Answer to Matthew Buckley
on the Origins of Plato
To re-introduce this topic as discussed in the previous MATRIX, we commence with this further comment by Matthew Buckley, this time querying the AMAIC’s view that so-called ‘Greek philosophy’ was actually of Semitic (biblical) origins:
…. I have not had much of an introduction before to your other theses on the identities of various historical personages. I must admit to being somewhat sceptical of the Plato [as based on the prophet Daniel] theory. I think you would need more than a few parallelisms to make such a case. I think the historical evidence would be in favor of the fact that Plato and Aristotle were living breathing Greeks, the latter being Alexander’s tutor in Macedonia ....
Matthew.
(His e-mail of 25 March 2010)
This article is the follow-up to our recent MATRIX article,
Church Fathers Were Right About Jewish Origins of Greek Philosophy,
about which we had intended to write more, anyway, but now the project has been given a prod, and a more definite focal point, thanks to Matthew’s comment above. Here we intend, after a brief recall of the Patristic witness in favour of our thesis - now to include the testimony of St. Justin Martyr - to provide, as Matthew has asked, some Platonic “parallelisms” with the prophet Daniel.
THE HEBREW BIBLE AS AN INSPIRATION
FOR MAINSTREAM GREEK PHILOSOPHY
An AMAIC Paper for
Consideration and Discussion
“The belief that the philosophers of Greece, including Plato and Aristotle, plagiarized certain of their teaching from Moses and the Hebrew prophets is an argument used by Christian Apologists of Gentile background who lived in the first four centuries of Christians”.
Introduction
As we have recalled on prior occasions, our P.J. Wiseman-based interpretation of Genesis 1 had absolutely no effect on Catholic readers (apart from a few colleagues) until we had added the testimony of such Catholic ‘heavies’ as Sts. Augustine, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, that seemed to allow for the interpretation of the ancient document as a revelation of a creation already effected. Indeed, Wiseman himself had quoted St. Augustine in favour of this particular view of his. Now, with our proposed reconstruction of the history of philosophy as having Semitic, not Greek origins, we have endeavoured right from the start this time to employ the testimony of the Fathers, Sts. Clement, Ambrose and Augustine, once again, as a support. Thus, as in the case of Genesis 1, what we are proposing is not actually a novelty, but rather, as in the words of P.J. Wiseman, “… to restore a common-place truth to its first uncommon lustre”. The Fathers though, as we previously suggested, were not able to nail their original intuition because of the chronological uncertainties of their time.
In our previous MATRIX article we had supported St. Clement of Alexandria’s view that Plato’s writings had taken their inspiration from the Hebrew writing of Moses, and St. Ambrose’s belief that Plato had learned from the prophet Jeremiah in Egypt; a belief that was initially taken up by St. Augustine, who added that Greek philosophy generally derived from the Jewish Scriptures.
And, although St. Augustine later retracted his acceptance of St. Ambrose’s view, realising that it was chronologically impossible for Jeremiah (c. 600 BC) to have met Plato anywhere, considering the c. 400 BC date customarily assigned to Plato, we had, on the other hand, looked to turn this around by challenging the conventional dates, and by proposing an identification of the original Plato as Baruch, an Israelite, the young priest-scribe contemporaneous with Jeremiah. This reconstruction, if legitimate, has enabled us to take the testimony of the Fathers a positive step further. From the Book of Jeremiah we had learned that Jeremiah and Baruch went together to Egypt. But we then enlarged the person of (i) Baruch (just as we had done with his old colleague, Jeremiah) by adding to him the alter egos also of (ii) young Elihu from the Book of Job (Job being Jeremiah, we say), and also (iii) the great prophet Daniel.
The obscure name ‘Plato’, we had suggested, had arisen from an element in Daniel’s given name in Babylonian captivity, Balatu (i.e. the first element in the name Belte-shazzar). [In this article we are going to add further to our (i-iii), (iv) Ezekiel].
The fairly brief partnership between the aged Jeremiah and the young Baruch we had claimed to have been the original matrix for the similarly famous, but brief, association of Socrates with Plato. The scribal work of Baruch, and his unfailing support of his old mentor (i.e. once he, as Elihu, had swung around from his former criticism) during Jeremiah’s trial, imprisonment and virtual martyrdom, was the foundation, we had argued, for some of the most famous written recordings by Plato (once he had experienced metanoia) of the life of Socrates, his imprisonment, trial and martyrdom. Again, much of Plato’s most famous work, the Republic, with its themes of justice and righteousness, arose, we had suggested, from the intense dialogues of the Book of Job {and the Book of Jeremiah} of identical themes, to which Elihu (Baruch) had paid the closest attention - and who, being a skilled scribe, might easily therefore have recorded all of the dialogues found in the Book of Job.
Since then we have learned that St. Justin Martyr had, even earlier than the above-mentioned Church Fathers, espoused this view of the Greek philosophers borrowing from the biblical Hebrews. And Justin Martyr too had, like Plato, written an Apology, in Justin’s case also apparently (like Plato) in regard to a martyrdom. Thus we read (http://beityahuwah.blogspot.com/2005/08/plato-stole-his-ideas-from-):
Plato Stole his ideas from Moses: True or False ….
The belief that the philosophers of Greece, including Plato and Aristotle, plagiarized certain of their teaching from Moses and the Hebrew prophets is an argument used by Christian Apologists of Gentile background who lived in the first four centuries of Christians.
According to St. Justin Martyr, an important second century AD Christian apologist:
“... Moses is more ancient than all the Greek writers. And whatever both philosophers and poets have said concerning the immortality of the soul, or punishments after death, or contemplation of things heavenly, or doctrines of the like kind, they have received such suggestions from the prophets as have enabled them to understand and interpret these things. And hence there seem to be seeds of truth among all men; but they are charged with not accurately understanding [the truth] when they assert contradictories. …”.
