Why Middle East?

[mediamogul]

Christianity especially is steeped in the philosophical thinking associated with the Greeks. I think you are right in terms of Zoroastrianism being the first monotheistic religion in the narrow sense (the common ancestor) but the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity and Islam are firmly Greek.

I don't think it is quite that cut and dried, M/M. Alexander the Great overran the Persian ( Zoroastrian) Empire by 331 but prior to that the Persians had controlled an empire which incorporated many Greek city states in what is now Turkey as well as various Aegean islands. Ideas flowed along the trade routes, too.

The Greeks defeated the Persians in 479 BC at Plataea ending the invasion and warfare continued for another 30 years between Athens' Delian League and Persia. But other Greek states were not involved and contacts with Persia and the Greek states in the Persian sphere revived. It was another hundred years before Alexander began his attack. People can learn a lot in 100 years.


P.S. Xtians hate it when you suggest that their godboy was not an original thinker.

But, you're right.


Fuck them.

I think that the fundamental link to modern christian theology from Greece is through Plotinus and Neoplatonism. Plotinus lived around 204-270CE and traveled the Middle East.

From Wiki:

"After spending the next eleven years in Alexandria, he then decided to investigate the philosophical teachings of the Persian philosophers and the Indian philosophers around the age of 38.[6] In the pursuit of this endeavor he left Alexandria and joined the army of Gordian III as it marched on Persia. However, the campaign was a failure, and on Gordian's eventual death Plotinus found himself abandoned in a hostile land, and only with difficulty found his way back to safety in Antioch. At the age of forty, during the reign of Philip the Arab, he came to Rome, where he stayed for most of the remainder of his life. There he attracted a number of students."

Plotinus though not directly involved in the mythology and folklore aspect, had a direct and overwhelming effect on the development of particularly the Catholic cosmology, metaphysics, and epistemology. Though I worry that these terms are a bit generous for what actually happened to Plotinus' philosophy after the Catholics got ahold of him. Sounds as though he influenced and was perhaps influenced by Zoroastrian and Persian ideas himself but the Catholic worldview has always struck me as fundamentally Platonic in nature.