Written Accounts of the Lives, Works, and Trials of Jesus and Socrates: the Common Hellenistic Literary Heritage Reflected within St. John's Gospels and Plato's Apology
Although the religious literature about Jesus, the New Testament, emerged from the Jewish literary tradition of the Old Testament) it has also been argued that in some portions of the New Testament, particularly the Gospels of St. John and St. Luke, the life, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus was described using a Greek rather than a Jewish literary model. In particular, evidence of a shared literary tradition may be seen within St, John's Gospels and depictions by Greek authors (Plato, for example) of such figures as Orpheus or Socrates. In this essay, I will analyze the claim of a Hellenistic literary connection between St. John's Gospels and Plato's Apology. First, the Gospels of St. John were originally written in Greek, and therefore, based on that alone, share a common literary heritage with works by Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek authors of the Hellenistic era. Moreover, according to the web article "John: Introduction": The Gospel according to John is quite different in character from the three synoptic gospels. It is highly literary and symbolic. It does not follow the same order or reproduce the same stories as the synoptic gospels. To a much
longer than a year; in John, three Passovers are mentioned. Mark describes There are considerable differences between John's gospel and the synoptics results of faith [emphasis added].. preparation for the feast. The short, pregnant words of teaching are missing in Arguably, Plato does the same, and in that respect may even have provided St. John the Baptist with a literary example of sorts to follow within his own depictions of the life, works, and death of Jesus Christ. Clearly, St. John was also aware of a Hellenistic audience. For example, within Revelation John uses two letters of the Greek alphabet, and hears the voice of the Eternal saying: "I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last", the true origin and inspiration for the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." Further, in both Revelation and the fourth Gospel the Word becomes flesh and is "tabernacled among us". The language of Revelation, like that of the Hellenistic tradition, is elegant yet unadorned, in ways reminiscent of Plato's vivid but simple descriptions of Socrates. This is not to say that such language is without metaphors, but that the metaphors themselves used by John are simpler in both style and tone than those of the synoptics. For example, as John states, within Revelations: The words of St. John, within the New Testament, are marked by an unadorned logical simplicity distinct from the texts of either Mark or Matthew, although similar to Luke, who was similarly influenced by the dominant Hellenistic literary tradition. Like Luke, and perhaps even more than Luke, John was heavily influenced, in his writing of the Gospel, by Greek literature. Plato's account of the life of Socrates has distinct parallels, in terms of literary style, tone, and content, with many portions of the Gospel of St. John. Given the preponderance of Hellenistic literary and other influence on the Jews of John's time and place, the similarities between these texts is more likely than not a sign of a distinct Hellenistic literary influence on the New Testament writings of St. John. and "It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail" (6:63). The basic
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Approximate Word count = 1833
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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