ICYMI: Is the NT Just Stoic Philosophy? (Jonathan Pennington) Ep. #232

speaker-0 (00:01.258)
Jesus was certainly a Jew, but he clearly came into the world for all people, and he was a real human who lived in the real world. And the world that he came into was a world that had already been a few hundred years into a mixture of Jewish culture and thinking with Greek culture and thinking, and now with a heavy dash of Roman on top of it as well. And so for Jesus to be a real human and for Christians like me who believe in that,

This is, it’s absolutely essential that we understand that Jesus would naturally be speaking right into the world of his day. And the world of his day was one where Jewish and Greek ideas had been banging up against each other and interacting with each other and disagreeing with each other and accommodating to each other for a couple of hundred century, or for a couple of hundred years by this point.

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Yeah, I think a lot of Christians aren’t aware of how much Hellenism hybridizes, infects, I mean, you can use lots of metaphors here, how much they mash and bang against each other and how much literature is produced in this time by Jewish thinkers who are appropriating, sometimes trying to separate themselves from Hellenistic thinking. And,

I don’t think people realize that this is what the biblical authors of the New Testament are surrounded by as well. This common core of literature that’s actually been produced fairly recently by people who have all been speaking or reading Greek. So I guess, is that dangerous? that diminish the work of the biblical authors in some way? Cause it’s say, isn’t this just another Greek project in the hands of Hellenized Jews?

Yeah, it’s always important to remember that already, again, a couple of centuries before the time of Jesus and early Christianity, there was enough Greek and Jewish interaction that there was a felt need to produce a Greek translation of the Old Testament or the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. And that need is reflected on the massive, reflected in the fact that the

the masses of Jewish people are not living in Jerusalem, and even those who are there and in Palestine or that area are probably speaking Aramaic as much as they are Hebrew. All this is, of course, debated and discussed among scholars. But clearly, there was a great need for a Greek translation because so many people, so many faithful Jews are reading Greek. And then it’s not only a translation, there’s also the production of lots of great Greek literature.

by Jewish people concerning Jewish themes, a lot of the books that become part of the subject to agent and are sometimes called the subject. The general apocrypha or of course, Greek composition books, books that are composed in Greek. And then you have great Greek Greek thinkers like phyllo, who is a highly educated person who is seeking very consciously to help.

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the faith of Judaism makes sense in a Greek world and interpreting Moses in light of Greek philosophy, et cetera. Now, the reality is, of course, that the reactions to this mingling together are going to be varied, just like they are whenever there’s a culture clash. You’re going to have everything on one end from complete rejection. Some Jewish people saying, no, Greek is a corruption, the Greek world is a corruption, and the extreme version of that would be something like

the people who ended up living and developing a community at Qumran and had their own life, their own calendar, their own teachers, their own practices, their own worship styles. And the other extreme would be people, maybe phylos in that category, but at least people who would completely adopt a Greek culture, Greek dress, Greek language, rejection of circumcision.

adopt Greek diets, all of that. And then of course, most people like all bell curves are probably somewhere in between, right? So that somewhere between those extremes, most Jewish people are probably just trying to live a real life and they’re using Greek for a trade language and they are aware of Greek ideas, just like we all are, you we’re all a product of our own environment as well.

If the New Testament authors are swimming in this literature, this culture, these ideas, I mean, the question really becomes, you’re a New Testament scholar, you’re now one of the newest fellows for the Center for Hebraic Thought. We’ve been arguing at the center, making an argument that

that scripture, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament has its own cohesive, internal way of thinking about the world. And the question really comes to the fore with what you’ve said is, is the New Testament just an appropriation of all things reek? Said, this is now the right way to think about the world. You know, we kind of had these muddy ideas back in the Hebrew Bible, but now, you know, now we have these clear ideas. Or does it perceive itself as a fellow intellectual tradition that can be translated to another intellectual tradition?

speaker-1 (05:38.734)
Hellenistic tradition.

That’s excellent. And that the last thing you said there is exactly how to describe it. And to use the bell curve again of the reaction to Judaism. So too, would say that we can, so too, I would say that there’s a spectrum of reactions to the idea of whether the New Testament and early Christianity is just selling out to, to Hellenism or whether it is rejecting it completely.

