The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse [antikvár]

PREFACE The Egyptians had various beliefs about the way the sky is held up. One idea was that it is supported on posts, another that it is held up by a god, a third that it rests on walls, a fourth that it is a cow or a goddess But a story-teller recounting any one such myth need pay no attention to other beliefs about the sky, and he would hardly have been troubled by any inconsistency between them. Nor, one may assume, did he feel that his own account was in compétition with any other in the sense that it might be more or less correct or have better or wórse grounds for its support than some other beUef. When we turn to the early Greek philosophers, there is a funda-mental différence. Many of them tackle the same problems and investigate the same natural phenomena [as Egyptian and other sciences], but it is tacidy assumed that the various theories and explanations they propose are direcdy competing with one another. The urge is towards finding the best explanation, the most adequate theory, and they are then forced to consider the grounds for their ideas, the evidence and arguments in their favor, as well as the weak points in their opponents' theories. (G. E. R. Lloyd)1 In this book we set forth the ways in which, from the very beginning of their work, the Judaic and Christian heirs of the Scripture of ancient Israël made their own Greek philosophical modes of con-fronting conflict and conducting argument. Our thesis is that at their deepest foundations, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism take their place wholly within Greek philosophical modes of articulating con-tradictory propositions and proposing explicit arguments and evidence to show that one is right, the other wrong. In général people understand that these principles of thought fbrm the foundations of