The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

What Do Jesus and Plato Have In Common?

An Interview with Dr. David Galston

David Galston

Some obvious differences between Plato and Jesus would include the fact that Plato preceded Jesus by three and a half centuries. Jesus was a Jewish teacher; Plato was a Greek philosopher. Plato taught with dialogues; Jesus taught with parables. But they are both figures of wisdom. Both styles are placed in everyday life, and yet both teachers encourage their students to exercise critical thinking and to discover reality beyond the obvious.

David Galston is the CEO Executive Director of the Westar Institute, which defines itself as “pursuing honest and rigorous inquiry on the origins and cultural implications of the Christian tradition through critical, collaborative, and cumulative scholarship.” Galston is a theologian and has authored three books: Archives and the Event of God (McGill-Queens Press, 2010), Embracing the Human Jesus (Polebridge Press, 2012), and God’s Human Future (Polebridge Press, 2016).

Related to this podcast, you might want to read David Galston’s blog post, “Saving Plato,” on the Westar blog.

Audio

Video

Some Bible and Beyond podcast episodes are made available as video podcasts on our YouTube channel. This month’s episode can be found here.

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

I am so pleased to have the opportunity to have this conversation to talk with Dr. David Galston. David is the Executive Director of the Westar Institute, and I have to say, as a Board Member of Westar, I’m appreciating the balancing act that he brings to the institution, between academic rigor and providing accessible scholarship for the public. David’s PhD work was at McGill University from Montreal, and he’s a theologian himself, having authored three books about God and humanity. And he continues his writing and teaching through Westar. So today our focus is on the provocative relationship he finds between Plato and Jesus. It’s a topic I’ve wondered about for years actually, but hadn’t really zeroed in on it as David has. So I’m really glad you’re here to talk about this, David. Thanks for being here.

David Galston

Thank you. Thanks very much.

Shirley Paulson

Alright, so to get started here, I think you’ve seen some actually startling similarities between Plato and Jesus and that Jesus, or at least as followers anyway, appear to have appropriated Plato’s teachings.  That seems really odd to me, since I think of them as so wildly different. So could you help us get our bearings here for this discussion by pointing out maybe the obvious differences we should keep in mind when we start to look at the similarity? Let’s start there.

David Galston

Sure. I should say that it’s a cultural influence and not necessarily a direct influence. I’m not saying Jesus was reading Plato or something like that, but there certainly are differences, of course. Jesus is Jewish. He tells parables, parables are about daily life. They don’t really have theory attached to them, or they don’t develop theory. So you have to work with these parables and their metaphors. What do they mean? How do you associate with them? Whereas Plato is theoretical, he has dialogues, but in his dialogues are monologues, they are statements about philosophy and the development of ideas that can be very complex. So really the differences in style of teaching parables versus dialogues, that’s the main difference.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, alright. And of course they lived a long distance time from each other

David Galston

Yes. Plato is from, what is he? He died in 348 BCE. I think so. And he was born in 428 BCE. I think those are the dates that are given to him before the common era.

Shirley Paulson

So at least several hundred years between them.

David Galston

Yes, definitely.

Shirley Paulson

And they did not live exactly in Jerusalem at the same time either.

David Galston

No, no, they did not.

Shirley Paulson

Alright, so they’re world’s apart. And so then how do you find similarities that actually matter then? I mean they’re wildly different to me.

David Galston

Yeah, well because you can find similarities for two reasons. One is because generally speaking, they both are figures of wisdom.

Wisdom teaching is kind of international. It doesn’t know any boundaries. You can find things in Buddhism that are similar to what Jesus taught. So, because the Buddhist tradition is a Wisdom tradition as well, and there’s a Wisdom tradition within Judaism, and of course, a Wisdom tradition within Greek philosophy. But the other thing is that, as I said, there’s a culture in which Jesus lives, which was what dominated since the time of Alexander with the Greek language and Greek concepts and Greek schools. So it’s not impossible that Jesus was familiar with some of the schools. Many New Testament scholars have indicated the similarity of the Cynic movement and the movement that seems to be around Jesus, including similar sayings, very similar sayings. So there is that kind of, you live in a culture and you adopt some of it, you use some of it. Look at Philo of Alexandria. He used Greek philosophy very effectively within Judaism and it goes both ways. It’s not like the Romans and the Greeks didn’t know anything about Judaism or didn’t know there were Jewish schools. They did. And you can see kind of a back and forth between the two.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. So I get that they were both teachers. I mean in some ways people think of Jesus as being sort of this divine person, but he was a teacher and obviously Plato was a teacher. So maybe how would you characterize the difference in their teaching methods? Or if they’re sort of playing with thoughts, how would you characterize that kind of difference?