[St. Justin] appears to be making the claim that Plato who has “exerted a greater influence over human thought than any other individual with the possible exception of Aristotle” (Demos, 1927.vi} was dependent for his understanding of freewill and responsibility on Moses. The saying "the blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless .... {Joann. Mdcccxlii,224}" was taken from Moses by Plato and uttered it ...".
[End of quote]
This is all quite the opposite of what our western education has told us. For let us now read of the type of indoctrination according to which we have been ‘educated’, that gives all the credit to the Greeks. Alistair Sinclair, in his book What is Philosophy? An Introduction (Dunedin Academic Press Ltd., 2008), has regurgitated the typically Western-biased view of the origins of philosophy so familiar to us:
P. 15 Philosophy as a western phenomenon
The great philosophers were all western philosophers because philosophy developed as a distinct subject in ancient Greek culture. The word ‘philosophy’ was popularized by Pythagoras but it was Plato who delineated the role of the philosopher and distinguished it from the role of the sophist.
…. Philosophy is essentially a western phenomenon because of the individualistic nature of the great philosophers. Each of them is one of a kind. Eastern thinkers in contrast tended to be more embedded in the prevailing religion and culture in which they had lived. They were more like cult figures than individualists obstinately ploughing their own fields.
Moreover, classical Greek philosophy in particular applied reason to the material world in a way that is not found in the speculative systems of India, the mysticism of Taoism, or the gentlemanly precepts of Confucianism. The ancient Greeks believed that reason was an essential feature of human beings and not just the prerogative of philosophers. It was fashionable among the Greeks to be lovers of truth who were possessed with a passion for knowledge of all kinds. Otherwise, they would have had no lasting interest in philosophers or their offerings. Such singlemindedness in the pursuit of philosophy has been a particular characteristic of western culture. It was not found anywhere else in the world until recent times. ....
P. 22 Pythagoras (c. 570-500 BCE)
The name of Pythagoras outshines that of any other early Greek philosophers, and rightly so since the whole science of mathematics originates in his work and that of his successors. He was reputedly born on Samos and his interest in mathematics may have been stimulated by early visits to Babylonia and Egypt ....
Certainly he brought to the study of mathematics something of an oriental adoration.
P. 33
‘The European philosophical traditions consist of a series of footnotes to Plato’ ... so said [Professor] A.N. Whitehead.
[End of quotes]
So much propaganda in the space of so few pages! We submit, however, that virtually none of this is true. That the whole received history of ancient philosophy needs to be re-written along the lines that the Church Fathers had glimpsed, as having originated from the Hebrews. Upon Thales, one of the so-called ‘seven sages of antiquity’, is bestowed the honorific title, “First Philosopher”. He, supposedly an Ionian Greek, that is, from western Asia, was actually, as we have argued elsewhere, the great biblical Patriarch Joseph, distorted by Greek legends. The name ‘Thales’ is likely a corruption of Joseph’s name in Egypt, Ptah-(hotep), the wise and legendary Old Kingdom scribe who, like Joseph, lived to be 110. He is also the genius, Imhotep, builder of the famous Step Pyramid of Saqqara: what we have considered to be a material icon of his father Jacob’s dream of a staircase unto heaven (Genesis 28:12).
Mark Glouberman has ironically, in “Jacob’s Ladder. Personality and Autonomy in the Hebrew Scriptures”, exalted the supposed rational triumph of the ‘Greek’ Thales, “Western rationality’s trademark mastery over the natural world”, over the “earlier [religious] mode of thought” of the Hebrews. “...Thales forecast the bumper crop by observing climatic regularities, not by interpreting dreams of lean kine and fat, nor by deciphering the writing on the wall ...”. Glouberman calls this a “Hellenic Götterdämmerung” (Mentalities/Mentalités, 13, 1-2, 1998, p. 9).
Contrary to all this, we submit that the earliest philosophers, or ‘lovers of wisdom’, were the Proverb-makers of Biblical (and perhaps Egyptian and Babylonian) lore. Thus Sinclair gets closer to the point when he concedes that Pythagoras may have been intellectually stimulated “by early visits to Babylonia and Egypt” and his bringing “to the study of mathematics something of an oriental adoration”. In fact the mystical Pythagoras makes a strange kind of rational Greek, we think. His name, too, like that of Thales, betrays its having originally been Egyptian, again based on the theophoric, Ptah. (We suggest something like Ptah-udjahorres for Pythagoras). Whereas Thales was allegedly the first philosopher, Pythagoras is said to have been the first user of the word, “philosophy”. But we should now (contrary to our previous estimate) distinguish Thales and Pythagoras as being two separate philosophers, respectively, Joseph and Baruch/Daniel (hence the connections with “Babylonia and Egypt”). This latter prophet of Israel was so great a man in fact that two famous philosophers have had to be created by the Greeks to accommodate him, namely:
(i) Pythagoras, for his fame and activities in Egypt (as Baruch, or Ptah-udjahorres), and
(ii) Plato, basically for his fame and activities in Babylonia (as Daniel, or Balatu).
Having said all this, we are now ready to draw those “parallelisms” for which Matthew Buckley has asked between Plato and key images of the Book of Daniel. Here we intend, prompted by Matthew Buckley, to take some of the most picturesque and famous images from the Book of Daniel and see if we can find an echo of these in the life and writings of Plato. Given the amount of filtering of the original Daniel - as we would anticipate that there was at least a double filtering, firstly from the Semitic (Hebrew or Aramaïc) recording of him through Mesopotamia (Babylon), then, secondly, from Mesopotamia through Greece - then we could no longer expect the highly processed and much re-worked sage to be a perfect reflection of Daniel. But we might expect, nonetheless, to find a pale but yet discernible image of this Daniel in Plato. The four items that we have selected for comparison with Plato are:
· King Nebuchednezzar’s Statue of Four Diverse Metals representing kingdoms (Daniel 2);
· King Belshazzar and the ‘Writing on the Wall’ (Daniel 5);
· Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts (Daniel 7).
· The Messianic Prophecy (Daniel 9).
