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Christianity by the Century: Fifth Century BCE (500–400 BCE)

by Shirley Paulson, PhD

We begin our series, Christian History by the Centuries, several centuries before Jesus’s birth, at a time when significant developments were already shaping the way people would eventually think about him.

We could have started this series with the beginnings of the Hebrew Bible, since Jesus was a Jew whose life was thoroughly shaped by his Jewish heritage. But we will begin, somewhat arbitrarily, with the fifth century BCE.  Certainly, the sixth century BCE was a turning point for the people of Israel, as their return from Babylonian exile in 538 BCE gave them the opportunity to rebuild their lives according to ancestral laws. The great Second Temple in Jerusalem was completed around March 516 BCE, just in time for Passover.

To focus more specifically on the ideas that later shaped the thinking of many followers of Jesus, we turn to Socrates and Plato. Though not Jewish, their ideas resonated deeply with early Christian thinkers. Socrates, born in 469 BCE, was the inspiration for Plato, and together they made a lasting impact on the intellectual and cultural development of the Western world.

Socrates

The issues related to democracy that led to Socrates’ death were of profound importance to him, but it was his approach to his trial and execution that left a lasting impression for centuries. His teaching of self-control, even to the point of death, became emblematic of the “noble death.” If one must die, die nobly.

To die for something, Socrates taught, is to maintain the final say over one’s life. In facing death with patience and conviction, the one executed demonstrates more authority over their life than the executioner. Plato’s account of Socrates’ death became an enduring model throughout antiquity and later became a key concept for explaining the death of Jesus.

Although the Jewish Maccabean family was martyred in the second century BCE, they may have been aware of Socrates’ example. This family—including a mother and her seven sons—was tortured and killed for refusing to violate Jewish law under King Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

There is no known connection between the deaths of Socrates and the Maccabean family, but the similarities are notable—especially in their influence on later Christian martyrdom. Early Christian concepts of martyrdom drew from both the Maccabean tradition and Greco-Roman ideals of noble death, with Socrates as a key exemplar.

Plato

Plato, Socrates’ most famous disciple, is the main source for what we know about Socrates. Born in 427 BCE, Plato deeply influenced his contemporaries’ understanding of morality, governance, and the nature of human life. His teachings on truth, justice, and the soul shaped philosophical, political, social, moral, and educational thought for generations.

His Republic—one of his most influential works—was found among the texts discovered near Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. Buried in a jar in the fourth century alongside 50 other Christ-centered writings, most from the second century, it is evidence that some early followers of Jesus saw continuity between Plato’s philosophy and Jesus’ teachings.

Both Plato and Jesus were wisdom teachers, though their styles differed: Plato, a wealthy Greek, preferred long dialogues; Jesus, a Jewish peasant, used short, powerful parables. Yet both sought a reality—a logos—beyond what the world presents.

Plato’s order of reality was a bit more hierarchical than Jesus’ vision of the basileia tou theou (“kingdom of God”), but some scholars argue Plato was not as dualistic as later Western philosophers made him out to be, particularly those following Descartes. In Christian debates, dualism—the view that the material world is sinful and the good and perfect exist only in the heavens after death—became a major point of contention.

That kind of dualistic framework might explain why Plato’s writings were found with extracanonical Christian texts buried in the fourth century, just as the Christian church was becoming institutionalized within the Roman Empire. Discoveries of second-century writings in Oxyrhynchus and Nag Hammadi, Egypt—many more than the 27 books in the New Testament—indicate a widespread interest in a Platonic-influenced understanding of Jesus’ message during Christianity’s formative centuries.

These two fifth-century thinkers—Socrates and Plato—left indelible marks on world history. But for our purposes, their relevance lies especially in how their ideas took root among the generations that followed Jesus.

This is the first post in a series offering Bible and Beyond readers a chronological reference for events and major ideas that influenced the evolution of various Christianities, Christian History by the Century. In the series we identify key events and people who influenced both the immediate and future generations of those who came to identify as followers of Jesus. This historical series offers readers an opportunity to engage in the collective rethinking of how Christianities have evolved across the centuries—past, present, and future.