David Galston

Yeah, again, I would go back to the difference between parables and dialogue.

With dialogue, Plato can really draw out questions. The similarity is that the dialogues are placed in everyday life—I mean, they are often conversations in a room, or some event, or you’re walking somewhere and you’re having a conversation, or you stop, and you sit down, and you expand conversation. So you get kind of a practical element. But in the dialogues you can get a figure—normally Socrates—who expounds an idea, and through question and answer, develops a kind of a theory. And so this is how you can draw theoretical stuff of mostly epistemology from Plato. Epistemology is “how do we know what we know?”

Plato kind of answers that question, or tries to, whereas with the parable, they’re so short and they’re so practical. A kid runs away from home and then he comes back and that’s the parable and you don’t get this sort of investment of theoretical discussion. So that has to happen outside the parable in the conversation about “what does it mean?” And of course we could do an endless session on how to interpret parables and “what did they mean?”, but the point is to impact the hearer and to upset the expectations of the hero, but you don’t solve that. Whereas Plato in dialogue, he can solve questions or at least propose solutions. The parable doesn’t do that. It leaves you working with it.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, okay. So Jesus seems to be provocative in a way that leaves you having to think more, even though Plato is very thoughtful, but he’s telling you more directly.

David Galston

Yes, he does. But I do like Plato because his dialogues—even though they’re difficult to read and you really have to concentrate—they are playful because he’ll reach a solution, and then he’ll throw it out because it doesn’t work.

So there is an intention to teach the student, if you like, or the reader, to think critically, to ask questions and to determine whether your solution just doesn’t accept the solution, test it. Does it really work? And very often Plato cannot find a solution. Sometimes he even makes fun of himself. He wraps you up in these enigmatic expressions and thoughts and you don’t even know where he is going to come out and he can’t. He ties himself up in knots. The Parmenides dialogue is the classic expression of that. But again, it’s because you’re writing a long piece, you can write a long dialogue and you can really think about the exchange and the thinking. But Jesus is so enigmatic because he’s so unknowable in this way. A woman puts leaven in three measures of flour. What does that teach us? How is that a lesson? That’s what you have to ask. What’s going on and why would that be controversial? That’s another question that we have to ask from our time back into the first century.

Shirley Paulson

Well, am I right that we understand Plato more as a writer and Jesus as a speaker? Or am I mixing that up?

David Galston

Yeah, I think so. I mean, we can’t help but do that because we just have this material from Plato that we don’t have from Jesus.

Shirley Paulson

Do you think that impacted the way they communicated their messages, or did that matter?

David Galston

Yeah, I think it made a difference. I mean, with Plato, you have an academy, you have students, and you can see in the writing that the students are often the dialogue. They’re kind of supplying the dialogue. And Socrates presumably is Plato in the dialogue and you can see that they really work out questions. They really attack questions. So you get a sense of what it was like to be in the academy. And you can even think that the Academy at that time was actually more like a graduate class today for us. It wasn’t just like, “Hi, I’m a student and it’s my first day and lecture to me.” It’s a very engaging form of learning and it presumes the student already has a good level of sophistication, I guess.

Shirley Paulson

Well, you are leading me to a question I’ve also wondered about when teachers. . . , When I’m accustomed to going to classes and having teachers working with me, I expect something to change in me and to change the world or my view or something. Do you think of these teachers as people who advocated for change or did they want to find something that is stable and permanent and tell everybody what the truth is? How did that work for them?