Once we have briefly considered these, we shall pass on to a few other famous ones associated with Ezekiel, one of Daniel’s proposed alter egos. These latter we dealt with in a fair amount of detail in an article on which our MATRIX one was based, The Platonic Elihu Of The Book Of Job (read at: http://bookofdaniel.blog.com/ or at http://westerncivilisationamaic.blogspot.com/).
Image One: King Nebuchednezzar’s Statue of Four Diverse Metals
Daniel, like Joseph in Egypt, was an interpreter of dreams (another Platonic feature). But, whereas the seemingly benign Pharaoh had actually told Joseph of what his dreams had consisted, King Nebuchednezzar had demanded that his wise men both recall the Dream and then interpret it: a seemingly impossible task, and one well beyond the powers of the Chaldean sages. But Daniel was up to it (Daniel 2:31-33): ‘You were looking, O king, and lo! there was a great statue, its brilliance extraordinary; it was standing before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. …’.
Such was the Dream. Daniel then interpreted it for the king as representing successive kingdoms, with Nebuchednezzar’s present Chaldean kingdom being the head of gold.
Similarly Plato, but in far less dramatic circumstances once again, proposes this very same sequence of metals; but he applies them to classes of men, not kingdoms. Plato does not actually call this a Dream, but “a fairy story like those the poets tell about”. Here is how it goes (The Republic, Bk. 3, 415):
‘You are, all of you in this land, brothers. But when God fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is the greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and the rest. Now since you are all of the same stock, though children will commonly resemble their parents, occasionally a silver child will be born of golden parents, or a golden child of silver parents, and so on. Therefore the first and most important of God’s commandments to the Rulers is that they must exercise the function as Guardians with particular care in watching the mixture of metals in the characters of their children. If one of their own children has bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs: similarly, if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its nature, they will promote it appropriately to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. For they know that there is a prophecy that the State will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze’.
[End of quote]
A somewhat counterfeit western version of a sparkling golden semitic original!
Surely King Nebuchednezzar himself was being entirely ‘Platonic’ in his command for the selection of the ‘golden boys’ of Israelite youth for education towards their holding a position in the king’s court! Similarly, too (cf. use of “promote” and “degrade” in Plato above), Nebuchednezzar “honoured those he wanted to honour, and degraded those he wanted to degrade” (Daniel 5:19).
Note, too, the “prophecy” in Plato above (Nebuchednezzar’s Dream entailed a prophecy of future history) that “the State” - currently the golden head - can “be ruined” by the “silver” and “bronze” entities.
Image Two: King Belshazzar and the ‘Writing on the Wall’
Now we think that the evil Chaldean king, Belshazzar, might find echo in the person of Meno, in Plato’s Meno. He is not a king there, but a man of some power, nonetheless, a friend of the ruling family of Thessaly, and he has connections interestingly with the king of Persia (read Media?). W. Guthrie tells of Meno as follows (Plato. Protagoras and Meno, Penguin, 1968, pp. 101-102):
… The character of Meno, as a wealthy, handsome and imperious young aristocrat, visiting Athens from his native Thessaly, is well brought out in the dialogue itself. He is a friend of Aristippus, the head of the Aleuadae who were the ruling family in Thessaly, and his own family are xenoi (hereditary guest-friends) of the Persian king .... He knows the famous Sophist and rhetorician Gorgias .... From Gorgias he has acquired a taste for the intellectual questions of the day, as seen through the eyes of the Sophists, whose trick question about the impossibility of knowledge comes readily to his lips. Xenophon tells of his career as one of the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus and gives him a bad character, describing him as greedy, power-loving, and incapable of understanding the meaning of friendship. .... There were rumours that Meno entered into treacherous relations with the Great King [of Persia], but he appears to have been finally put to death by him after the failure of the expedition, though possibly later than his fellow-prisoners.
[End of quote]
‘Bad character’, ‘greedy’, ‘power-loving’ ‘unloyal friend’, ‘connected with a Persian (Median) king’, but then ‘slain and replaced by the king of the Persians (Medes)’, all of this fits perfectly the wicked King Belshazzar and his replacement, violently, by Darius the Mede (see Daniel 5:30-31). Belshazzar’s greed and his love of power and flattery are clearly manifest in the biblical description of his great feast; one of the most celebrated feasts in history and in the Old Testament (Daniel 5:1-4).
Obviously Meno could not match the same sort of opulence and grandeur as we read of in Belshazzar’s Feast; but Socrates does say of Meno – and this is immediately before Socrates begins to write in the sand: “I see that you have a large number of retainers here” (Meno, 82).
We can gain some impression of King Belshazzar’s own treacherous nature from Daniel’s pointed address to him (vv. 18-23). Daniel would on this occasion have had the full attention of the whole company since these words of his were spoken just after King Belshazzar and his court had witnessed the terrifying apparition of the Writing on the Wall whilst in the midst of their blasphemous celebration. Here is the description of it - and does it have a resonance anywhere in Plato’s Meno? (vv. 5-9):
[As they were drinking the wine and praising their gods]:
Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote. Then the king’s face turned pale, and his thoughts terrified him. His limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. The king cried aloud to bring in the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the diviners; and the king said to the wise men of Babylon, ‘Whoever can read this writing and tell me its interpretation shall be clothed in purple, have a chain of gold around his neck, and rank third in the kingdom’. Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king the interpretation. Then King Belshazzar became greatly terrified and his face turned pale, and his lords were perplexed. ....
[End of quote]
This fascinating life and death encounter we think inspired the whole drama of the (albeit pale by comparison) Meno. Instead of the miraculous Writing on the Wall of the Chaldean king’s palace, though, we get Socrates’ writing in the sand. Instead of the words that name weights and measures, indicating the overthrow of a great kingdom, we get a detailed lesson in geometry. Instead of the stunned and terrified Chaldean king, we get Meno, who tends to be similarly passive in the face of the Socratic lesson. Instead of the exile, Daniel, we get Meno’s slave boy seemingly providing a confirmation of the matter, under the skilful prompting of Socrates.
