nightshadetwine wrote: ↑Sat Sep 15, 2018 10:53 pm
DCHindley wrote: ↑Sat Sep 08, 2018 6:39 pm
DCHindley wrote:PS: I will follow with a post with a table that shows where this gem & pure gold imagery for the Heavenly Jerusalem probably really came from. It may or not be what you expect.
What I mean here is that this Gem imagery and talk of Gold "as clear as glass," seems in actuality to stem from Plato's Phaedo 109a-111c:
So, these parts of the book of Revelation are actually derived (probably indirectly) from
Plato!
I was just re-reading this and then decided to read more of Plato's "Phaedo" and I came across a section where the judgement of the dead is described and there's a lake of fire and other lakes of purification and the damned are thrown into Tartarus like in Revelation. I know a lot of Greeks claimed that Plato, Pythagorus, and the Orphics got their teachings from the Egyptians so maybe that's where all this originated from.
Plato, Phaedo, 112e-114c:
...
Personally I'm not so keen on the idea that Egyptian ideas influenced Plato as much as you suspect. In Athens they were probably aware of Egypt and may have seen some of the goods brought back by cargo ships and heard about their wild traditions, being so different than Hellenes were accustomed to. So, yes, some of this may have colored Hellenic myth making. Athenians could also have had their own traditions about afterlife that may have included punishment for the bad and rewards for the good. The Elysian plains are an example, although they apply to human or semi-divine Heroes of legend upon whom the gods had imparted immortality.
IMHO, though, Judeans did not seem to have much influence from Egyptian myths, although there was a strong regional rivalry between them, full of hot headed polemics.
There was a hardcover book written and/or edited by Russell Gmirkin & Andrew Mein entitled
Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (T & T Clark, 2006)" which I have seen available online but I don't recall where.
More to point, Russell's recent book,
Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (Hardcover by Routledge, but available in Kindle edition, 2016). When I last looked at this book, Gmirkin was asking for US $40+ for the Kindle edition, which I thought was a bit excessive, so I did not buy it.
However, he brings up many connections between Egyptian and Judean foundation myths as found in Berossus, the Pentateuch and some other Greek writers including Josephus'
Against Apion. He confidently dates the stage of mythic development that seems to be common between the accounts of Exodus and Berossus' report of Egyptian polemic to the 3rd century BCE. Egypt had recently been subjugated by Alexander the Great, and Greek language was introduced by the ruling class of Hellenes, and with it Plato, Herodotus, etc. It became quite the rage among scribes, who held a good deal of sway in those days (not so much later), to learn Greek and make use of its myths. Judeans resident in Egypt were among these.
Here's his own web page on this:
http://russellgmirkin.com/
I am best known for my research on the circumstances behind the creation of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Jewish Bible or Old Testament.
In my 2006 book Berossus and Genesis, I argued that the very first evidence for the Hebrew Bible was the translation of the Books of Moses into Greek around 270 BCE, the famous Septuagint translation made by Jewish scholars for the Great Library of Alexandria. I proposed that these same Jewish scholars also wrote the Books of Moses on this same occasion, using various Greek sources found in the Great Library.
My latest book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, argues that Plato's Laws was one of those sources, pointing out that many biblical laws have their best and often only legal parallel in Plato, corroborating the late date of the Books of Moses. Plato's Laws also described a program for creating a national library of approved ethical texts that appears to have been the direct inspiration for the Hebrew Bible.
He supports himself as a freelance Editor, Proofreader/copywriter, and writing consultant. His research appears to be very thorough and his books have been published by major publishers who do their own peer review.
DCH