David Galston

Yes, that’s a very good question. And that’s another difference between Jesus and Plato. You have to remember Plato is relatively wealthy, and he’s a Greek in the Greek world, whereas Jesus is impoverished and he is Jewish in the Greek world—the Greek and Roman world. And so he’s not really able to say, “This is how government should be.” Whereas Plato can imagine forms of government and discuss politics, or, of course, the Republic and the Laws are the dialogues that do that. Even with the intention of possibly seeing this government come to fruition. I won’t go into the history of Plato, but he does have a kind of chance in Syracuse to sort of see if he can make it work politically. And of course that’s impossible for Jesus. So you see, Plato is trying to correct us, enlighten us, address our ignorance, and Jesus is more provocative in the sense that he’s trying to say, “Imagine the world differently.” He’s undermining the world. He is on the ground. He’s like, you hate to use this image in a sense because people don’t get it and they often dismiss it, but he is like a social justice type of figure. He’s corrupting society as it is because it works against him. Whereas Plato is more in a position of saying, “You know what? We can perfect society.” That’s an impossible question for Jesus.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, that’s interesting. Then would you say that they were both looking for what you might call reality, like the truth of things that maybe would lean towards changes or things that never change? What were they looking for? I should put it that way, maybe?

David Galston

Yeah, so these are tough questions to summarize very quickly, but you just do the best you can. I think in a way you can touch on some similarity there because it’s very typical in the ancient world to sort of have the idea that you see the world the way it is. But there’s something beyond that. There’s something  more. There’s a Logos, there’s an order that we don’t see. And so both Plato and Jesus actually have that quality just expressed in different ways. So for Jesus, the behind-the-scene is the basileia tou theou, the Empire of God. We don’t see it, but we do see it. It’s there to be seen, but people don’t see it. That comment in the Gospel of Thomas, the Empire of God, is scattered everywhere, but people do not see it. So the parables are all about changing your perspective, trying to see that this Empire is here, you can live in it.

It’s a different order of reality. And for Plato it’s slightly more hierarchical, but it’s the Good. So instead of the Empire of God, you have the Good, and this is a deep part of our Western tradition. The common good is what society is about, and that’s Plato. And so he’s trying to show us that behind the world of appearances, what’s really valuable. And his answer is virtue. Virtue is really valuable. Well, what is virtue about? Virtue is about aiming toward the Good. And that’s Plato. I often think of the Robert Frost poem, I’ll just say,  ”Choose something like a star”—is basically Plato.

Shirley Paulson

Then is Jesus looking for this kind of Good too, or is it a different way of understanding reality for him?

David Galston

I think in a way he sort of is, but the parables are trying to uncover a different way of valuing the world. So you end up with a different language with Jesus. He’s a bit more from the ground up and Plato’s a bit more from the sky down. But the thing we do with Plato is that we often think he’s a dualist. And that’s not really fair because he’s very integrative. The point of, I have to say, the point of the myth of the cave;  the philosopher’s in the bottom of the cave and finds the way out and gets into the sun and sees reality as it really is, that’s the philosophy, the enlightened person, but that’s not where it stops. Then you have to go back down into the cave. That’s the philosophical move. You’ve got to go back down and figure out how to make that light come alive in the society that doesn’t see it.

Shirley Paulson

Let me just stop you a second, David. Maybe not everybody knows the Allegory of the Cave. So could you sort of describe it, really briefly, what you’re talking about from Plato?

David Galston

Yes. So this is in the Republic. There are people tied up in a cave, and they’re kind of forced to look at a wall and behind them burns the fire. And behind the fire is sort of a stage and people walk across this…, Pardon me, the fire’s at the very back. In front of the fires, the stage. People walk across this stage with objects, and the shadow of the objects falls on the wall. And these prisoners can only see these shadows of things. And they have to kind of figure out what that is. And it’s sort of a way that Plato says, this is what it’s like to be in the world. We don’t see things truly as they are. We see the shadow of things or beyond the shadows or behind the shadows, if you like, is light. So the philosopher is the person who gets out of the prison of the cave, finds a passageway out of the cave, into the real world, into the sunlight.

David Galston

And sees these objects that were passed in front of the fire and were only shadows, sees them for what they really are, the truth. But then the job of the philosophers is to go back into the cave and to sort of convince people that this isn’t what we’re really about, that there’s a real world out there. There’s more than this. But remember, I just like to say to people, remember that truth for Plato is the Good. Okay, it’s not an abstract idea that you never live. It’s the Good. You’re supposed to live the Good in your heart as a person in the world. It’s not something that comes after life. It’s now.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, that’s interesting. So going back to Jesus and your connection between the two, would you say then that Jesus learned anything from Plato like this? I mean he lived so much later, but everybody seemed to be aware of Plato at that time. So what do you think Jesus may have picked up from Plato?