Now Meno, supposedly focussing on the subject of virtue, tells of what he knows of Socrates’ enigmatic reputation, and it, too, like Daniel’s, has connection with “magic” (see quote above & 4:9), and Meno himself feels numb and weak, just like Belshazzar, so lacking in virtue (or moral goodness as in Plato’s version) (Meno, 80):
Meno. Socrates, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel that you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat sting-ray .... Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you. Yet I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times, held forth often on the subject in front of large audiences, and very well too, or so I thought. Now I can’t even say what it is. In my opinion you are well advised not to leave Athens and live abroad. If you behave like this as a foreigner in another country, you would most likely be arrested as a wizard.
Socrates. You’re a real rascal, Meno.
[End of quote]
On the occasion of Socrates’ writing in the sand, which we think must have originated from the Writing on the Wall in the Book of Daniel, we have as the audience, Meno (whom we are equating with King Belshazzar), and his “large number of retainers” (Belshazzar’s large court), and the writing about to be effected due to a query from Meno. And, in a sense to interpret it, we get, not Daniel a former exiled slave, but Meno’s own slave boy, a foreigner (like Daniel) who however speaks the native language (like Daniel). The issue has become the immortality of the soul and whether it pre-exists the body, as manifest in someone’s being able to recall knowledge. Socrates will attempt to demonstrate this supposed pre-knowledge using the young slave boy – but perhaps this, too, is built upon Daniel’s God-given ability to arrive at an entirely new knowledge without any human instruction (as in the case of his recalling of Nebuchednezzar’s Dream).
Such apparently is how the life and death biblical account becomes gentlemanly and tamed, and indeed trivialised, in the Greek version! Daniel is not a passive slave, like the boy, supposedly recalling pre-existent knowledge, but an Israelite sage, a sure Oracle to kings under the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God. This all gives the lie to Alistair Sinclair’s view of the “individualistic nature of the great philosophers”, presumably Greeks. “Each of them is one of a kind”, as opposed to the - as he thinks - rather bland and conformist Hebrews.
The Writing on the Wall contains, like Socrates’ writing in the sand, division, and measure, but adds weighing. There is nothing Protagorean or Sophistic here. God, not man, is indeed the measure of kings and kingdoms according to the biblical account (vv. 24-28):
‘So from [God’s] presence the hand was sent and this writing was inscribed. And this is the writing that was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin. This is the interpretation of the matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; and Peres [the singular of Parsin], your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians’.
[End of quote]
Fr. L. Hartman (C.SS.R), commenting on “Daniel” for The Jerome Biblical Commentary (26:22), connects the Mene (or half of it) to King Belshazzar (upon whom we are arguing this Meno was based).
We can take this further in our context and propose that even the very name, Meno, has arisen from the Mene of the biblical Writing on the Wall.
Image Three: Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts
The scribal Daniel tells of the Dream (his own) that he wrote down (Daniel 7:1-4):
In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then, as I watched, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a human being. ….
[End of quote]
Needless to say these beasts are up to no good.
Now Plato seems to have absorbed these same composite beasts, and lion-man image, and located them in his ‘imperfect societies’ (Republic, Bk. 9, 588). Thus:
‘Let us show him what his assertion really implies, by comparing the human personality to one of those composite beasts in the old myths, Chimaera and Scylla and Cerberus and all the rest’.
‘I know the stories’.
‘Imagine a very complicated, many-headed sort of beast, with heads of wild and tame animals all around it, which it can produce and change at will’.
‘Quite a feat of modelling’, he replied; ‘but fortunately it’s easier to imagine than it would be to make’.
‘Imagine next a lion, and next a man. And let the many-headed creature be by far the largest, and the lion the next largest’.
‘That’s rather easier to imagine’. ….
[End of quote]
Image Four: The Messianic Prophecy
We simply need to recall here what Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote (as previously quoted in the September 2009 MATRIX), but we would correct the typical view that the sages to whom he refers were “Greeks”. Fulton Sheen had written: “Even the Greeks were in on the coming of Christ too. The play write and soldier Aeschylus, who lived some 500 years before Christ, wrote in his Prometheus, “Look not for any end, moreover, to this curse until God appears, to accept upon His Head the pangs of thy own sins vicarious.” And Plato and Socrates spoke of the Logos and of the Universal Wise Man “yet to come”.”
That is the end of our four comparisons between Daniel and Plato. We have already argued that Jeremiah and Daniel (both enlarged) were the original Socrates and Plato. But who, then, was the original Aeschylus, who here is credited with having, like Daniel, a half a millennium-long-range awareness of the coming of Christ?
The name ‘Aeschyl-us’, is, we suggest, a Greek attempt to render the Hebrew name, Ezechiel (Ezekiel). And thus here we are advancing the view that Daniel - whom we have argued previously was actually a priest - was also the same person as Ezekiel, a priest contemporary of Daniel’s. But if we now make this connection of Daniel with Ezekiel (with Aeschylus, the “Father of Tragedy”), then we can add (only briefly here) some other very startling comparisons between the Bible and Plato. The obvious one is the already-mentioned long-range Messianic prophecy. But we can also now include a comparison between Ezekiel’s famous vision of the Glory of God and the wheels within wheels (3:12-21) with Plato’s famous description of the Spindle of Necessity in his “Myth of Er” (The Republic, Bk. 10, 615). See our Plato’s Usage of Key Images From Daniel.
