20 - Alexandrian School

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, I did flirt with the idea of a, and you know,

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I just realized, and I haven't, and I don't see anyone who can answer this question in the room right now, are we having

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Sunday school next Sunday morning? Or just the service? I honestly don't know.

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So, I still would have time, though it's going to be a really busy week, I might still have some time to work in a church history thing about the history of incarnational celebrations.

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We'll see. I don't know. I mean, I have the service, I'll be preaching the Sunday morning service, but I honestly don't know what the schedule is as far as,

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I haven't been told that there's not going to be a Sunday school service, so I don't know.

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I have a feeling someone's going to find out right now. Generally, when Sean walks out of the room, it's for some reason.

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But we'll see. But I'm just going to press on where we are in church history. This is the 20th lesson.

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I told you last time we did this in the 1990s, we only had 52 lessons, and we covered the whole nine yards.

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We are going much more slowly this time than we did last time. Now, I'm not sure if that's just because I'm getting old, and hence

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I have to move more slowly than I did before, or just what it is, but I haven't received too many.

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We will have Sunday school. Now, well, I can't make promises because I've got a lot of stuff this week,

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I'm sorry, but I'll try. It would be, I think at some point last year I did something sort of like that, but we'll see.

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We'll see if we can whip something together that would be of interest to everybody.

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But we're going to stick with where we are, and we had just started looking at the Alexandrian school, which the city of Alexandria, Egypt, was an extremely important city, not only in trade, but also because of its libraries and its philosophers.

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Alexandria was really the gateway to Egypt. You remember the stories of Cleopatra, and so there was military relevance because of its location.

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There was a tremendous amount of trade and travel, and hence it made it a rival in some ways to Rome, but what it also meant is it was a cosmopolitan city, a city of the world.

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And hence, because there was a strong Jewish presence in Alexandria, the

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Alexandrian Judaism was a Judaism that had a broader perspective than Judean Judaism did.

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You had far less contact with the rest of the world going through Jerusalem than you did

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Alexandria. And so you had much more of a philosophical bent to the

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Judaism in Alexandria, and especially the most famous Jewish philosopher or teacher of Alexandria would be

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Philo, contemporary with the Apostle Paul, basically. And so, eventually,

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Alexandria's libraries would be the largest in the world. Sadly, they were damaged and destroyed a number of different times through battles and war and things like that, but one of the major times was actually the instigation of Christians later on in history because of the pagan material in those libraries and so on and so forth.

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But also, another thing to keep in mind about Alexandria is a lot of the papyri that we have not only of the

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New Testament comes from Egypt and areas around Alexandria, but the secular papyri that have shed so much light not only on the language.

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There was a time not very long ago when people thought that the Greek of the New Testament was a

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Holy Spirit Greek. It was a special Greek designed by the Holy Spirit just to write the

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New Testament because we had so little evidence of it existing in antiquity.

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Well, now we have lots of evidence of it existing in antiquity, and now we know it was koine

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Greek, koine meaning common. It was the common Greek of the day, which makes perfect sense.

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If you want the gospel to go out to all the world, you're not going to put it in some language that no one's ever heard of before. It's going to be in a language that people can be able to understand.

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And so, a lot of that secular stuff, which often is just bills of sale, correspondence from soldiers going back home and stuff like that, you would think that wouldn't be overly relevant, but it is.

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It's extremely relevant. It's relevant not only for providing dates and background information, but it's also relevant in identifying handwriting styles of different times and periods of time and stuff like that.

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So, a lot of that material from Alexandria has been extremely important in providing background light and information that has ended up improving, for example, the lexicons that we have that define the meanings of words as they were being used at that time in history.

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So, Alexandria is important, and so when a school of Christianity becomes established in Alexandria, obviously that's going to have great impact around the world, because just as a church in Rome has influence around the world because of all the correspondence and people traveling through and so on and so forth, same thing in Alexandria.

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And they're going to take on the character of the intellectual life of that particular city, which in the case of Alexandria means that, pretty much as we would expect, when we look at the

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Alexandrian school, it tends to be very heavy on philosophy, speculative theology.

