cathedrals testify to the idea, but the Greek spirit, that of humanism, of taking the divine world less seriously than it should be taken, lived on, and burst out in the 15th century, after Greek scholars fled the Turkish conquest of Constantinople.

Practical Sense

Rabbinical Judaism orders the desecration of the Sabbath if life is at stake. However, the reason which the Jewish Sages give for the exception is stated thus in the Talmud: Desecrate one Sabbath on him so that he may keep many Sabbaths. Man is just a servant of God, a slave ordered to keep His laws, including the Sabbath. Furthermore, the Sabbath must not be desecrated if the life of a Gentile is at stake, for Gentiles do not keep the Sabbath.

The second chapter of Mark tells of Jesus and his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath - one version among many in the New Testament. The Pharisees, like any modern Orthodox Jewish rabbi, expressed indignance about breaking the law of God. To which, in Mark 2:27, Jesus supposedly answered:

to sabbaton dia ton anthropon egeneto
kai oukh ho anthropos dia to sabbaton
The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath

That being a horrendous blasphemy in Judaism, it is no wonder that the rabbinical authorities had Jesus crucified. He was usurping their absolute control over people's lives by destroying the very principle of duty unto God. That man, if he existed, that infidel, further disrupted the trading industry which was flourishing near the Temple (a common feature of established religions) and, in Mark 12:17, advocated separation between secular and religious life:

Ho de Iesous eipen autois
ta Kaisaros apodote Kaisari kai ta tou theou to theo
And Jesus [answering] said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

Truly a contrast to Judaism and Islam, where religion is life.

From the brief survey one might consider Christianity to be a pussy-cat religion, the mother of democracy and church-state separation. It is, of course, not so. As I said, for most of the Middle Ages the feeling of powerlessness before God dominated the minds of Christians. The story of the Sabbath being made for man was not interpreted as humanistic, but as an example of the authority of Jesus over the dead letter of the rabbinical scholars. Church-state separation did not, of course, exist until fairly recent times. As Christianity had thrown out much of the Jewish Law (the path of life, Halakha in Judaism, Sharii'a in Islam), there was not much to busy about the lives of people, but freedom of thought and speech was forbidden. While the Jews, deprived of national rule, merely excommunicated the apostates (such as Spinoza), Christians burned the kuffaar at the stake. The order to render unto Caesar was merely an exhortation to denounce worldy life, not an advocation of church-state separation, though Jesus, if he was a historical person, may have meant so.

Christianity, like Islam, took the spirit of Judaism with it: man has duties towards God, and not human rights. The duty was one of faith rather than works (in contrast to Judaism and Islam, which stress deeds over creeds), yet it was still a duty, and man had to humble himself before God. But when the Hellenic spirit of the Renaissance broke free, lifting humankind to a God-given centrality, some Christians, much like some Arab philosophers who had studied Greek sources, began to doubt the authority of the church. Then the West was steadily on its Westoxicated way onto modern scientific Ilhad.

Science, it should be said, dethroned not only God, but man also: no longer at the centre of the universe, but revolving round one star among many in one galaxy among many; and no longer a special isolated creation, but an integral part of the Animal Kingdom. The legacy of Greece is humility.