And the reality is neither of those extremes. think the reality is that Christianity, earliest Christianity understands itself as being robust and sophisticated enough of a worldview or a metaphysic to be able to accommodate itself to the cultures that it’s interacting with. And again, it’s neither extreme of that Christianity has just lost its soul. It’s lost its Jewish soul by speaking in Greek.

because obviously the New Testament is written in Greek and that’s one of the things you just can never get around that the group of Jewish people who understood themselves as being the fulfillment of the whole story of Israel. Now, know, a Jewish person who does not become a Christian would reject that narrative, but we can all agree that that is the self-understanding of early Christians, that they are the Jewish people who are the fulfillment or the completion of the story of Israel.

they choose to write their documents, their authoritative documents, not in Hebrew, not even in Aramaic, but in Greek. And so you could interpret that. And some would say, and then even in Jesus’s day, some would say, yeah, they’ve lost their Jewishness, right? On the other hand, someone might argue that early Christianity doesn’t have anything to do with the Greek and Roman world of society. It’s just Judaism. And I think you’d find people

speaker-0 (07:34.382)
assuming, sometimes arguing, and probably just presuming or having a presumption that one of those two is the case without thinking about it. But I think the beauty and genius of Christianity, I think it’s true for the Hebrew faith and for Judaism as well, but maybe not quite so self-consciously and so intentionally. I think the genius of Christianity is that it sees itself as a core metaphysic, a core belief that actually can be translated.

into any culture. And I always like to tell my students, it’s a good reminder that our version of Christianity is just a version of Christianity. And it takes some intellectual maturity and just some chronological age to mature to recognize that, my version of Christianity is not coextensive to what Christianity has always been or is in the world even today.

It’s my version of it, meaning it’s my inculturated version of it. Now, again, that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It just means that this is the genius of a core faith, is that it’s able to be itself, still be true in its core beliefs, and yet accommodate itself and explain itself in different languages and cultures. And I think this is a fair contrast. I don’t want to be misrepresentative of Islam.

or Muslim people, so please correct me if I’m wrong here, Drew or any listener. But I think this is an interesting distinction between Islam and Christianity as well, and to some degree Islam and Judaism, is that Christianity was very happy to have it be translated into other languages. Scriptures were very quickly translated into all kinds of languages, and nobody even thought to resist that. In fact, that was very welcome and became part of it.

And as the faith spread, it looked different in different cities and it looked different in different cultures. There wasn’t a heavy handed, it has to look this way, it has to be in this language. It was constantly adapting itself. Of course, there’s always the danger of losing itself in that, right? But the risk is worth it, right? And again, the contrast I’m drawing that I hope is fair to Islam is that I think for true Muslim, they must read the Quran in Arabic and it,

speaker-0 (09:56.246)
really shouldn’t be translated from what I understand.

Well, it’s not the Quran if it’s translated. Yeah, it loses this metaphysic of Quran-ness.

It’s not,

speaker-0 (10:06.156)
Yeah. And in a weird way, and this, you know, this is getting deeper and maybe you want to cut this out, but from a cognitive linguistic standpoint, there’s actually something to that, right? In the sense that no language really translates into another language, right? I mean, because language is embedded in culture and when you’re translating, are attempting to translate culture, which you can never fully do. But this again is the genius of the Christian, the Christian metaphysic is that it sees itself as robust enough as the true story of the entire world.

that it’s able unashamedly and unafraid to translate itself into different cultures and languages and let it be. I think that was true for Judaism to some degree. You do see it in people like Philo and others who have a very robust sense of their faith and that it’s able to be translated. You’re able to understand Moses in light of Socrates or something like that. But I think it’s maybe a particular distinctive of Christianity that it sees itself as a religion.

that is capable of adjustment. And you see this in the way it talks about geography, for example. There become no sacred sites in the New Testament itself. And in fact, the New Testament speaks this way that it is a spiritual reality that the temple is now those who worship in spirit, that the church gathered is the temple, et cetera. I think that geographical emphasis that the New, or that non-geographical emphasis that the New Testament

puts on its own faith understanding is part of this whole reality that the faith is constantly translatable into different cultures and places.