David Galston

Yeah, I think that’s really, really hard to answer because Jesus is within Judaism and how much… but I do think there’s cultural influences. I don’t think you can deny that. So I would say in a general sense, there’s that shared experience and antiquity that there’s a kind of truth behind the material world or beyond it in some sense. And I guess in another way, it’s very likely that Socrates and Plato were pretty famous. I mean very famous. So just like today you can say, “Gee, who hasn’t ever heard of Jesus?” Jesus is pretty internationally known. You could say in the ancient world, “Who has never heard of Socrates?” I mean, everybody heard of Socrates. So we don’t have any evidence that Jesus ever heard of Socrates, but it’s hard to believe he had never heard of Socrates in a certain sense. And the consequence is that the ethic of Plato, the sense that there is virtue, that there is truth and that we need to live it somehow, we need to somehow make it wake up in our life. That’s there. And it’s not necessarily from Plato in a direct sense, it’s Wisdom teaching and it’s common to both the Greek and the Jewish experience of Wisdom.

Shirley Paulson

So a little while ago you were talking about dualism, which I think is helpful to talk about right now in this context. So would you say, then, that Plato is or is not a dualist,  like these two distinct realities? You’re saying he’s not, is that right?

David Galston

Yeah. This is where people agree and disagree. So I’m on the side of saying Plato’s not really a dualist. I think he’s very clear in the republic that the line he has between the world of the perfect world above us and the mundane world we live in is a dotted line and they infiltrate one another and they have to because you can’t know the truth if you can’t see it. And the only thing you can see is the mundane world. So the truth is in the mundane world. So he’s not a dualist in that sense. But the platonic tradition begins to separate these things that Plato kind of integrated. In fact, sometimes you can even see it being separated in Plato himself. And by the time you get into Plotiunus and neo Platonism, it’s not the good anymore, it’s the one. And so you get a much more expressed dualism. But the big dualism is really later, quite a bit later in Descartes or any Descartes, he’s the major dualist of Western philosophy.

Shirley Paulson

Maybe you could talk a little bit about why is dualism considered like a heresy? What’s wrong with dualism?

David Galston

Yeah, in Christianity it’s become orthodoxy. Okay. What’s wrong with it is that when it hits those exaggerated expressions, everything that’s good and perfect is, for you after death, up in the heavens. And meanwhile, this earth, what you’re dealing with is sin, original sin. And the whole purpose of life is to escape life. That’s the difficult side of dualism. And Christianity has made an art of it by kind of making life a life of sin. And you need to be saved. But what means ‘being saved’? Well, it means getting out of this life and getting up into heaven. And that’s sad because there’s no ethic in that. Whereas this is really not Plato’s thing, and he is an ethicist. It’s about living the virtues. And I think you could argue Jesus, too, is like that. It’s about living this reality now, this Empire of God, making it be part of our life and the world.

Shirley Paulson

I think that helps us get a better view of what that means when you talk about hierarchy relationships. Also in a hierarchy, it’s almost like a dualism because you’re talking about two different, at least, two ends of a spectrum or something. How would you say that Plato deals with hierarchy, as opposed to Jesus, then?

David Galston

Yeah, I think this is a good observation because one of the troubles Plato has—and this is what you can tell I’m fighting against—it isn’t what I’m saying, but truth does come down sort of hierarchically: the world is the perfect and the good. Plato says that the Good casts no unrighteous shadow.

Whereas in this world, we do cast unrighteous shadows. And so we need to try our best to be righteous. So that means it sort of comes down. So the transcendental truth, the transcendental good is this ideal, and it slowly sinks down into our mundane world. And there’s traces of it here. Whereas I think Jesus is much more from the ground up. He doesn’t go with God. It’s not like the prophetic voice. God said this, God said that. And “Hear the Word of the Lord!” It’s this: A woman lost a coin in a hut. It’s like, how is that like God?

Shirley Paulson

Yes. Right, right. So go ahead, answer the question. How is that like God? Tell us.

David Galston :

Yeah. Well, so you can see the gospel writers, they want to say, “Oh, well, God looks for lost sinners, but the woman is in a dark hut, and she loses a coin, and she searches all day for it and finds it. And then she has a party celebrating finding it.” But of course, she has to spend that coin and more than that coin to have that party. So it’s finding and losing at the same time. So there’s something like the Empire of God about giving away. It’s not in finding; it’s in giving it all away.

