A Conversation on Greek and Roman Philosophy for New Testament Studies
A Transcript of My Latest Parker's Pensées Episode with Dr. Timothy Brookins
Here’s the transcript from my recent Parker’s Pensées Podcast episode with Dr. Timothy Brookins on his new book, Greek and Roman Philosophy: A Survey for Students of the New Testament.
The transcript came out of the software I use and it was pretty wonky. I cleaned it up and changed it a bit to convey the points better in print. This took way longer than I was expecting but the transcript—now—is pretty great. I’m thinking of doing this for all of my Parker’s Pensées episodes because I think it will help people learn the material much better than solely listening to the episodes. So let me know it you like that. I am going to be making these exclusive posts just for my paid subscribers because it will take so much time to do—I have to listen back on the episode and drop links to resources mentioned and fill in gaps and edit and clean up the text—but they will be worth it. You’ll be reading my conversations with some of the best living philosophers and theologians and you can read and listen at the same time.
If you just want to listen, that works too! I’ll drop the episodes before the paywall. I’ll give a free sample on this one so you can read it and see if this is something you’d be interested in. Behind this paywall will be our conversation on Stoicism, the skeptical Academy, the Cynics, and Epicureanism. That stuff is worth being a paid sub… just saying.
Transcript of Parker’s Pensées Episode 281
Introduction
Parker: Hey, welcome back to another episode of Parker's Pensées. I'm your host Parker Settecase, and this is a podcast where we explore all the deepest ideas in philosophy, theology, nature, and life. I love thinking about cool stuff, so come think with me. Today's episode is very special. I have a returning guest I have with me, Dr. Timothy Brookins. In our first episode, we discussed his book, rediscovering the Wisdom of the Corinthians, and it’s all about Paul, Stoicism, and Spiritual Hierarchy. Amazing, fantastic book. He had mentioned that he was writing a book on Greek and Roman philosophy easily titled Greek and Roman philosophy, which is fantastic.
This just came out, it's a survey of Greek and Roman philosophy for students of the New Testament, which is just everything that I love. I would love for more students of the New Testament to be reading philosophy and understanding the philosophers that are briefly mentioned in the New Testament, but also who are being interacted with by the early church fathers, apologists and on and on.
So, I'm really excited to be talking with him today. Before we jump in, I wanna thank everyone who's making this podcast happen over on Patreon, YouTube members Spotify members and Substack. If you're listening to this somewhere, then there's also an opportunity to support your boy. So thank you for doing that.
If this is your top five, top 10 favorite podcasts, please consider becoming a patron. I also have a bunch of sponsored links in the description wherever you're getting this at. So check those out. If you buy from those, you'll also be supporting me. That's huge. It's a win-win. And then I have these books linked in the description, so if you get 'em from those links, you'll also be supporting me.
That's probably too much commodification. Let's jump in with. Dr. Timothy Brookins and chop it up on ancient Roman and Greek philosophy.
Dr. Brookins, thanks again for coming back on the podcast.
Tim: Yeah, thanks so much for having me again. It was a good time.
Parker: Yeah, man I'm stoked for this. Like I said last time, I'm gonna say it again. I love. The way that you write, because you are a New Testament scholar and you guys are like the footnote aficionados. I learned to footnote like you guys while I was working on my two theology Master’s degrees but then when I started studying philosophy and kept writing the same way, all my philosophy professors were like “what are you doing with all these footnotes? Stop doing that!”
But I love that you're you're showing all the philosophical sources. You’re saying “Hey, if you wanna read more, I will show you every single place you need to read.”
So I love that you used that style to talk about Greek and Roman philosophy. I appreciate that.
Tim: Yeah I think you're right. There is something probably pretty exceptional about the field of biblical studies when it comes to footnotes, simply because so much is written on the Bible—obviously more, more than any other book. But I tried to lighten up the footnotes here, maybe because it is a philosophy book.
Parker: Yeah, that's hilarious. This is this is your version of lightenning it up. I caught that note in the beginning where you're like, “look man, if it's common knowledge that this is what Plato taught, then I'm not gonna go through all of the footnotes in it.” But compared to a philosophy text, it's still an epic amount of footnotes. Before we jump in, I'm wondering are those lobe classical library books behind you on that shelf?
Tim: Oh yes. This is the, not the whole lobe classical library. Maybe someday I'll have the whole set here. But there are almost a hundred of them Now.
