Plato, Athanasius, Nag Hammadi, Apocrypha, Arianism AND Islam

Submitted by dhimmi no more, Sep 10, 2018 at 16:52

Hi Michael,

>Yes, I'm almost certain that Athanasius, the great troubler of the church,

May be to those that endorsed Arianism! No? But what did Arianism bring to humanity? If you believe many Muslims, Arianism inspired a certain illiterate Arabian war lord and caravan raider to invent a new Arab religion! Where was Tertullian when you need him?

> read Plato. Unfortunately, he didn't know the New Testament,

Well, let me expand a bit about what I wrote. Whether you like or dislike Athanasius his Festal letter in 367 CE was very fundamental in the evolution of the Canonized NT. In effect he told his Coptic monks and priests in far away Nag Hammadi, Egypt to stop reading "books" that were not included in the Canon and the test in history!

And BTW in Hellenized late antique Egypt educated Egyptians (in Alexandria as well as the cities of the Nomes (districts of Egypt) the likes of Oxyrhynchus) were avid readers of Greek literature poetry, philosophy including Plato. So it does not come as a surprise that monks and priests in Nag Hammadi were not only reading the NT and OT but also the apocrypha AND in this case Plato

What Athanasius was telling his flock: Stop reading the Gnostic texts. He never mentioned anything about not reading other Greek texts, as far as I know But I suspect that as a Hellenized Egyptian he was also reading Greek literature and philosophy

Even the Muslim 'Ulama hated the Greek philosophers. Still early Muslims were reading Aristotle and other Greek philosophers in translations from Greek to Syriac to Arabic because the profound Greek philosophy refuted Muhammad and his Allah and his so called Islamic Tawheed. For good reading check al-Tabari's exegesis of Q112:1 (i can provide you with a link in Arabic if you wish)

BTW I'm not asking you to like or dislike him. I'm just providing you with a context about what really happened at Nag Hammadi and the profound influence of Greek learning even in far away Nag Hammadi

--SNIP diatribes.

>I could diverge here, in many directions. Suffice to say, that Jesus has played a MAJOR role in the lives of Americans,

Oh sure and Jesus also played a major rule in the lives of Jews and Muslims living in the West as well as the East

>whereas Plato's role, if any, is largely unknown to them.

Well, we disagree on this one

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