Early Christian Ethics

The Hellenistic and Roman periods saw a convergence of three great cultures: Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian. The Greek translation of the Hebrew biblion ("bible" or papyrus) around 332 BCE both gathered the stories of Abraham and his people (in much the same way that Homer gathered the stories of Agamemnon and the battle of Troy) and interpreted those stories through the translation of key terms. In a section from Isaiah, for example, a word referring to "a young maiden" who would give birth to a savior of the nation was translated as parthenos ("girl," "maiden," or "virgin"). Thus began the prophecy that the Savior would be born through a virgin from an "immaculate conception" (properly interpreted as "free from Original Sin"). For many, this prophecy was fulfilled with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in 4 BCE. And with the birth of Jesus and death of the christos (Annointed One, Savior), a new religion with values largely unfamiliar to the traditional pagan world came into being.

The reception of this faith, however, was already set into motion by the Orphic and Platonic separation of the soul from the body and the Stoic conception of a universal Logos. And whether one interprets this whole story from the perspective of the historical Jesus or the Christ of Faith, the evolution of the early Church up to the flourishing of the Medieval University Schools stands as an important moment in the history of ethics.

Augustine of Hippo Thomas Aquinas