HTCG Introduction

It’s this blog’s turn to review a book: Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek by Thorleif Boman (HTCG). The book was published first in German back in 1954; this is the second edition translated into English around 1960. The copy I’m using is a later release from Norton paperbacks, available on Amazon or other online booksellers. Some of you may struggle to follow this highly philosophical discussion. The underlying premise is that you cannot separate language and thought.

This book dives deep on the first page; it is not a light read. There are critical explanations from the very first words of the introduction. One of the first things you learn is that, among Hebrew intelligentsia familiar with Greece and Hellenism, they regarded themselves as anti-Hellenists by predisposition. A footnote explains that, in their rejection of Hellenism, the Hebrews didn’t feel the need to worry about the form of things, nor to harmonize with the natural world, but to remain focused on the moral reality of everything. Thus, they produced no visual art simply because the Second Commandment to avoid idolatrous images.

European theologians very early became aware of the inherent contradiction between Jesus’ Hebrew mindset and the early church doctrines so deeply rooted in Hellenistic thinking. A major difficulty for us is the very uneven scholarship which addressed this conflict. There was no consensus in European scholarship about this question.

Boman is honest enough to admit his bias in favor of seeing the Greek influence as not a such a big problem as I do. He states that, in regards the question of Greek influence on the gospel message, Plato is the pinnacle of Hellenism — the idealist proposition (Allegory of the Cave). If there’s a problem, he believes rests on Platonism. I agree that taking away Plato will not mean the gospel prevails, but only because I think that misses the point.

Boman goes on to note that Platonism was a much bigger influence in English church history than was the case in Germany. In his mind, Plato is about what exists, while German idealism is about training the mind to consider what ought to be. Thus, while Catholicism (Thomism) was Aristotelian, the Reformation was Platonic idealism. Both tend to nail things down statically from different approaches. Meanwhile, Hebrew is more aimed at tracking the Divine Person of God, a dynamic prospect.

In that sense, Hebrew thinking is more temporal (timely) versus the Hellenistic mind seeking permanence. There’s an odd quality of “eternity” as time rolling on forever in the Greek mind, versus Eternity as unknowable and incomprehensible to humans in Hebrew.

So, the question of how the gospel message was influenced by casting it in Greek intellectual assumptions is a very hard one. Most previous scholarship has been notably one-sided, preferring the net result of Hellenism in how it formed western Christian religion. It is exceedingly difficult to get inside the Hebrew mind from a western position. The task is so large that the author confines himself to Platonism versus Hebrew outlook.

Thus, while the Hebrew mind considers the power and authority of the Creator, the Platonist looks at what kind of Person the Creator is shown to be by Creation. The latter is a very human question. This is quite natural for a man-centered epistemology; all things are measured by man. What can we make of this? Hebrews would instinctively think to ask what this requires of them; not an intellectual exercise, but a moral one.

Boman notes that previous approaches to this whole question have often labeled the Hebrew mind as primitive, while the Greek is more highly developed. Thus, they compared the Hebrews to any number of other primitive cultures instead of trying to give the Hebrew credit for simply being different from Greeks.

I take a moment to note that Boman seems to have embraced the JEPD Documentation Hypothesis, now long discredited. This is where his own bias peeks through at us, because it is a purely western superiority that proposed the JEPD Theory in the first place. I can recall college professors who seemed to believe God built the West. “Doesn’t Hellenism come from God? Surely God could not have really been that primitive Himself?”

If you track the intellectual development of the Hebrews, even from Scripture alone, you will see that the cultural and intellectual drift of Hebrew leadership away from “primitive” Hebrew to more cosmopolitan and developed thinking is highly correlated with God’s very clear growing displeasure with them.

At any rate, Boman describes a very deep lack of academic interest in the whole question of just how it is that Hebrew is truly different from Greek thinking. The true experts in such a study seem to have no interest. The comparison of the biblical narrative with Homer’s epics is missing the point. This is not a simple literature question; the Hebrew purpose in literature is altogether different in the first place. Too many scholars are working too hard at collating Hebrew and Greek thinking, and too from from a Hellenistic bias. Even a great many Hebrew scholars seem to write from a western mind.

Boman goes into a long discussion of these scholars by name, and it’s not likely any us would recognize them. I spotted W.F. Albright, the founding father of biblical archaeology as we know it today, mentioned for his expertise in Ancient Near Eastern languages. Too many of the scholars approached Hebrew with all of their western presuppositions, and so completely missed the fundamental differences. He also notes that on the one hand, a knowledge of the other Semitic cultures is essential, we still need to be aware of how the Hebrews struggled so hard to distinguish themselves from them.

We shall see if Boman is able to step outside his own biases for a task that precious few have even bothered to approach.