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In some instances, textual critical studies, as we see in origin, a study of manuscripts and differences in manuscripts and things like that.

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In many ways, there are negative things to be said concerning the

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Alexandrian school, but in other ways, positive things. It's got to be taken, both the good and the bad.

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So, let's consider it. What's our time period? Well, I was about to say, the first superintendent or leader of this school is a fellow by the name of Pantanus.

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Huh. Let's see, I don't remember which one is the one that actually works. Pantanus, and you're looking at the end, well, he runs it until 190, so there you're getting your idea of the time frame there.

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Pantanus is the first superintendent that had no building, no faculty. He was a converted

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Stoic philosopher, and he eventually left around 190 to work as a missionary in India.

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So, he left Egypt and went off to work as a missionary in India, and was succeeded by a big name in history,

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Clement of Alexandria. So, he takes over in 190, and I won't spend too much time on Clement.

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I'll be honest, the two big names are Clement and Origen, and we make note of them.

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We recognize some of the important contributions, but my gut feeling, in essence, is that in general, you have more negative than positive coming from these particular sources.

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Clement was born around 150 of Greek stock. He was probably educated in Athens, and he led the school for 12 years until 202

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A .D. At that time, it seems that the persecution under Septimus Severus forced him to flee.

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We find him in 211 in Antioch, and he died somewhere around 220.

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So, there you have the time frames for Clement of Alexandria. Clement viewed, his primary work is called the

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Stromata. I've read sections of it, and as people like to say on Facebook these days, when someone links you to something and says, you've got to watch this, and it's two minutes and 20 seconds long, and you get done, and your response to them on Facebook is, that's two minutes and 20 seconds of my life,

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I'm never getting back, is how you basically say, why did you force me to watch that?

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Because that was utterly irrelevant. Well, the time

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I spent in the Stromata probably is not irrelevant if you teach church history, I suppose, but as far as edification was concerned, not so much.

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He viewed Christianity as the highest of philosophies, the highest of philosophies.

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He believed that all truth was God's truth, and hence one should embrace truth wherever one found it.

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Well, I suppose if something is true, it's true because God made it true, and human philosophy, as far as it is true, finds its origin in God.

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I suppose on that level, you can go there. But there are hierarchies of truths, there's relationships of truths, there's presuppositions upon which everything is built, and foundations, and things like that, and the problem is, with Clement's perspective, his theology is a strange mixture of Christianity, Stoicism, and Platonism, and where the one ends and the other begins is somewhat difficult to understand.

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Now, it's fully understandable, if Pantanus was a converted

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Stoic philosopher, and Clement's educated in Athens, it's fully understandable why there are questions that need to be answered as the gospel encounters the culture of the world.

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That's fully understandable. The question has, and what we're going to see, you know, we, did we, we haven't looked at Tertullian, yeah, we did look at Tertullian.

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Remember Tertullian's famous statement, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? And everybody, at one point or another, has to make a decision as to where the proper dividing line is going to be in regards to utilization of philosophical categories, language, you know, the great danger has always been to avoid the scandal of 1

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Corinthians 1, which says that the gospel is foolishness to the world, that to those who are seeking wisdom, very clearly he's referring to philosophers, lovers of wisdom, to those who are seeking wisdom, the message of a crucified

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Messiah is always going to be moria, foolishness. And there's always a tendency on the part of the church to be wanting to be accepted in Athens, to have the approbation of the academy.

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But on the other hand, so we see people who go way too far and who use as the matrix of everything they read in scripture, a foreign philosophy that was not a part of the apostle's thinking, and the result is a, as we'll see with origin, a mess.

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But then the other tendency, on the other hand, is always, you know, balance, there's two sides, you know, you can fall off of a balance beam, well

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I suppose you can fall forward and whack your head on it, but I have seen that happen, but generally you're going one way or the other, okay?