Shirley Paulson

Well, okay. So how does that argue work down/up then, as opposed to up/down?

David Galston

Well, because the story starts us right in daily life, like a really practical thing. So you have to ask your own self. Your question to yourself is, “Well, what do I do with my money?”

David Galston

I want to keep it. And this is a story of giving it away. It’s a fascinating story, but it changed my life, because I grew up in a Scottish household. You always used to say, “tight as the paper on the wall’ kind of thing. And learning to be generous and learning to not hang on to that and helping people and to feel it’s okay to be porous, if you like, in your life. I think there’s that element in the parable, but there’s another way in which you don’t really know what Jesus is talking about. You only have to work at it.

Shirley Paulson

So then do you think that Christians, maybe I’m talking about Christians who followed Jesus, then took on more Platonic ideas than Jesus actually meant?

David Galston

Yes, I do. Definitely.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. How did that happen?

David Galston

Christianity used Plato to interpret Jesus, for sure. Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

Tell us about that. How did that help us?

David Galston

Well, you can’t really do the Council of Nicea and Jesus being fully human, fully divided. The second Person of the Trinity begotten, not made, sinless coming down. That’s all a Platonic notion. That’s really NeoPlatonism. The council of Nicea is like NeoPlatonism.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. Now you said a bunch of words we need to pause on a little bit here. What’s the difference between NeoPlatonism and Platonism?

David Galston

Yeah. So remember we talked about Plato’s main thing is the Good, but in NeoPlatonism, the main thing is the One. The sole  truth. So the One you don’t really have to think about it, as “How does that live in the world?” Because it’s not in this world. It’s beyond us. We can’t reach it. And so the Council of Nicea and Christianity basically took God to be the One and Jesus to be the begotten of God, and comes into the world to save us down here in the darkness and take us back up to the light. Whereas if you really use Plato with Jesus, you would say, no, we’re not going back up to the light. We’re trying to transform this world here in an ethical way, in a way that imitates the light or the Good.

Shirley Paulson

So if I’m understanding you, are you leading us to a view of the Nicene Council as a more of a dualistic view, like Platos?

David Galston

Yeah. Yes it is. I think it is.

Shirley Paulson

And yet the Nicene Council also talks about dualism as a heresy.

David Galston

Yes. They talk about that because they don’t want two gods, they don’t have God, God and God, Jesus. They’re the same God.

David Galston

You have the Trinity developed or developing to kind of preserve a monotheism, but have distinctions.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. So we have two different kinds of dualisms: up and down and side to side. Gotcha.

David Galston

Notice how in Christianity, so now the problem is metaphysical, and that’s what I would call a NeoPlatonic problem. How do you solve the One and have Jesus here on earth? How is Jesus the One? That’s the Platonic question of Christianity.

Shirley Paulson

So then let’s just ask this, then as we kind of wrap this up. What is the takeaway that you would like for us to think about with this? Or specifically maybe, how would you like us to think about the relationship between Plato and Jesus? Let’s put it that way.

David Galston

Yeah, I think it would be good of us to really allow both figures to be truly human. I think we need to stop making Jesus divine. The parables of Jesus I think are so important to hearing the voice and what they’re about. And this figure is about getting into life, your practical life, the life you really live and living it as if you were in the Empire of God. I think that’s Jesus. And I think if we were to remind ourselves that our tradition, the Western tradition is built on Plato. Plato was not about getting out of history. Plato was about history becoming more like a just society. And that’s inspiring.

Shirley Paulson

Alright, so then we’re going to think of Jesus in the context of Plato. That opens our view to living more realistically right here and now.

David Galston

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, like I say, ’Choose something like a star’, that’s Plato. Think of your life that’s inspiring about Plato. How do you find ‘Choose something like a star’ in your life?

Shirley Paulson

Yeah.

David Galston

So reach for it. Beautiful. Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

Gosh. Well thank you so much for this conversation. I’ve just always wondered about  these two thinking figures in ancient history—how do they connect? And this has been a very fascinating conversation. I know there’s more, but you’ve whetted our appetite and I really appreciate that so much. Thanks for coming to talk to us today.

David Galston

Alright, well thank you. Thank you for the invitation.