ABSTRACT
Despite the relative modernity of the term, monotheism as a doctrine of one cosmic principle or a summary statement of faith in a solitary God emerged independently in the two ancient cultures of Israel and Greece some twenty-five centuries ago. Although they largely generated their ideas of cosmic oneness independently of one another, the wisdom of the Hebrew and Greek philosopher-theologians was destined to converge in the Roman empire. As we have already seen, over the course of the five hundred years leading up to the start of the Christian era, Greek thinkers gradually developed the notion of cosmic unity in terms of eternal principles of mathematics and the perfection of unchanging ideas (represented by the number one) as an antidote to the evident susceptibility of the gods to political manipulation. And, in the same period, Israelite thinkers also responded to the utter devastation that the Babylonians had wrought on their sacred kingdom by developing a strong and universal concept of one God alone who created the cosmos, governed its history, and so engineered and transcended the apparent defeats of the Israelite people. Both cases exemplify brilliant theological construction, accomplished under the pressure, or perhaps as a result of the pressure, of changed and changing circumstances. Both ideas of powerful theological oneness-monotheism and monism-came out of cultural defeat and war trauma. They bore ever after the marks of disassociation from worldly uncertainty and change. By the start of the Christian era both Israel and Greece were (again)
colonies, thrown together this time under Roman rule. Although the Romans despised the conquered Greeks, their own lack of educational traditions and even of rudimentary philosophical or political vocabulary
meant that they turned to the wisdom and scholarship of the former Greek empire for the tools with which they built a distinctively Roman culture. Clothed in a jump-started Latin language and helped along by Roman scholars such as Cicero, Virgil, and Seneca who were trained in Greek literature, Greek ideas soon shaped the substance of Roman culture.3 By the start of the Christian era Jewish scholarship also reflected strong Greek influences. Young Jewish men with the means to study, like Saul/Paul of Tarsus or Philo of Alexandria, regularly supplemented Torah instruction with Greek and Latin language and rhetoric. It was typical for them to read the pre-Socratics (Pythagoras, most notably) along with the Socratic academicians like Plato and Aristotle. Jewish thought in this period retained its strong monotheism expressed in patriarchal and covenantal terms, but began to add more noticeably Greek ideas of forms and mathematics, at least among the urban scholars. Philo of Alexandria is a prime example of the Hellenization of Jewish
and nascent Christian thought. He was 20 years old when the Christian era began with Jesus’ birth and in his seventy years he self-consciously brought together both Jewish and Greek strands of thought in his writing. His work is critical for any discussion of early Christian thought because, despite the fact that he never intended to encourage Christian theology, his writings influenced Christian writers throughout the first three centuries of the Christian era.4 A member of the Jewish upper class that benefited from Roman rule (his nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander played an important role in the Roman suppression of the Jewish revolt in 66-70 CE),5 Philo’s fusing of Greek and Jewish thought crystallized the monotheism of Jewish belief in terms of Hellenistic concerns about order, rule, and empire, a combination that the Christian apologists found perfectly reasonable and useful in their own development of a political model for Christian authority. Erik Petersen
has shown that it was the doctrine of the universal monarchy of the one God which molded Philo’s Hellenistic re-formation of Jewish belief: ‘The God of the Jews was fused with the monarchical concept of Greek philosophy.’6