Again, commentators have noted many points of likeness between Plato’s account of Atlantis, in his Timaeus, and Ezekiel’s description of the coastal city of Tyre (26-28). E.g. (http://atlantissolved.com/identityevidence.cfm); and they have also compared the mathematics of Plato and Ezekiel, e.g. http://www.ernestmcclain.net/
And we are quite confident that there will emerge many more comparisons between Plato and our composite prophet of Israel (which includes the person of Mordecai, by the way).
on the Origins of Plato
To re-introduce this topic as discussed in the previous MATRIX, we commence with this further comment by Matthew Buckley, this time querying the AMAIC’s view that so-called ‘Greek philosophy’ was actually of Semitic (biblical) origins:
…. I have not had much of an introduction before to your other theses on the identities of various historical personages. I must admit to being somewhat sceptical of the Plato [as based on the prophet Daniel] theory. I think you would need more than a few parallelisms to make such a case. I think the historical evidence would be in favor of the fact that Plato and Aristotle were living breathing Greeks, the latter being Alexander’s tutor in Macedonia ....
Matthew.
(His e-mail of 25 March 2010)
This article is the follow-up to our recent MATRIX article,
Church Fathers Were Right About Jewish Origins of Greek Philosophy,
about which we had intended to write more, anyway, but now the project has been given a prod, and a more definite focal point, thanks to Matthew’s comment above. Here we intend, after a brief recall of the Patristic witness in favour of our thesis - now to include the testimony of St. Justin Martyr - to provide, as Matthew has asked, some Platonic “parallelisms” with the prophet Daniel.
THE HEBREW BIBLE AS AN INSPIRATION
FOR MAINSTREAM GREEK PHILOSOPHY
An AMAIC Paper for
Consideration and Discussion
“The belief that the philosophers of Greece, including Plato and Aristotle, plagiarized certain of their teaching from Moses and the Hebrew prophets is an argument used by Christian Apologists of Gentile background who lived in the first four centuries of Christians”.
Introduction
As we have recalled on prior occasions, our P.J. Wiseman-based interpretation of Genesis 1 had absolutely no effect on Catholic readers (apart from a few colleagues) until we had added the testimony of such Catholic ‘heavies’ as Sts. Augustine, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, that seemed to allow for the interpretation of the ancient document as a revelation of a creation already effected. Indeed, Wiseman himself had quoted St. Augustine in favour of this particular view of his. Now, with our proposed reconstruction of the history of philosophy as having Semitic, not Greek origins, we have endeavoured right from the start this time to employ the testimony of the Fathers, Sts. Clement, Ambrose and Augustine, once again, as a support. Thus, as in the case of Genesis 1, what we are proposing is not actually a novelty, but rather, as in the words of P.J. Wiseman, “… to restore a common-place truth to its first uncommon lustre”. The Fathers though, as we previously suggested, were not able to nail their original intuition because of the chronological uncertainties of their time.
In our previous MATRIX article we had supported St. Clement of Alexandria’s view that Plato’s writings had taken their inspiration from the Hebrew writing of Moses, and St. Ambrose’s belief that Plato had learned from the prophet Jeremiah in Egypt; a belief that was initially taken up by St. Augustine, who added that Greek philosophy generally derived from the Jewish Scriptures.
And, although St. Augustine later retracted his acceptance of St. Ambrose’s view, realising that it was chronologically impossible for Jeremiah (c. 600 BC) to have met Plato anywhere, considering the c. 400 BC date customarily assigned to Plato, we had, on the other hand, looked to turn this around by challenging the conventional dates, and by proposing an identification of the original Plato as Baruch, an Israelite, the young priest-scribe contemporaneous with Jeremiah. This reconstruction, if legitimate, has enabled us to take the testimony of the Fathers a positive step further. From the Book of Jeremiah we had learned that Jeremiah and Baruch went together to Egypt. But we then enlarged the person of (i) Baruch (just as we had done with his old colleague, Jeremiah) by adding to him the alter egos also of (ii) young Elihu from the Book of Job (Job being Jeremiah, we say), and also (iii) the great prophet Daniel.
The obscure name ‘Plato’, we had suggested, had arisen from an element in Daniel’s given name in Babylonian captivity, Balatu (i.e. the first element in the name Belte-shazzar). [In this article we are going to add further to our (i-iii), (iv) Ezekiel].
The fairly brief partnership between the aged Jeremiah and the young Baruch we had claimed to have been the original matrix for the similarly famous, but brief, association of Socrates with Plato. The scribal work of Baruch, and his unfailing support of his old mentor (i.e. once he, as Elihu, had swung around from his former criticism) during Jeremiah’s trial, imprisonment and virtual martyrdom, was the foundation, we had argued, for some of the most famous written recordings by Plato (once he had experienced metanoia) of the life of Socrates, his imprisonment, trial and martyrdom. Again, much of Plato’s most famous work, the Republic, with its themes of justice and righteousness, arose, we had suggested, from the intense dialogues of the Book of Job {and the Book of Jeremiah} of identical themes, to which Elihu (Baruch) had paid the closest attention - and who, being a skilled scribe, might easily therefore have recorded all of the dialogues found in the Book of Job.
Since then we have learned that St. Justin Martyr had, even earlier than the above-mentioned Church Fathers, espoused this view of the Greek philosophers borrowing from the biblical Hebrews. And Justin Martyr too had, like Plato, written an Apology, in Justin’s case also apparently (like Plato) in regard to a martyrdom. Thus we read (http://beityahuwah.blogspot.com/2005/08/plato-stole-his-ideas-from-):
Plato Stole his ideas from Moses: True or False ….
The belief that the philosophers of Greece, including Plato and Aristotle, plagiarized certain of their teaching from Moses and the Hebrew prophets is an argument used by Christian Apologists of Gentile background who lived in the first four centuries of Christians.
According to St. Justin Martyr, an important second century AD Christian apologist:
“... Moses is more ancient than all the Greek writers. And whatever both philosophers and poets have said concerning the immortality of the soul, or punishments after death, or contemplation of things heavenly, or doctrines of the like kind, they have received such suggestions from the prophets as have enabled them to understand and interpret these things. And hence there seem to be seeds of truth among all men; but they are charged with not accurately understanding [the truth] when they assert contradictories. …”.