speaker-1 (11:53.644)
Yeah, so just to put a fine point on it, it’s because of the confidence of the early Christian movement, which were all Hellenized Jews at this point, or at least living in Hellenistic Jewish culture, that they, again, saw what was handed to them through the tradition as sophisticated and having enough savvy to think through the entire world of thoughts, that it was comparable to something, so it could therefore be translated.

you do have resistance movements. Yeah. I’ll just jump. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, certainly there’s going to be resistance. Yeah. I was just saying, I think as a scholar over the last 25 years or so, and as a being a Christian for 30 plus years, this has been, I think one of the things that I’ve come to see, maybe even especially in the last 10 years of my work is that Christianity is a very sophisticated thought world. And I don’t think I would have said the opposite of that before, but I just don’t think I really had the categories for that until I started reading a lot of philosophy.

and then reading, going back to my new Testament and recognizing it’s really talking about a lot of the same issues and is in fact, giving very sophisticated, nuanced answers to those issues. One thing I’ve been spending a lot of time with, and there is a personal interest in this as well, is in stoicism. mean, I love reading Seneca. I love reading Marcus Aurelius. I love reading Epictetus. I love reading the Epicureans as well who

the stoics didn’t like, but there’s a lot of overlap. And the more I’ve read them, not only have I found them to often be very helpful. So when I read Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, I often take away real nuggets and they’re kind of nugget droppers a lot of times. They say these really pithy little aphorisms and sayings. some good friends of mine even bought me the stoicism coins. don’t know if you’ve

speaker-1 (13:54.134)
I haven’t seen those, no.

So there’s a whole world of daily stoicism now. don’t know if you know that. Yeah. In my book, I talk about Stoicon, you know, 2019 and so, and there’s these coins you can, there are these coins you can buy that have sayings from the stoics like Amor Fati or, premeditatio, melorum, you know, meditate on all the bad things that could happen to you so that you’ll desensitize yourself to them. or love, learn to love what fate has given you.

I’ve seen that, yeah.

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know, summa bonum that what is the greatest good and pursue that. So they, they, they were really good at these like pithy sayings. And what I find when I read stoicism and how it’s affected my reading the Bible is that, I realized what’s the strength of stoicism is that it was very, very practical about how to handle emotions. It was very practical about how to live your life and how to make choices. It was very practical about,

to handle conflict and how to organize your day. was super practical and this is what ancient philosophy was. And yet when I read Stoicism, I always feel like it’s like half true and then totally wrong. mean in the

Take a left turn somewhere always.

I mean, it’s always such a mixed feeling. Like I just saw this quote again from Marcus Aurelius where he says something like, you know, if someone seeks to harm you, I botched it up. Let’s Let’s see. You are only harmed. This is paraphrasing. You’re only harmed when you think that someone has harmed you. So consider that they have not harmed you and you will not be harmed. I think, okay, you know, the good of that.

is that, you know, that’s what I need to say to myself. What I need to say to my children like, or in Seneca’s form of it is something like, it is not circumstances that affect you. It’s the, interpretation of the circumstances. And there’s a lot of wisdom in that, isn’t there? Like to just kind of say, okay, if I’m feeling upset about something or angry, that’s me. Like I need to think about that. And that’s brilliant. That’s wonderful. And I think the Bible,

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Old and New Testaments, know, Jewish scriptures or Hebrew scriptures and the, and the apostolic teachings would both emphasize that kind of sophisticated soul work, like consider, you know, and don’t just blame others, et cetera. But what’s wrong with that stoicism is that it’s, it ends up being this kind of Buddhist anti-realism in the sense that people actually do harm you. And actually some circumstances do really matter. And so as I’ve reflected on that,

and they really do affect you. As I’ve reflected on that and gone back to the Hebrew scriptures and to the New Testament, what I’ve found is an incredibly sophisticated thought world where it both acknowledges the wisdom of self-control, right? But also is so deeply realistic. It’s a realism in saying the world really matters. Your body really matters. Your circumstances really matter. And that

This is why God promises to enter into the world, be in relationship with his people, and actually in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament, it’s forward-looking to a time when God is going to reestablish Shalom on the earth. So in other words, the hope of the Bible’s thought world is not, you just need to recognize nothing really matters. The hope of the Bible’s thought world is,

reality matters and God, the true God of the universe is intervening and will intervene to bring true shalom upon the earth. And so I feel like I didn’t fully appreciate that about the Bible until I read Stoicism and felt and realized that the Bible is actually as good and it turns out I think even much more sophisticated and better on the very same kind of great human questions of