Parker: That's a major flex. So sometimes people will see these shiny ones back here behind me and say “oh yeah, that, that's so cool.” But you guys don't understand that the Loeb classical library is the true flex. That's awesome. Tim, can you. Just for those who haven't seen our first one or aren't familiar with it, can you give us a little characterization of what you do for a living?
What's your area of expertise?
Tim: Yeah. As you mentioned, I focus on the New Testament. My title is Professor of Early Christianity at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Yeah, trained in essentially early Christianity or Christian origins. And so I've been writing in that area mostly with a focus on the New Testament since graduate studies.
And yeah, really that my time at Baylor University in the PhD program got me started on this trajectory of the New Testament and philosophy that I've been. Working on in some way continuously since then.
Parker: That's awesome. Yeah. So this is a survey of Greek and Roman philosophy, and I wonder if you have a technical understanding of ‘survey’, if that's a term of art, or like what should the reader be expecting from a survey?
Tim: Yeah, so by calling it a survey, I'm signaling that it's not for experts or specialists in Greek and Roman philosophy. So I'm not looking at all the intricacies of all of the Greek philosophical systems or of individual Greek philosophers but who I have in mind primarily are students of the New Testament.
As the subtitle indicates, and I'll give a shout out to my former colleague at Houston Christian University, Jason Mastin, because in some ways I had him and people like him in mind as I wrote this book. He's another expert in the New Testament, who also happens to be strong in his understanding of Second Temple Judaism.
So Judaism around the time of the New Testament writers but was less expert in Greek philosophy. And so those are the sorts of people I'm writing for people who want to know the intellectual context in which the New Testament was written in which the first missionaries went out to evangelize.
The world philosophy is a very important aspect of the culture, particularly the intellectual culture. And so while the New Testament itself doesn't seem to vary directly and extensively engage philosophy it is the world in which they lived in and moved. And in some ways philosophy was a serious competitor for converts, so to speak with early Christians.
Parker: Yeah I love that. And I have that in mind as well. The survey aspect, I think it threw me a little bit because your book is actually really detailed. It's not so much so that it's not fun or anything like that, but you're coming up with all these charts and you're showing the history of philosophical schools, which you wouldn't know unless you took Master's level history of philosophy. It's deeper than history of ideas. It's deeper than these kind of things. So I'm like, yes, it is a survey, but you're doing due diligence as the NT Scholar that you are. So I thought that was really helpful. I don't know how to explain it.
The reader is gonna get more out of it than they would a survey of the history of Western philosophy. But it's not so detailed that you're gonna be overwhelmed by it.
Tim: Yeah. So if I can just add to that, then the book has 17 chapters. And the average chapter's about 3000 words. So if you can imagine writing a 10 page paper, that's about the average length of the chapter.
So real bite-sized in that way. And so each chapter is going to take you through either a major philosopher like Plato or Aristotle or each of the major schools of the time, for example, stoicism or Epicureanism. And in outline, it's going to give you, say for the schools, what are the main departments of their philosophical system and what is the summary of each part or for Plato or Aristotle, what are key concepts that we see running throughout their works and their philosophical system to the extent that they had systems? But you noted each chapter also concludes with a short list of primary sources to read for that philosopher or philosophical school, it does have tables and figures.
That I think was a nice little touch and I had some help formatting those from a former student named Mark Hines, who I very much appreciate. Some of those tables are really cool. For example several of the figures show a genealogy of philosophers in philosophical schools from the beginning or from Socrates tracing down through a family tree.
And then there are some other tables which give you a summary of the views of each school or, my personal favorite, charts which show information that had been distilled by another scholar that shows how many philosophers we have attested by count from each philosophical school in each century to get a sense of which schools were most popular and perhaps most influential at that time.
Parker: Yeah that's really fascinating. I love the tables. I can't commend this book highly enough. And I think it's a way that you're still staying in your own lane. While doing really good work that's gonna help out philosophers. So I think that's fantastic.
The stuff on Anaximander was really helpful 'cause I never find stuff on him, but I named my dog after him. We call him Ax, but his name is Anaximander, so seeing this much info on my dog’s namesake is so cool.
Tim: Haha that’s great! Yeah, a lot of early philosophers that most people haven't heard of have Xs in their names like that.
Why Should New Testament Readers Care About Ancient Philosophy?