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And on the other side, you have the tendency to an isolationist perspective, where we build our little enclaves and we create our own little vocabulary, and it's like, well, they are them, and them is out there, and we've got what we like over here, and so we're just going to stay over here, and that just must mean that they're on their way, they're on the broad path to hell, and we're on the narrow road, and we're happy with this, and so we're not going to engage the world.

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And so you have these two competing tendencies, and most people end up somewhere on that spectrum solely by tradition.

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It's just, this is the way we've done it in my church, and the people

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I listen to have sort of come down at this point, and I'm comfortable with that.

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It's not because we've actually thought it through, it's just sort of we inherit it, because most of us are not going to be spending almost any of our time studying

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Platonism, or Stoicism, or any of these types of things, and so in any way, critically engaging with any of that stuff is really beyond what most of us are equipped to do in the first place.

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So it's easy to look at Clement and go, oh Clement, you didn't go to Westminster Theological Seminary, did you?

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No. But if you were raised in Athens in the middle of the second century, and embraced

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Christianity, and felt that Christianity needed to address your culture, then it's understandable, and yet had deleterious results, as we will see.

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We also find the influence of Philo, again, the Jewish writer, philosopher, contemporaneous with Christ and Paul, can be seen very much in Clement's Stromata as well.

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We move from Clement to the big name of the Alexandrian school, and that is

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Origen. And Origen was born in 185.

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Some of you have seen the odd waste of time that took place.

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He died in 253. The odd waste of time that took place in a debate between myself and Robert Syngenis years and years ago, during the cross -examination, he said, well, so James, what's the dates for Origen?

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And I was like, I forget exactly how it went, but because the majority of his work was in the third century,

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I said, well, early third century. No, he was born in 185. Yeah, he wasn't writing anything back then.

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What's the point here? So, born in the late second century, dies middle of the third century.

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Now, his father was named

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Leonides, and the story is told that under the same persecution that caused

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Clement to flee, that Leonides was martyred.

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And Origen, as a young man, a teenager, wanted to die with his father.

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And so he was going to go with his father and become a martyr with his father. And his mother saved his life because she recognized that he was a very demure, that's not the word

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I'm looking for, and humble isn't the word, chaste, yeah. Shy, yeah.

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But if you're always very careful about what you're wearing. Modest.

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Modest, okay. Realizing that this was

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Origen's nature, she hid his clothing. She hid all of his clothing so he could not leave the house, because he's not going to go die a martyr naked.

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And that's why he didn't go with Leonides to his death, and that's how she saved his life.

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So, there you go. So I believe he was 17 at that point in time.

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And so the very next year, though only 18 years of age, so at 18 years of age, he was chosen to take

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Clement's place at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. So at 18 years of age, his brilliance was already recognized, so much so that with the opening at Clement's fleeing from Alexandria, Origen was chosen to take his place.

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His fame spread widely. He was sought after by many of his day.

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His works to this day fill 600 volumes. Basically, for most of his life, he had a scribe with him day and night who would write down everything.

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Now I suppose if we all had a scribe with us day and night, we could fill 600 volumes too, but I'm not sure it would be really worth 600 volumes.

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Or the paper, or the scribe's life, or the pen, or the ink, or whatever else.

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And I'll be perfectly honest with you, not everything in Origen's works is worth the pen and the paper and the ink as well, but it is astounding to consider the breadth of the topics that the man did address.

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You may disagree with his conclusions, but it's funny.

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There is an unfortunate tendency amongst us conservatives to...

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I see this happen, for example, most of you know that I fairly regularly criticize the theology and apologetic methodology of probably the most famous Christian apologist today,

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William Lane Craig. And I do so because Dr. Craig is not only an evidentialist, and so on an apologetic level

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I have real issues with the foundational approaches he takes, but he's also a

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Molinist, which is a philosophical theory that was created by a

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Jesuit after the Reformation to get around the preaching of the sovereignty of God, is what it was. The Jesuits have already abandoned it, but it's still alive only because of people like William Lane Craig.

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Well, I believe William Lane Craig is a Christian, and I attempt to be respectful even though we have serious, serious disagreements.

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You've never ever heard me say that William Lane Craig is stupid, or an idiot, or dumb.