How do you handle your emotions? How do you think about your life? How do you find happiness?

speaker-1 (18:01.582)
Yeah, that’s really good. And I, you know, just saying that, uh, I had a very similar, uh, interaction. I’ve finished seminary love scripture, love reading about it, was really interested in theology. And then I did work in philosophy. And as I did more and more work in philosophy, thought, wait, wait, wait, these aren’t, these are, there are no new questions here. Uh, and, and it is hard to, uh, to think about, you know, if there were a Stoics Bible, you know, if we were to get a compendium of all the best thinking there, it would be difficult to situate, uh,

a teaching on lament or, uh, or salvation in there, right? It’s, um, there’s just no place for it because it does detach it at several points. So I think, yeah, that’s a really good insight or hope for the future or hope for future.

There’s really no hope for the future. only hope is you need to learn to control your emotions no matter what happens.

has a deleterious effect to the whole system.

I think so. And of course the genius of the ancient philosophical systems, at least the Greek ones that I’m familiar with is that their ethic, sorry, their, their ethic and their metaphysics is actually rooted in a physics. It’s rooted in an understanding of the world. So the metaphysics is rooted in a physics. So for the Stoics, they understood from what I understand is that the world is this atomic world that is always going from agitation back to rest.

speaker-0 (19:26.776)
So things, atoms get agitated, this is their atomic understanding, their physical understanding of the world, things get agitated and then go return to rest. So the basis of that, that is the basis, I should say, for the metaphysic that drives their ethic. Because the idea is that everything just gets agitated and eventually returns to rest. Because that is their physical understanding, that means their metaphysical understanding and their ethical understanding is you shouldn’t worry about anything.

because it doesn’t really.

Go to rest as quickly as possible and do whatever exercises it takes to get you to rest.

Yeah. And this is where the Bible has such a sophisticated metaphysic that’s rooted in its own physic understanding, which is that there is a reality to God as the creator of the world, Genesis one, one on, and he’s the creator of the world. And that affects the conceptualization of the Bible’s understanding of how the world is structured and how we live in it. And therefore what is the good and how do you live your life according to it, the ethics. So it’s, it’s all connected. And again, I,

I don’t feel like I appreciated that sophistication of the Bible until I saw that it was exactly how other ancient philosophers thought.

speaker-1 (20:46.828)
Every time I say Hebraic thought, I always include the New Testament in that because the New Testament authors, think, are thinking fully through the Hebrew Bible, but they’re engaging this world that they’re in, including the Stoic philosophy. think you’ve done a lot of work and you have more books coming out to show how the various biblical authors are engaging Roman philosophy, as we typically think of Stoic and Epicurean as Roman philosophy, the best examples. And so I wonder,

Are there ways in which you see you’ve written on Jesus quite a bit in Matthew and the Gospels? And I wonder if there’s like a simple demonstration point if people are just like, okay, you think Jesus is acting like a philosopher? What’s an obvious example of this where he’s engaging this conversation?

Yeah, I think Matthew 12 is a good example of Jesus showing up as a philosopher, as well as Matthew 21 and 22, particularly in conflict with the other sages or wise people within his immediate context, which would be the experts in Torah, the experts in God’s revealed word that gives a metaphysic and an ethic. And in those conflicts,

In the case of Matthew 12 it ends up centering on the Sabbath or in Matthew 21 to 22 he Engages a number of issues because he’s questioned by people he engages issues of the relationship of Faith to the state right should you pay taxes to Caesar for example? and then also issues of how the metaphysic works out in the future whose wife will someone be if You know

One of my favorite passages.

speaker-0 (22:32.75)
et cetera. Yeah, so yeah, we never came back to that issue of what did you do? you ever? I don’t know if we came back to that marriage issue.