Parker: Yeah, you gotta love that. Okay, so here's a, another quick question before diving into some more of the details on the book.
I get this all the time because I studied systematic theology, theological studies, and then philosophy and philosophy of religion. I still get Christians who are reading, maybe it's the KJV or something, saying “look out for vain philosophy, an empty deceit. Don't study philosophy! It's gonna lead you astray. You're gonna become gnostic, blah, blah, blah.”
From your perspective, so your perspective's probably gonna be a little bit different than mine, but why should a New Testament reader also be looking at the philosophy that’s from the same time period and leading up to the NT?
Tim: Yeah. So there are several ways that we could attack this question. But let me just take it from this perspective. I mentioned earlier that the New Testament writers aren't really directly engaging philosophy or philosophers. I say that with maybe some qualification but particularly Paul's letters are written to churches. Throughout the Greek speaking world, in the Roman Empire that were predominantly Gentile, non-Jewish people.
And to some extent he has to accommodate the way that he speaks as a Jew to a Greek audience who were largely not educated in philosophy in a formal way, but would've been familiar with basic philosophical concepts. Some may have been lightly educated in Greek philosophy in some way.
So we find Paul, for example often deploying what we call philosophical commonplaces to give you one example the idea of life as a competition and we're competing for a prize, but a prize that is imperishable rather than a perishable wreath. And where our adversaries are vices or sins.
And we're pursuing a life of virtue or righteousness, and we find that in one Corinthians nine, but we find something very similar in lots of places all over the philosophers. It was a very popular metaphor, common to philosophical discourse. And we see Paul doing that quite a bit.
And so in that sense, this is Paul speaking the language of the times. Now as we go on in Christian history, philosophy will be engaged much more directly and extensively by Christians.
Parker: I love that point there. Something that I forgot about but which used to be a really big deal for me, as a Christian philosopher, I have to just ham up Act 17 as much as possible. Look! Paul mentioned these philosophers. Okay. He was speaking to the philosophers, see! It’s important to study philosophy. The Apostle Paul did! But another time philosophy makes its way into the Bible, besides Acts 17, is when Paul brings up the liar paradox in Titus. The Liar Paradox, put forth by Epimenides, says all Cretans—people from Crete—are always liars… and Epimenedies is a Cretan! So is he telling the truth or lying? And that became a huge puzzle in logic today even. And Paul's yeah this this sentence is true. This sentiment is true. Don't believe the Cretans. Haha! And it's just so funny 'cause you look at it and you go “was Paul affirming a paradox? And therefore does that make problems for the inerrancy of scripture?”
And I’m like, no, Paul’s using Jewish witticism. He's just making a joke. Yeah. He's familiar with this liar paradox and he just runs into it and he goes, yeah don't listen to the Cretans. Anyways, Titus, let me go on with my letter. So I love finding those little those little philosophical gems, or as you called them, ‘philosophical commonplaces.’
But I wanna jump ahead really quick and just ask you, do you think Jesus was a philosopher—not merely a philosopher of course—but could he be considered a philosopher based on this old school philosophy as a way of life, building schools and followers, style of philosophy?
Tim: So if I can approach this the way that Diogenes does in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, he gives us biographies of different Greek philosophers, but he begins the work by tracing the origins of philosophy. And he points out that there was philosophy outside of the Greeks.
And there's philosophy a long time before Socrates and that the Babylonians were doing philosophy. The Babylonian philosophers were the Chaldeans, right? The Persian philosophers were the Magi. The Egyptians had their own philosophers. All of these civilizations had people who were doing philosophy.
Thousands and thousands of years before Greek philosophers like Socrates, people were doing philosophy. So in a way you ask, is Jesus a philosopher in the way a Greek philosopher was a philosopher? By the definition established by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.? I'm gonna say no, Jesus isn't. Is he doing something analogous to what the philosophers are doing?
I'd say yes. And this is what Christians, particularly in the third and fourth century begin to do is they begin to. Set philosophy and Christian theology side by side and say, '“look, if we formulate these things in a parallel way, in a way where Christianity is essentially subversive of, or an arrival of what the Greek philosophers are doing.
And they said, if we read the New Testament writers like Paul, we can extract from those writings a systematic presentation of Christianity that mirrors a systematic presentation of a Greek philosophy. So what each of the philosophical schools did among the Greeks was to say, “look there has to be some highest goal of human life, what they call the telos—sometimes translated as ‘the end’. And each philosophical school had a different idea of what that end was, but the teachings of philosophy would be to say, here's how to get to that end. And when you get to the ends, there's happiness.