[St. Justin] appears to be making the claim that Plato who has “exerted a greater influence over human thought than any other individual with the possible exception of Aristotle” (Demos, 1927.vi} was dependent for his understanding of freewill and responsibility on Moses. The saying "the blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless .... {Joann. Mdcccxlii,224}" was taken from Moses by Plato and uttered it ...".
[End of quote]
This is all quite the opposite of what our western education has told us. For let us now read of the type of indoctrination according to which we have been ‘educated’, that gives all the credit to the Greeks. Alistair Sinclair, in his book What is Philosophy? An Introduction (Dunedin Academic Press Ltd., 2008), has regurgitated the typically Western-biased view of the origins of philosophy so familiar to us:
P. 15 Philosophy as a western phenomenon
The great philosophers were all western philosophers because philosophy developed as a distinct subject in ancient Greek culture. The word ‘philosophy’ was popularized by Pythagoras but it was Plato who delineated the role of the philosopher and distinguished it from the role of the sophist.
…. Philosophy is essentially a western phenomenon because of the individualistic nature of the great philosophers. Each of them is one of a kind. Eastern thinkers in contrast tended to be more embedded in the prevailing religion and culture in which they had lived. They were more like cult figures than individualists obstinately ploughing their own fields.
Moreover, classical Greek philosophy in particular applied reason to the material world in a way that is not found in the speculative systems of India, the mysticism of Taoism, or the gentlemanly precepts of Confucianism. The ancient Greeks believed that reason was an essential feature of human beings and not just the prerogative of philosophers. It was fashionable among the Greeks to be lovers of truth who were possessed with a passion for knowledge of all kinds. Otherwise, they would have had no lasting interest in philosophers or their offerings. Such singlemindedness in the pursuit of philosophy has been a particular characteristic of western culture. It was not found anywhere else in the world until recent times. ....
P. 22 Pythagoras (c. 570-500 BCE)
The name of Pythagoras outshines that of any other early Greek philosophers, and rightly so since the whole science of mathematics originates in his work and that of his successors. He was reputedly born on Samos and his interest in mathematics may have been stimulated by early visits to Babylonia and Egypt ....
Certainly he brought to the study of mathematics something of an oriental adoration.
P. 33
‘The European philosophical traditions consist of a series of footnotes to Plato’ ... so said [Professor] A.N. Whitehead.
[End of quotes]
So much propaganda in the space of so few pages! We submit, however, that virtually none of this is true. That the whole received history of ancient philosophy needs to be re-written along the lines that the Church Fathers had glimpsed, as having originated from the Hebrews. Upon Thales, one of the so-called ‘seven sages of antiquity’, is bestowed the honorific title, “First Philosopher”. He, supposedly an Ionian Greek, that is, from western Asia, was actually, as we have argued elsewhere, the great biblical Patriarch Joseph, distorted by Greek legends. The name ‘Thales’ is likely a corruption of Joseph’s name in Egypt, Ptah-(hotep), the wise and legendary Old Kingdom scribe who, like Joseph, lived to be 110. He is also the genius, Imhotep, builder of the famous Step Pyramid of Saqqara: what we have considered to be a material icon of his father Jacob’s dream of a staircase unto heaven (Genesis 28:12).
Mark Glouberman has ironically, in “Jacob’s Ladder. Personality and Autonomy in the Hebrew Scriptures”, exalted the supposed rational triumph of the ‘Greek’ Thales, “Western rationality’s trademark mastery over the natural world”, over the “earlier [religious] mode of thought” of the Hebrews. “...Thales forecast the bumper crop by observing climatic regularities, not by interpreting dreams of lean kine and fat, nor by deciphering the writing on the wall ...”. Glouberman calls this a “Hellenic Götterdämmerung” (Mentalities/Mentalités, 13, 1-2, 1998, p. 9).
Contrary to all this, we submit that the earliest philosophers, or ‘lovers of wisdom’, were the Proverb-makers of Biblical (and perhaps Egyptian and Babylonian) lore. Thus Sinclair gets closer to the point when he concedes that Pythagoras may have been intellectually stimulated “by early visits to Babylonia and Egypt” and his bringing “to the study of mathematics something of an oriental adoration”. In fact the mystical Pythagoras makes a strange kind of rational Greek, we think. His name, too, like that of Thales, betrays its having originally been Egyptian, again based on the theophoric, Ptah. (We suggest something like Ptah-udjahorres for Pythagoras). Whereas Thales was allegedly the first philosopher, Pythagoras is said to have been the first user of the word, “philosophy”. But we should now (contrary to our previous estimate) distinguish Thales and Pythagoras as being two separate philosophers, respectively, Joseph and Baruch/Daniel (hence the connections with “Babylonia and Egypt”). This latter prophet of Israel was so great a man in fact that two famous philosophers have had to be created by the Greeks to accommodate him, namely:
(i) Pythagoras, for his fame and activities in Egypt (as Baruch, or Ptah-udjahorres), and
(ii) Plato, basically for his fame and activities in Babylonia (as Daniel, or Balatu).
Having said all this, we are now ready to draw those “parallelisms” for which Matthew Buckley has asked between Plato and key images of the Book of Daniel. Here we intend, prompted by Matthew Buckley, to take some of the most picturesque and famous images from the Book of Daniel and see if we can find an echo of these in the life and writings of Plato. Given the amount of filtering of the original Daniel - as we would anticipate that there was at least a double filtering, firstly from the Semitic (Hebrew or Aramaïc) recording of him through Mesopotamia (Babylon), then, secondly, from Mesopotamia through Greece - then we could no longer expect the highly processed and much re-worked sage to be a perfect reflection of Daniel. But we might expect, nonetheless, to find a pale but yet discernible image of this Daniel in Plato. The four items that we have selected for comparison with Plato are:
· King Nebuchednezzar’s Statue of Four Diverse Metals representing kingdoms (Daniel 2);
· King Belshazzar and the ‘Writing on the Wall’ (Daniel 5);
· Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts (Daniel 7).
· The Messianic Prophecy (Daniel 9).