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You've never heard me say any of that, because I'm not going to say that. He's a brilliant guy. Sometimes we have a problem recognizing that people can be absolutely brilliant, far more brilliant than we are, and still wrong.

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And I think that's part of the way the world thinks, because the world thinks the number of letters you have after your name determines what your actual intelligence and truth quotient is, and that's not the case.

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But we've bought into it. And so it really bugs me when I see people,

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I'll be in a chat channel, or somebody will make a comment on Facebook or something like that, and like,

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I just can't believe how dumb that guy is. He's not dumb. Just because you disagree with him doesn't mean he's dumb.

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I mean, brilliant people say stupid things, and for different reasons.

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We all have blind spots, and sometimes the more brilliant you are, the more light you shine upon the places where the light ain't hitting.

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You know, when can you see the deepest shadow but only in the brightest light, right?

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So anyway, that does seem to be a problem that we have, is we can look at someone like Origen, and we have to go, oh, real issues of theology, pre -existence, universalism, all sorts of really weird stuff.

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And so that must mean he was dumb. No, he wasn't. And I think sometimes conservatives have almost a fear, well, if I admit that people who disagree with me can be smart, then maybe

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I'm not right. There's a real problem with your understanding of truth and things like that, if that's the case.

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So anyways, I think I've mentioned to you that of those 600 volumes, probably only 20 or 30 have been translated into the

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English language. So obviously his major works have been, but there's just all sorts of stuff that, well, look, there isn't a whole lot of money in Origen books, you know?

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I mean, do you see them on anybody's top 20 Christmas list, you know, right now? It's just really not there. So it takes money to print books and to do translations and stuff like that, and so it comes out really slowly because generally some poor graduate student who's working on his

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Ph .D. finds some as -yet -untranslated work by Origen, and you translate it and you write your dissertation on something that way, and you and your doctoral readers are the only people who will ever read that.

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It gets stuck in an archive someplace, and there it turns to cyber dust, but that's why it comes out as slowly as it does.

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He was an ascetic. The ascetic movement, let me see here, yeah, development of monasticism.

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This is coming up, so we will be talking about the development of monasticism and the ascetic movement a little bit later on.

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There are some fascinating stories such as Simon Stilotes.

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Simon Stilotes, Simon the Stylite. Do you know there were people who used to build pillars and live on them?

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And that was considered an act of spirituality. You'd have disciples who would bring you food, and they'd send up food and bring down waste, and rain, snow, desert heat, you just up there on that pillar.

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Yeah, anyway, so we'll talk about Simon Stilotes later on, but yeah, the pillar saints, they were, yeah.

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So he was an ascetic, wore a slave collar all of his life. He owned but one coat, no shoes.

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Never drank wine. Ate sparingly. Slept on the floor.

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Spent much of the night in prayer. So all of what would become the standards of ascetic spirituality,

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Origen is an early example of this. What's probably most famous about Origen as to him personally, is that as a youth, he emasculated himself.

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Yeah, he took a knife and he emasculated himself. Now he repented of that later in life. He later in life determined that that was a sinful act, that it was wrong.

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But as a youth, he felt that that was the best way to deal with desires that he was convinced were sinful desires.

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And so he emasculated himself. It's one of the reasons it's not saint

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Origen. You've never heard anybody say saint Origen. The Roman Catholic Church does not consider

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Origen a saint for many reasons. Teachings and behaviors both would prohibit

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Origen from being considered along these lines. The canons of the church prohibited anyone who had been emasculated from entering into sacred office.

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Despite this, he was ordained a presbyter by bishops outside of Alexandria. This and his growing fame all across the empire caused the bishop of Alexandria, Demetrius, to convene a council against Origen and to have him condemned and excommunicated.

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So Origen went to Caesarea, founded another school which soon rivaled the school in Alexandria. Toward the end of his life, he was invited to return to Alexandria after Demetrius' death.

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But he was caught up in the Decian persecution, another one of the empire -wide persecutions.

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Well, this is really the beginning of the truly empire -wide persecution in the 250s.

