Homer or Moses?: Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture

by Arthur J. Droge

220 pages, Hardcover

Published December 31, 1989

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent discussion on how Jewish and early Christian writers interacted with Greek concepts around the history of culture. In particular, Droge discusses how the early Christian apologists used the widespread belief in the chronological priority of Moses and the whole Jewish tradition over the Greek one; the implication being that chronological priority indicates the dependence of Greek learning on Jewish learning. The reasoning which gets to that conclusion can be a bit convoluted in many of our authors and it does fly in the face of much modern scholarship, but that isn't the concern here. The concern is to see how that argument played out and how it interacted with pagan polemic against Christianity, particularly the polemic inspired by Celsus.

Droge's discussion is excellent, although I find that he tends to make Celsus the lynch pin of the pagan polemic, which I'm not sure is warranted. Celsus was important, but he wasn't the only critic.

Well worth reading both for the light it sheds on the apologists, but also on the sub-theories around the barbarian source of Classical knowledge- a topic which would reward further research.