Once we have briefly considered these, we shall pass on to a few other famous ones associated with Ezekiel, one of Daniel’s proposed alter egos. These latter we dealt with in a fair amount of detail in an article on which our MATRIX one was based, The Platonic Elihu Of The Book Of Job (read at: http://bookofdaniel.blog.com/ or at http://westerncivilisationamaic.blogspot.com/).
Image One: King Nebuchednezzar’s Statue of Four Diverse Metals
Daniel, like Joseph in Egypt, was an interpreter of dreams (another Platonic feature). But, whereas the seemingly benign Pharaoh had actually told Joseph of what his dreams had consisted, King Nebuchednezzar had demanded that his wise men both recall the Dream and then interpret it: a seemingly impossible task, and one well beyond the powers of the Chaldean sages. But Daniel was up to it (Daniel 2:31-33): ‘You were looking, O king, and lo! there was a great statue, its brilliance extraordinary; it was standing before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. …’.
Such was the Dream. Daniel then interpreted it for the king as representing successive kingdoms, with Nebuchednezzar’s present Chaldean kingdom being the head of gold.
Similarly Plato, but in far less dramatic circumstances once again, proposes this very same sequence of metals; but he applies them to classes of men, not kingdoms. Plato does not actually call this a Dream, but “a fairy story like those the poets tell about”. Here is how it goes (The Republic, Bk. 3, 415):
‘You are, all of you in this land, brothers. But when God fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is the greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and the rest. Now since you are all of the same stock, though children will commonly resemble their parents, occasionally a silver child will be born of golden parents, or a golden child of silver parents, and so on. Therefore the first and most important of God’s commandments to the Rulers is that they must exercise the function as Guardians with particular care in watching the mixture of metals in the characters of their children. If one of their own children has bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs: similarly, if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its nature, they will promote it appropriately to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. For they know that there is a prophecy that the State will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze’.
[End of quote]
A somewhat counterfeit western version of a sparkling golden semitic original!
Surely King Nebuchednezzar himself was being entirely ‘Platonic’ in his command for the selection of the ‘golden boys’ of Israelite youth for education towards their holding a position in the king’s court! Similarly, too (cf. use of “promote” and “degrade” in Plato above), Nebuchednezzar “honoured those he wanted to honour, and degraded those he wanted to degrade” (Daniel 5:19).
Note, too, the “prophecy” in Plato above (Nebuchednezzar’s Dream entailed a prophecy of future history) that “the State” - currently the golden head - can “be ruined” by the “silver” and “bronze” entities.
Image Two: King Belshazzar and the ‘Writing on the Wall’
Now we think that the evil Chaldean king, Belshazzar, might find echo in the person of Meno, in Plato’s Meno. He is not a king there, but a man of some power, nonetheless, a friend of the ruling family of Thessaly, and he has connections interestingly with the king of Persia (read Media?). W. Guthrie tells of Meno as follows (Plato. Protagoras and Meno, Penguin, 1968, pp. 101-102):
… The character of Meno, as a wealthy, handsome and imperious young aristocrat, visiting Athens from his native Thessaly, is well brought out in the dialogue itself. He is a friend of Aristippus, the head of the Aleuadae who were the ruling family in Thessaly, and his own family are xenoi (hereditary guest-friends) of the Persian king .... He knows the famous Sophist and rhetorician Gorgias .... From Gorgias he has acquired a taste for the intellectual questions of the day, as seen through the eyes of the Sophists, whose trick question about the impossibility of knowledge comes readily to his lips. Xenophon tells of his career as one of the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus and gives him a bad character, describing him as greedy, power-loving, and incapable of understanding the meaning of friendship. .... There were rumours that Meno entered into treacherous relations with the Great King [of Persia], but he appears to have been finally put to death by him after the failure of the expedition, though possibly later than his fellow-prisoners.
[End of quote]
‘Bad character’, ‘greedy’, ‘power-loving’ ‘unloyal friend’, ‘connected with a Persian (Median) king’, but then ‘slain and replaced by the king of the Persians (Medes)’, all of this fits perfectly the wicked King Belshazzar and his replacement, violently, by Darius the Mede (see Daniel 5:30-31). Belshazzar’s greed and his love of power and flattery are clearly manifest in the biblical description of his great feast; one of the most celebrated feasts in history and in the Old Testament (Daniel 5:1-4).
Obviously Meno could not match the same sort of opulence and grandeur as we read of in Belshazzar’s Feast; but Socrates does say of Meno – and this is immediately before Socrates begins to write in the sand: “I see that you have a large number of retainers here” (Meno, 82).
We can gain some impression of King Belshazzar’s own treacherous nature from Daniel’s pointed address to him (vv. 18-23). Daniel would on this occasion have had the full attention of the whole company since these words of his were spoken just after King Belshazzar and his court had witnessed the terrifying apparition of the Writing on the Wall whilst in the midst of their blasphemous celebration. Here is the description of it - and does it have a resonance anywhere in Plato’s Meno? (vv. 5-9):
[As they were drinking the wine and praising their gods]:
Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote. Then the king’s face turned pale, and his thoughts terrified him. His limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. The king cried aloud to bring in the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the diviners; and the king said to the wise men of Babylon, ‘Whoever can read this writing and tell me its interpretation shall be clothed in purple, have a chain of gold around his neck, and rank third in the kingdom’. Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king the interpretation. Then King Belshazzar became greatly terrified and his face turned pale, and his lords were perplexed. ....
[End of quote]
This fascinating life and death encounter we think inspired the whole drama of the (albeit pale by comparison) Meno. Instead of the miraculous Writing on the Wall of the Chaldean king’s palace, though, we get Socrates’ writing in the sand. Instead of the words that name weights and measures, indicating the overthrow of a great kingdom, we get a detailed lesson in geometry. Instead of the stunned and terrified Chaldean king, we get Meno, who tends to be similarly passive in the face of the Socratic lesson. Instead of the exile, Daniel, we get Meno’s slave boy seemingly providing a confirmation of the matter, under the skilful prompting of Socrates.