Yes. Not now. But in both those cases and others we could say, Jesus, I think shows up as a reasoner, as a logician. I’m thinking of Dallas Willard here. Dallas Willard wrote so many wonderful things, but he wrote this essay that appears in a couple of places, including the great omission about Jesus as a reasoner or as a logician and as a very intelligent person. So that’s one of the kind of the basic level that Jesus clearly

is shown to be a sage because he interacts and engages with questions in this sort of very educated way. And that’s part of the shock, isn’t it, of the New Testament is that he’s clearly not of the scribal class. He’s a tecton. He’s some kind of working class person, whether it’s carpenter or stonemason, we don’t know for sure. That word can mean both. But the idea is he’s not of the scribal elite class, yet he shows up

as someone who’s able to not only hold his own and make logical arguments, but actually to win them so that in every case, he has these public philosophical debates and he wins, right? And so it’s the people who are the sophisticated, educated people, in this case, the scribes or teachers of the law, end up dumbfounded by what he says. So that’s one of the ways in which I think

Matthew shows Jesus as a philosopher, really. But I think the most obvious place is in the Sermon on the Mount. And this is where he starts right off, doesn’t he, by talking about the greatest philosophical question, what does it mean to be truly happy? And so he talks about what it means to be Makarios, is the Greek word, or Asher in Hebrew. And he gives a very shocking

speaker-0 (24:35.01)
But I think very definitive answer about what it means to be truly happy. He says that true happiness is found in an orientation towards the future when God’s coming kingdom will arrive on earth and to live in ways that are very counterintuitive and very unnatural to the human in the sense of laying down one’s life and considering others more important, turning the other cheek, being a peacemaker, et cetera.

I think you could get all that without thinking about philosophy, but once you again read ancient philosophy and you realize this is what everybody was talking about, how do you live a truly good life? It makes a lot more sense of what Jesus is saying and shows Jesus to be a philosopher par excellence and a shocking philosopher as well in that sense.

Yeah. And, and he’s, he’s going back and tilling the soil of the Torah, to, work in, this, this new old philosophy. think, yeah, what you said there, just to make sure that everybody hears the point you’re making. I think a lot of us, when we hear the, the, the, the word philosopher or philosophy, we think of people just having nonsense conversations about the nature of air or something like this.

the chairs exist when we lead. Yeah.

I mean, I’ve worked in philosophy. So yeah, I’ve had those conversations before, the, but everything you’ve said, it’s, there is the nature of the relationship of humans to the earth, the nature of, happiness and what, constitutes happiness, but these always have an output in the lived life, right? So it’s never just the thinking world where they’re just ruminating on these ideas, but it’s actually always how will we then live if I hear you correctly.

speaker-0 (26:16.866)
Yeah, absolutely. And all you have to do is go back and read Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, get into the Romans of Seneca. That’s what philosophy is about. It’s how to live well.

Socrates was not given a death sentence because he was just corrupting people’s minds because what he did with their minds caused them to live in a way that was, well, was deleterious to the state. Well, I don’t think we ever introduced you. Who are you again?

speaker-0 (26:47.81)
That’s a very philosophical question. Who am I? Yes.

No, I just meant like name and title

we’re not just doing philosophy anymore. Yeah. My name is Jonathan Pennington and I teach New Testament at a Baptist seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. And I’m a gospels guy. That’s what I spend most of my scholarly work on, for which I’m very thankful. And I’m also a pastor. I’m very engaged in church ministry and preaching as well.

Well, Jonathan, we heartily welcome you to the Center for Hebraic Thought, and we look forward to your forthcoming book, Jesus, the Great Philosopher, where you go into more detail. It’s a very accessible book, right? This is for anybody who could read this, pick this up and learn from it. It’s not, it’s not a nerdy book.

I think the fact that Ron Swanson, Steve Martin, and lots of other people like that appear throughout the book, I hope that’s pretty accessible.

speaker-1 (27:39.394)
Yeah, there are some very colorful examples from pop culture used throughout the book as well. We thank you for your time in this quarantine time in your household. found somewhere to sit quietly and talk with us today. And thanks for coming on board to the Cinephorechiboreic Thoughts.

I’m thrilled. I’m thrilled. Love what we’re doing here. Thank you.

Thank for listening to the Center for Hebraic Thought podcast. Be sure to subscribe, rate, or leave us a review wherever you found us. Want to learn more about Hebraic Thought? Visit our website at HebraicThought.org.