The Standard October 11, 2025
It is hard to imagine the “400 Silent Years,” or the intertestamental period between the Old and New Testaments, when God was silent, not speaking through prophets. There were shifts between the rules of Persians, Greeks, and Romans from roughly 400 BCE to the birth of Christ in the first century CE. During this time Jewish sects like the Sadducees and Pharisees came to be.
Athens, Greece was regarded as the center of culture and philosophy during the Classical Period, a Golden age in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Drama, history, and scientific reasoning were flourishing. This period ended with the death of Alexander the Great in 323.
Some 350 years before Jesus Christ came to this earth as a baby, Greek philosophers were laying a foundation for certain thought, which eventually would be important for early Christians to ask questions, use logic and apply reasoning in order to examine Scripture to ascertain God’s plan and purpose.
Socrates (469-399 BCE) considered human nature and contemplated the structure for an ideal society, ethics, and politics. He developed rigorous ways to question, in order to get to a more thorough understanding of truth, still known today as the Socratic method. In his mind, the “examined life” was the crucial path to knowledge and virtue.
Plato (427-347) was a student of Socrates. He distinguished between the material world and the realm of the eternally perfect. Plato focused on the human soul, as far superior to the body.
Eventually, he served as a teacher to Aristotle. Aristotle (384-322 BCE), focusing on reason as the means to cultivating virtues, became one of the most influential philosophers of all time. He argued for a “Prime Mover’ who was the first cause of all motion, building from a logical and systematic approach in all of his studies.
These three men had a profound influence on Christian thought and offered an intellectual framework for articulating deep theological ideas. Early Christian thinkers were educated in Greek tradition, and were forced to think critically about how the truth of Jesus’ words and those of the Old Testament aligned or did not align with modern philosophical thought. “Logos” during the time of Aristotle and Plato was a concept that included aspects like speech, reason, the rational soul, a divine principle or creative force that orders the cosmos.
Understanding this, John wisely begins his Gospel by describing Jesus as the Logos (Greek for “Word”). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind.” “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came down from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:1-4, 9-12, 14
John, Paul, and others understood the culture of their day and engaged thoughtfully with those who did not understand biblical truth. We should do the same.
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