Now Meno, supposedly focussing on the subject of virtue, tells of what he knows of Socrates’ enigmatic reputation, and it, too, like Daniel’s, has connection with “magic” (see quote above & 4:9), and Meno himself feels numb and weak, just like Belshazzar, so lacking in virtue (or moral goodness as in Plato’s version) (Meno, 80):
Meno. Socrates, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel that you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat sting-ray .... Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you. Yet I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times, held forth often on the subject in front of large audiences, and very well too, or so I thought. Now I can’t even say what it is. In my opinion you are well advised not to leave Athens and live abroad. If you behave like this as a foreigner in another country, you would most likely be arrested as a wizard.
Socrates. You’re a real rascal, Meno.
[End of quote]
On the occasion of Socrates’ writing in the sand, which we think must have originated from the Writing on the Wall in the Book of Daniel, we have as the audience, Meno (whom we are equating with King Belshazzar), and his “large number of retainers” (Belshazzar’s large court), and the writing about to be effected due to a query from Meno. And, in a sense to interpret it, we get, not Daniel a former exiled slave, but Meno’s own slave boy, a foreigner (like Daniel) who however speaks the native language (like Daniel). The issue has become the immortality of the soul and whether it pre-exists the body, as manifest in someone’s being able to recall knowledge. Socrates will attempt to demonstrate this supposed pre-knowledge using the young slave boy – but perhaps this, too, is built upon Daniel’s God-given ability to arrive at an entirely new knowledge without any human instruction (as in the case of his recalling of Nebuchednezzar’s Dream).
Such apparently is how the life and death biblical account becomes gentlemanly and tamed, and indeed trivialised, in the Greek version! Daniel is not a passive slave, like the boy, supposedly recalling pre-existent knowledge, but an Israelite sage, a sure Oracle to kings under the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God. This all gives the lie to Alistair Sinclair’s view of the “individualistic nature of the great philosophers”, presumably Greeks. “Each of them is one of a kind”, as opposed to the - as he thinks - rather bland and conformist Hebrews.
The Writing on the Wall contains, like Socrates’ writing in the sand, division, and measure, but adds weighing. There is nothing Protagorean or Sophistic here. God, not man, is indeed the measure of kings and kingdoms according to the biblical account (vv. 24-28):
‘So from [God’s] presence the hand was sent and this writing was inscribed. And this is the writing that was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin. This is the interpretation of the matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; and Peres [the singular of Parsin], your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians’.
[End of quote]
Fr. L. Hartman (C.SS.R), commenting on “Daniel” for The Jerome Biblical Commentary (26:22), connects the Mene (or half of it) to King Belshazzar (upon whom we are arguing this Meno was based).
We can take this further in our context and propose that even the very name, Meno, has arisen from the Mene of the biblical Writing on the Wall.
Image Three: Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts
The scribal Daniel tells of the Dream (his own) that he wrote down (Daniel 7:1-4):
In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then, as I watched, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a human being. ….
[End of quote]
Needless to say these beasts are up to no good.
Now Plato seems to have absorbed these same composite beasts, and lion-man image, and located them in his ‘imperfect societies’ (Republic, Bk. 9, 588). Thus:
‘Let us show him what his assertion really implies, by comparing the human personality to one of those composite beasts in the old myths, Chimaera and Scylla and Cerberus and all the rest’.
‘I know the stories’.
‘Imagine a very complicated, many-headed sort of beast, with heads of wild and tame animals all around it, which it can produce and change at will’.
‘Quite a feat of modelling’, he replied; ‘but fortunately it’s easier to imagine than it would be to make’.
‘Imagine next a lion, and next a man. And let the many-headed creature be by far the largest, and the lion the next largest’.
‘That’s rather easier to imagine’. ….
[End of quote]
Image Four: The Messianic Prophecy
We simply need to recall here what Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote (as previously quoted in the September 2009 MATRIX), but we would correct the typical view that the sages to whom he refers were “Greeks”. Fulton Sheen had written: “Even the Greeks were in on the coming of Christ too. The play write and soldier Aeschylus, who lived some 500 years before Christ, wrote in his Prometheus, “Look not for any end, moreover, to this curse until God appears, to accept upon His Head the pangs of thy own sins vicarious.” And Plato and Socrates spoke of the Logos and of the Universal Wise Man “yet to come”.”
That is the end of our four comparisons between Daniel and Plato. We have already argued that Jeremiah and Daniel (both enlarged) were the original Socrates and Plato. But who, then, was the original Aeschylus, who here is credited with having, like Daniel, a half a millennium-long-range awareness of the coming of Christ?
The name ‘Aeschyl-us’, is, we suggest, a Greek attempt to render the Hebrew name, Ezechiel (Ezekiel). And thus here we are advancing the view that Daniel - whom we have argued previously was actually a priest - was also the same person as Ezekiel, a priest contemporary of Daniel’s. But if we now make this connection of Daniel with Ezekiel (with Aeschylus, the “Father of Tragedy”), then we can add (only briefly here) some other very startling comparisons between the Bible and Plato. The obvious one is the already-mentioned long-range Messianic prophecy. But we can also now include a comparison between Ezekiel’s famous vision of the Glory of God and the wheels within wheels (3:12-21) with Plato’s famous description of the Spindle of Necessity in his “Myth of Er” (The Republic, Bk. 10, 615). See our Plato’s Usage of Key Images From Daniel.
Again, commentators have noted many points of likeness between Plato’s account of Atlantis, in his Timaeus, and Ezekiel’s description of the coastal city of Tyre (26-28). E.g. (http://atlantissolved.com/identityevidence.cfm); and they have also compared the mathematics of Plato and Ezekiel, e.g. http://www.ernestmcclain.net/
And we are quite confident that there will emerge many more comparisons between Plato and our composite prophet of Israel (which includes the person of Mordecai, by the way).
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