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And though he was released, the torture he underwent while in prison eventually resulted in his death.

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Now, he is vitally important in the discussion of a number of aspects of early church history.

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Obviously, in places like Westminster and schools like that, you probably have elective courses solely on Origen.

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And you'd have plenty of material to be able to do that. It wouldn't be difficult to do at all. He does stand as a giant in many ways.

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I've already mentioned this a number of times, but now we're getting to the individuals themselves. But there are two vitally important, well -known early church fathers who knew both biblical languages, and only two.

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Now, there may have been minor individuals someplace else who had various levels, but actually had proficiency so as to be able to examine texts and engage the text in a meaningful fashion.

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There are only two. Origen and Jerome. Origen and Jerome. You need to put that right together with Council of Nicaea in 325.

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So, we're talking final examination here. And remember, the final examination enforcer, even though he's not here this morning, will be

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George Soto. Oh, I'm sorry. There you are. You're not in your normal spot.

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So, the feng shui of the room is just so messed up here.

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What George will do is he's going to be my grader. And you turn your paper in.

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You stand there. And he's going to grade it. And then he says, hand, please. And you put your hand out.

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And if it's too low, well, let's just think about what George could do to an unprotected hand.

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I can't guarantee that all the digits will still be where they're supposed to be, things like that. So, this is a pretty serious class.

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Very, very serious. So, the minimum levels of passing. One of the things you need,

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Council of Nicaea, 325. And two early church fathers who knew both the biblical languages.

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Origen and Jerome. So, just make sure to... You getting these down?

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You're not taking any notes, so you're pretty confident. It's recording. It's recording.

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Well, we hope. The guy next to you in the funny sweater is in charge of all that.

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So, you never know. Yes, sir. You know, you're starting to look more and more like B .B.

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Warfield. Did you know that? You're starting to remind me more of Benjamin Warfield. I've been to his grave, by the way.

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I'm not wishing anything on you. I'm just simply saying. When you talk about schools and Alexandria and Origen founding a school in Caesarea, is this like the school in Athens where it's very informal?

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Philosophical schools, yes. So, it's not a formalized... Buildings and personal libraries and stuff, no.

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Like, guys meeting. Well, people would travel from all over the world to study there, but they would basically be begging for food and meeting outdoors.

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Yeah, yeah. Almost all of those will eventually become institutionalized, but that's almost always after the time of their greatest influence and after the greatest teachers leave them.

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But at first, it's always this really vital, there's the guy, let's sit on the hillside and learn at his feet type thing that only eventually develops into a building and a faculty and that kind of thing.

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Yeah, definitely. Brother Cowland, did you? Just waving. I got you. Yes. George has a question.

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We need to make sure George is clear on these things, because if he's doing the grading, he needs to be very, very clear on these things.

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Yes. I have a strange connection. Did Luther read a lot of Origins because of the state of nature?

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He slept on the floor and whipped himself and that type of thing? No. No, actually

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Luther was a part of the Augustinian order. But there was, when we get into the development of monasticism, normally it would be next week, but maybe the week after that, we get into the development of monasticism, all of the medieval

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Catholic orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, the Augustinians, the rule of St.

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Benedict and things like that, the nightly prayers, the fastings, the denial of physical comforts, sleeping on the floors, penance, things like that.

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That was pretty much a universal aspect across all of the orders at that time, and it wouldn't require you to recognize that Origin had anything to do with that.

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It just simply had become the universal experience of all the monastic orders by the time of Luther's day.

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Yes. Anything else? Okay. Okay. So, I mentioned he's one of the only two.

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He wrote, there it is, something very important called the

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Hexapla. The Hexapla. And the

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Hexapla, as you can sort of tell by looking at it, is a multi -columned work.

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Yes, a six -column work, so basically three on each page, comparing different textual streams of information.