And that's something that we can attain in our lives. And church fathers like origin Clement of Alexandria, but particularly Augustine, because he elaborates this in a lot of detail, Augustine in his monumental work, the City of God in book 19, he actually explicitly puts Christian theology within the context of this conversation among philosophers.
And he says, “look, here are all of the different views philosophers have about the telos, about the highest good of humanity. And he says, here are the best of those options. And he says, but here's the Christian telos, which he says is eternal life in the heavenly city” which God essentially means participating in God, right?
Being in His presence in that peace eternally. So that is in stark contrast with what all of the philosophers had said because for all of the philosophers, the promise was here's how to attain happiness now, in this life—if you live by these principles. But it wasn't an eschatological kind of happiness.
Augustine insists you can experience some of this peace in Christ in this life, but ultimately we await arrival in the heavenly city before all of that comes to its climax and fulfillment.
Parker: Amen. Man, that's that's a great point. I love that. I haven't done a word study on this yet and I would like to, but some of the ancient Greeks emphasized ‘eudaemonia’ type of happiness as the end or fulfillment. And dude, this is totally on the spot, I haven't warned you about this or anything, but Christ in the sermon on the Mount, starts with the beatitudes, and he says ‘blessed’ are x, blessed are y, but the Greek word there is ‘makarios’ and that's ‘happiness’ as well, but it's not like the fleeting happiness, but that deep fulfillment kind like eudaemonia. I actually don't know the relationship between those, but Christ is saying, “Hey, if you want to be blessed, if you wanna have happiness, here's what you do. Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the meek and the merciful, etc., and it's this topsy-turvy view on what all the other philosophers would have said.
But he's doing it on a mountain in front of all of his followers saying, here is the blessed life. Here's what the good life is. And it's basically come follow me.
Tim: Yeah. No that's really good. And I think that would be an example of us looking back and saying, here we can formulate Jesus' teaching in a way that sort of echoes the way that the philosophers thought.
Parker: Yeah. Jesus is saying what the blessed life consists in, or who counts as blessed. It's like what the philosophers are doing by saying here's what happy life consists of. Yeah. That's good. Thanks for that.
What Is Philosophy?
Alright, so every history of philosophy has to start somewhere. And one of the major critiques that I always get from people is “hey, you're not looking at Indian philosophy. Or the other kinds outside of the West.” And they’re mostly right. I'm not. I'm I'll narrow it down to a Western philosophy, but. What counts as Western, blah, blah, blah. I totally get it. Everyone has to start somewhere.
Gordon Clark starts his history of philosophy [Thales to Dewey] with Thales and he says, philosophy started and he gives like the exact moment when Thalys predicted an eclipse, a lunar eclipse (?). And that’s not really philosophy, but whatever.
You talk about philosophy going back, like all the way back, super far back, but you've also given 2 figures who like there's these two figures, Anaximander and Pythagoras, who maybe coined the term ‘philosophy’ independently and we can use them as a reference point. Can you flesh that out for us a little bit?
Tim: Yeah, so Diogenes Laertius, who I referred to earlier, wrote the lives of eminent philosophers, and it might feel like an infinite number of philosophers. And one thing that chronicler of that time wanted to do is to be able to trace successions of a tradition all the way back. And those are always oversimplifying, I think. But Diogenes basically adopts the scheme that says there were two independent lines from which Greek philosophy originated. So one was the Ionian line in what would be modern day Turkey, Western Turkey. And that's Thales who asked, you know we have, a plurality of things in this universe, but is there something that unites them all together? Is there some fundamental underlying principle that unifies things and Thales says, yes, it's water. All things are water. Which might sound, counterintuitive, but we also don't have Thales’s writings and maybe very intelligently defended that.
But the other line was the Italian line. That traced back to Pythagoras. Who as far as we know actually was the first man to call himself a philosophos. Using the Greek word which we translated as philosopher. And so the origins of that word are actually pretty varied.
It meant different things to different people. And we think it was actually originally meant as a slur. A philosopher was someone who wanted to be wise. And Pythagoras said “Okay. Yeah I am, I do want to be wise. I am trying to be wise and I'm trying to seek out to do that.”
And so that yeah so he was the first. And that language stabilized and gained a stable definition with Plato and Aristotle.