II. GREEK PHILOSOPHY. The purpose of the following article is to examine the question of the influence supposed by some writers to have been exercised by Greek philosophy on the doctrines of the New Testament. Thus stated, it is obviously but a limited portion of a more extensive subject—that of the general relation between philosophy and Christianity. But besides that this subject, in its full extent, could not be satisfactorily treated in an article like the present, the limits within which we propose to confine our remarks seem naturally suggested by the character of the article itself and of the work to which it belongs. On the religious side of the question, a Cyclopzedia of Biblical Literature, pro fessing to deal, not with the later developments of Christian theology, but only with the foundations as laid in Holy Scripture, will naturally regard the speculations of philosophy only with respect to the influence which they may be supposed, rightly or wrongly, to have exercised on the composition of the Canonical Books, and not with respect to their position in the subsequent history of the Church ; while, on the philosophical side, the fact that the Greeks are the only people before the Christian era who can be considered as having de veloped a system of pure philosophy as distinct from religion, seems to warrant the restriction of our view to the speculations of that country, and to the points of contact which may be supposed to have existed between Greek and Jewish thought before the close of the canon of Scripture. The relation of Scripture to Oriental religious ideas may be more conveniently discussed under other heads. [GNogricfstsr.] The Jews indeed are sometimes spoken of as having had a philosophy of their own in the 0. T. ; but it was a philosophy in its results only, not in its method ; or rather, it was a teaching which iu many respects dispensed with the necessity of any philosophy at all. Many of the questions which philosophy endeavours to discuss are answered in Scripture—the personality of God, the origin of the world,•the superintending providence of God, the efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, the obligation to virtue, the responsibility for vice— but the answer removes them from the domain of philosophy : they are facts to be believed, not theories to be comprehended ; they are not pro posed as problems to be solved by human reason, but assumed as certainties guaranteed by divine authority. Even the book of Job, which approaches
most nearly to a philosophical discussion, and which has been regarded by a modern critic as an attempt on the part of the Jewish mind to construct by dialectic reasoning a theodicy, or justification of the ways of God (see Bunsen, Hippolytus, vol. ii., p. 7), is in truth rather an authoritative declaration by God himself of the insufficiency of such reason ing for such a purpose. The reasonings which would explain God's dealings with man are con demned ; the faith which trusts in him, though he slay, is approved ; but the only answer given to the questions raised is a declaration of the igno rance of man and of the unsearchableness of God's judgments. It is an answer quite in agreement with the general method of Scripture, which, even where it deals with questions common to it with human philosophy, contents itself with telling its what is to be believed as true, without attempting to satisfy the philosophical inquiry, ' How can these things be ?' The rise of philosophy in Greece may be stated in general terms as almost contemporaneous with the termination of the series of the Hebrew pro phets. If we except, on the one side, the specu lations of Thales and Anaximander, which belong to the first half of the 6th century a c., and on the other side the prophecies of Malachi who wrote at the end of the 5th century B.C., the earliest de velopments of Greek thought fall into the latter half of the 6th century, contemporaneously with the date of those prophets who arose at the time of the return from the captivity. Even Malachi, the latest of the 0. T. writers, is contemporary with Socrates. It is manifest, therefore, that an inquiry into the influence, real or supposed, of Greek philosophy on the doctrines or the language of Scripture must be limited to the books of the N. T.; and the medium of that influence, if it was exer cised at all, must be sought in the literature of the period intervening between the close of the first and the formation of the second canon.