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So, in other words, Origin becomes very important for us When you look at a modern

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Greek New Testament, such as especially the United Bible Society's 5th edition, which is, there are two primary printed texts as of the recording of this particular lecture, the

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United Bible Society's 5th edition and the Nessie Olin 28th edition, the UBS is normally the one that first -year

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Greek students get mainly because the font's bigger, easier to read, and it doesn't look as intimidating as the

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Nessie Olin text does. The UBS is actually designed for Bible translators who are translating other languages, so it has a minimum number of textual variants in it.

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It limits it to the places where the variant would impact how you're translating into another language.

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But what it does is when it gives you the data as to who had what reading, it gives you a lot more information than Nessie Olin does.

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One of the things it does is it goes through the early church fathers, and so over and over again you'll see

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OR, that's Origin, and then you'll have something like OR3, and then in the superscript, so it would look like this,

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OR37, or something like that. And then the variant down here where it's the other side will be

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OR47. So what are they telling you? Well, in three out of the seven times that Origin references this text, he has it this way, and four times he has it that way.

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So they've even gone through what's available and have broken it down, and so there are many places where Origin, in writing about textual issues, will say,

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I have seen manuscripts that say this or say that.

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Well, man, that's a goldmine around 220, 230

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AD. That's a goldmine of information to go, you know, where had he seen this?

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Where had he seen that? Assuming that we can trust everything that Origin says, and when it comes to the textual issues, it's not like he had some kind of an axe to grind.

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I've never seen anyone say, you know, Origin was fudging the numbers because of theology or something like that.

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As far as his textual work is concerned, he seems to have just had one idea, and that is that we need to know what was originally written, and so we're dealing with the text on that level.

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So he is pretty important. His asceticism, the fact that he was an ascetic, obviously had a huge influence on the students, and so he'd have students that would study at the

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School of Alexandria, and then they'd go out, and what are they doing? They are spreading the influence of asceticism and the idea that this is the spiritual standard, and that is a problem because it's not the spiritual standard from the

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New Testament perspective. That's important. But the greatest area of Origin's impact seems to be in the area of exegesis, or in this case, eisegesis.

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I suppose I should make sure that everyone, you know, we use these terms all the time, and I'm assuming that everybody automatically knows, but it's always good just to make sure, and especially how to spell them because some people go, and that's wrong.

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It's not eisegesis as in isolating something. It's eisegesis, reading into something.

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Exegesis is what we try to do consistently and regularly in our teaching through books of the

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Bible and things like that. Exegesis is reading out of the text its meaning, so it is taking into consideration the author, his original audience, the context, the language, the backgrounds, all these things, who the original audience was, what he intended to communicate, what his language was, just all sorts of things that go into doing proper exegesis.

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But the point is that you want to understand what the original author intended to communicate.

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Over against eisegesis, where you're taking a meaning or a concept and you're reading it into, eis means into, a reading into the text that would have been unfamiliar or unknown to the original author, the original audience.

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It does not reflect the language, context, culture, whatever else it might be. Sadly, across our land today from pulpits, you'll be getting a whole lot more of this than you'll be getting of that.

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Part of the reason is, if you don't believe that the original text is truly authoritative, then you're not going to be spending much effort to try to represent the intentions of that original text.

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If the idea is, I need to entertain these people, I need to excite these people,

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I need to get these people to do what I want them to do, this is your way to go. If you come up with a sermon topic and then go hunting for a text, that's the perfect recipe for eisegesis.

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I can give you example after example after example after example of eisegesis.

42:07

This is what we want to avoid and this is what we want to do. Origin and his method of interpretation ended up having tremendously negative impacts upon doing this and opening the door for this.

42:25

The reason for this is what's called the allegorical method of interpretation, which

42:34

I figured we would have gotten through by now, but we didn't and you cannot do it in 35 seconds.

42:40

So it'll be fairly easy for me to remember that we are at the allegorical method in origin as our break point after lesson number 20 in the church history series.

42:54

So with that, let's close our time. Once again, Father, we do thank you for this day, we thank you for this opportunity, and we do pray and ask that you would help us once again to learn from the light of history, to be thankful for those who went before us and yet also to learn from their errors as well as the things you did in them by your spirit that we can gain confidence from and encouragement from.