From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

by Louis A. Markos

Christ, not the Bible, is the ultimate source of truth; the Bible is but the most perfect and reliable embodiment of that truth which resides in Christ alone.

The Greco-Roman understanding of virtue was, in its purest form, not antithetical to but prophetic of the biblical Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. As H. Richard Niebuhr has shown in his illuminating study Christ and Culture (1951), the Roman Catholic church has a strong tradition of viewing Christ and Christianity as representing the culmination and fulfillment of both the Old Testament law and the highest wisdom of the ancients-Christ over culture, to use Niebuhr's memorable phrase.

Luther was a classical humanist; The Bondage of the Will boasts no less than two dozen carefully chosen and subtly used references from such pagan writers as Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Cato, Ovid and Homer.

You [Virgil] were the lamp that led me from that night. You led me forth to drink Parnassian waters; then on the road to God you shed your light. When you declared [in the Fourth Eclogue], "A new birth has been given. Justice returns, and the first age of man. And a new progeny descends from Heaven"-you were as one who leads through the dark track holding the light behind-useless to you, precious to those who followed at your back. Through you I flowered to song and to belief.'

Both the phrases "for we are also his offspring" and "in him we live and move and have our being" are quoted by Paul from the works of two pagan poets: Aratus and Epimenides, respectively.

Eleusis they tended the shrine of Demeter, and it is believed that part of their ceremony included the viewing of a ripe ear of corn or grain. At the heart, therefore, of the Eleusinian mysteries was a faith in the rebirth of spring, a firm hope that life could spring out of death and that we, perhaps, could share in that new life. If I am right and the Greeks of John's Gospel were members of this ancient cult-a cult well known throughout the Near East-then Jesus' reply would have carried special significance for them. This mini-parable of the grain of wheat is a unique one in the Gospels; it has no parallel in Christ's other parables or in his predictions of his death and resurrection. To me it is clear that Jesus constructed this brief but provocative parable specifically for these Greeks as an attempt to communicate with them directly, to build a bridge from myth to doctrine. It is possible that Jesus is doing here the same thing Paul does in his speech before the Areopagus: proclaiming himself as the embodiment of what they have until now worshiped in ignorance. By means of their own rational and emotional yearnings, these Greeks, along with the other initiates of Eleusis, had achieved a higher spiritual understanding: namely, that life can come only through death and that salvation consists somehow in sharing this divine surrendering and recapturing of life. Having come this far, the Greeks needed only to be nudged by Jesus into a saving knowledge of the one who is mo...

The pageant of earthly royalty has the semblance and the benediction of the Eternal King. Peace and civilization, commerce and adventure, wars when just, conquest when humane and necessary, have His co-operation, and His blessing upon them. The course of events, the revolution of empires, the rise and fall of states, the periods and eras, the progresses and the retrogressions of the world's history, not indeed the incidental sin, over-abundant as it is, but the great outlines and results of human affairs, are from His disposition.'

Unless we strive to understand the rise and fall of the four great empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome (i.e., the four metals of the giant in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar), we fail to grasp how God works through history.