The direct notices of Greek philosophy in the N. T. are very scanty. The words philosophy, philosopher, etc., occur only in two places, in both of which the philosophy spoken of is exhibited as antagonistic to the teaching of the gospel. In one of these (Col. ii. 8) the expression 301 riffs cbao cocincis real Kevijs dircirns apparently relates rather to the mixture of Jewish and Oriental speculations, in which might already be traced the germ of the later Gnosticism, than to the philosophy of Greece or the Jewish theories derived from it. The other place is the well-known passage in Acts xvii. in which certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics' are mentioned as having en countered St. Paul at Athens. The doctrines of these sects require notice only in so far as they are related to the teaching of the apostle, who, we are told, was regarded as a setter forth of strange gods, because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection.' The doctrine of the resurrection of the body, or even of the immortality of the soul, would indeed be fundamentally at variance both with the materialism of the Epicureans and with the pantheism of the Stoics. The former, con sidering the soul to be, like other substances, a body composed of atoms, naturally concluded that it was resolved by death into its constituent ele ments ; and even more rapidly than the body, as consisting of finer and more volatile particles (Lucret. iii. 173, seq., 426, seq. ; Laert. x. 63-67). The doctrine of the dissolution of the soul was even valued by these philosophers on account of its consolatory character, as enabling men to de spise the terrors of the invisible world, and to look forward without fear to a release from the evils of life in the annihilation of their personal existence (Lucret. iii. 842, 850-854 ; cf. iii. 37 ; Laert. x. 124, 125).
The Stoics, on the other hand, from very oppo site premises, arrived at a similar conclusion. With them, the soul of man was regarded as a portion and fragment of the divine principle of the universe,* subject to that necessity by which the universe is governed, having no independent existence or action of its own, and destined, not indeed to perish with the body, but when a certain cycle of duration was accomplished, to be absorbed back again into the source from which it came.± It was a maxim of the Stoical philosophy that whatever has a begin ning must also have an encl.::: They acknowledged but one real existence, which, regarded from dif• ferent points of view, was both matter and God ; on its passive side an original substance, on its active side an original reason ; an unformed ma terial substance, the basis and substructure of al: definite phenomena, and a pervading active power, by which that substance was supposed to develope itself into every variety of individual form.* In this doctrine, the one remains, the many change and pass ;' the Deity, or active power of the universe, produces all things from himself, and again, after a certain period of time, draws them back into him self, and then produces a ew world in another cycle, and so on for event The result of this theory, as regards the immortality of the human soul, may be given in the words of Cicero : Stoici autem usuram nobis largiuntur, tanquam cornicibus ; diu mansuros aiunt animos ; semper, negant ' ( Tusc.
Disp. i. 31). The utmost duration that could be alloted to any individual soul was till the termina tion of the current world-cycle ; and it was a dis puted point among the philosophers of this sect, whether this extent of existence was conceded to the souls of all men, or only to those of the wise (Laert. vii. 57). Thus the same conclusion which the Epicureans deduced from the assumption of the multiplicity of matter was deduced by the Stoics from that of its unity : both alike recognised no real distinction between matter and spirit ; and both alike inferred the impossibility of an immortal existence for any dependent being. This circum stance alone is sufficient to place a barrier between Stoicism and Christianity which cannot be removed by any approximation in moral precepts or doc trines of natural theology ; and even the verbal resemblances which undoubtedly exist in these re spects lose much of their significance when it is remembered that the Stoical morality was founded on fatalism, and their theology on pantheism.
It was natural, therefore, that the notice of the Greek philosophers at Athens should exhibit them in an aspect of antagonism to the central doctrine of apostolic preaching,—the resurrection of Christ, and, through him, the resurrection of all mankind ; and it is probably from the same point of view that St. Paul, writing to the neighbouring city of Co rinth, speaks of the preaching of Christ crucified as being 'to the Greeks foolishness.' A very different relation, however, has been asserted to exist between Christianity and one sect, at least, of Greek philosophy ; and a modern critic has gone so far as to maintain that nearly all the doctrines which are usually regarded as distinctive of Chris tianity—the incarnation, the atonement, the free grace of God, the judgment to come—sprang from the circumstances of the age in which they were first preached, one of the principal of these circum stances being the changes produced by the influence of heathen philosophy in the Jewish ideas of God (Gfroerer, Philo, Preface, p. lxvi., 2d ed.) This assertion may be examined from two different points of view ; first as regards the doctrines of the N. T., and secondly as regards the language in which those doctrines are expressed. The former involves an inquiry of the utmost importance in reference to the character and authority of the Christian revela tion ; the latter may be important or not, accord ing to the conclusion at which we arrive concerning the other.