Preface

The individual papers collected in this volume are united by their aim to illuminate the links between Hellenism, early Judaism, and early Christianity. The interconnection of these phenomena defies holistic analysis due to the breadth of the topic; nevertheless, individual case studies can help us grasp different aspects of such ties and answer the question of the impact of Hellenism on the development of early Judaism and early Christianity. This question is rooted in an understanding of Hellenism as an epoch of Greek influence upon the Mediterranean and the Near East as a result of the expansion of Alexander the Great, exerted until the end of the Hellenistic empires and the beginning of Octavian’s monarchist rule. However, we need first to emphasize the complex nature of the cultural exchange between these areas: the cultural impulses brought by Alexander vastly transcended the Peloponnese perspective, and in this regard the word “Hellenism” does not fully correspond to such complexity. By “post-Hellenism”, a term used occasionally in this book but not yet fully and firmly established, we understand not a historical epoch but rather a sphere in which the secondary consequences of Hellenization are to be found, visible in action, for instance, in the evolution of early Christianity; we also use this term to indicate the continuity between Hellenism and later times. By studying the Hellenistic influences on early Christianity, both in response to and in reaction against early Hellenized Judaism, we intend not only to better understand Christianity as a religious and historical phenomenon with a profound impact on the development of European civilization, but also to better comprehend Hellenism and its consequences, which have often been relegated to the realm of political history.

Most of the studies in this book are based upon the selected papers delivered at “Hellenism, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity: Transmission and Transformation of Ideas”, an international conference held in Prague on September 12–13, 2019, and organized by Radka Fialová, Jiří Hoblík and Petr Kitzler, who immedia­telly afterwards began preparing this volume. This conference was attended by some twenty-five speakers, not only from Western, Eastern and Central Europe but also from further afield, such as from Argentina, Hong Kong, and the USA, its main objective being to investigate individual topics from the field of early Judaism and Christianity in the context of the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic period, especially with regard to the history of thought. Both the conference and this volume contribute to a three-year project, funded by the Czech Science Foundation, researched by a team from the Centre for Classical Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. It is worth mentioning that within this grant-aided project the research team has also been working on the interdisciplinary “Encyclopaedia of Hellenism, post-Hellenism and early Christianity”: this encyclopaedia, currently in an early phase of its development, aims to gather current knowledge in the field in the form of extensive entries, scholarly yet accessible not only to experts but also to the Czech public in general, and to boost Czech research into Hellenism, which despite its steady pursuit has been somewhat fragmentary.

To give just some examples of this long-term interest, there is the monograph Řecké dědictví v Orientu (Greek Heritage in the Orient; Praha: OIKOYMENH, 1993), by one of the most prolific Czech biblical scholars, Petr Pokorný (1933–2020), which summarizes the political, philosophical and religious development during the Hellenistic epoch. Petr Pokorný was also one of the founders of the interdisciplinary Centre for Biblical Studies, a joint research facility of today’s Centre for Classical Studies at the Institute of Philosophy, CAS, and the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague. For nearly thirty years, this Centre and its researchers have been striving to bridge the sometimes artificially fabricated gap between biblical scholarship, a broad conception of early Christian theology, and classical studies, and the present book can be considered one of the fruits of this endeavour. Petr Pokorný died in January 2020, just a few months after the conference at which he delivered his short paper which, thanks to the kind permission of his family, is posthumously printed in this volume. Unfortunately, in January 2021 he was followed by another Czech pioneer in the study of Hellenism, the doyen of Czech classical philology and an eminent historian of Antiquity, Pavel Oliva (1923–2021), who himself devoted two monographs to the history of Hellenism and its context: Řecko mezi Makedonií a Římem (Greece between Macedonia and Rome; Praha: Academia, 1995) and Svět helénismu (The World of Hellenism; Praha: Arista, 2001). It is to the memory of these two great scholars that we dedicate this volume.

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The chapters in this book are arranged into two slightly overlapping thematic sections. The first section comprises papers illuminating different aspects of philosophical theology dealt with by different Jewish and Christian authors and texts, rooted in and influenced by the Hellenistic cultural and philosophical context; the second section features studies focused on the Jewish literary and cultural tradition and its reception.

The book opens with a study by Jiří Hoblík (Prague) on Philo and the concept of “power(s)” present in his vast oeuvre. Hoblík persuasively demonstrates the philosophical background of Philo’s multifaceted understanding of this notion, in this respect correcting the position held by David Runia. As also well documented in Hoblík’s paper, this also provides the philosophical grounding, drawn from various philosophical traditions of Antiquity and transformatively employed to meet Philo’s concept of monotheism, which can be seen to underlie his preference for the Greek δύναμις over the Septuagint’s ἰσχύς when speaking about “power”; Hoblík also analyses this issue with reference to Philo’s attitude to the concept of God’s power found in the Torah. For Philo, as Hoblík concludes, the term “power” combines primarily cosmogonic and cosmological but also historical and anthropological elements.

The paper by Ana Carolina Delgado (Los Polvorines, Argentina) also deals with Philo. She focuses on the passage in Philo’s Quod Deus sit immutabilis (51–69) in which the Alexandrian seems to deviate from his usual allegorical method of scriptural interpretation and prefers to cling to the literal meaning of the story of God’s regret for having created people as recorded in Gen 6:1–8. As Delgado shows in an in-depth analysis, Philo’s approach in this instance is most probably influenced by (and to be understood against the background of) Plato’s account of “beneficial falsehood” found in his second book of the Republic. In following this argumentative strategy of Plato, Philo himself can interpret the anthropomorphisms as falsehoods beneficial to a certain type of reader, false only on a literal level whilst communicating a doctrinal truth.

With the brief essay by Petr Pokorný (Prague), we turn to the beginnings of Christianity: Pokorný ponders the early Christian redefinition of Hellenistic heritage and the attempt to construct a new Christian paradigm by transforming the Hellenistic and Jewish cultural and religious substrates. He uses as exemplar the Acts of the Apostles, especially Paul’s speech in Athens (Acts 17), which documents Paul’s confrontation with Greek philosophy, and which reveals not only the legacy of Hellenism, but also a significant tension opposing it.

With the paper by Jan Kozlowski (Warsaw) we stay on that same track leading to the very foundations of the Christian paradigm, to the message of Christ’s resurrection conveyed by Lukan Paul in his famous Areopagus speech mentioned above (Acts 17:22–31). As Kozlowski shows, the overall contents of this speech and its grand finale announcing Christ’s ἀνάστασις is only seemingly in discord, since from the beginning Luke alludes to this event through a subtle net of literary and cultural allusions deeply rooted in the shared classical tradition. Kozlowski not only unravels them but also offers possible explanations for this Lukan strategy.

Damian Mrugalski (Kraków) presents an overview of the concept of infinity from the Presocratics through Plato, Aristotle and Middle Platonism to Philo and the Greek Christian thinkers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. He shows how, via Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and many others, this fundamental philosophical category has evolved, and through the philosophical reflection of the Bible has been transformed, losing its negative connotations, to positively refer to divine infinity.

In her study focused on Origen, to a certain degree summing up her numerous scholarly contributions devoted to the philosophical context of early Christian thought, Ilaria Ramelli (Milan and Durham) shows how this influential Christian theologian and thinker truly embodies the very title of the present volume and the conference upon which it was based. Ramelli abundantly documents how deeply Origen’s thinking was rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition and how he...