The Beginning: A study in the Greek philosophical approach to the concept of Creation from Anaximander to St John

The philosophical question of the ‘beginning’ has been widely neglected for centuries, especially by Christian theologians. Nevertheless, a long history of controversy lies behind the revolutionary assertion of the Fourth Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ It is with this controversy that this study is concerned. Dr Ehrhardt begins by claiming that Goethe was one of the few people who have seen the significance of the Fourth Gospel reference to ‘arche’. This leads to the Pythagoreans and raises the whole problem of the history of ‘arche’. If the Greek view of the world was that it was eternal, how should St John’s audience (which obviously was Greek) react to his opening words ‘In the beginning’? That such a statement as St John’s did not startle his readers means that, unconventional as this statement was, the subject was very much in the air. The problem of the discussion of ‘arche’ is traced by the author through the Hellenistic collections of ancient wisdom. He shows how the concept plays an important part in Pythagoreanism and undergoes a transformation in the work of Parmenides, before going on to discuss the views of Anaxagoras, Democritus and Aristotle. The second part of the book contains an account of how the idea of the ‘beginning’ was understood in Hellenistic philosophy. The emergence of a theory of creatio ex nihilo is carefully mapped out and the difficult problem of the Greek quality of these ideas is illumined, as is also the close relation between philosophical and mythical cosmogonies. The author then refers to the history of magic before coming finally to the Fourth Gospel. This book should be of considerable interest to Biblical scholars and to historians of philosophy but also to non-specialists interested in the history of ideas. Arnold Ehrhardt: a memoir by J. HEYWOOD THOMAS, vii Preface, xiii 1. Prelude, 1 DR FAUSTUS, ST JOHN, AND PALAIPHATUS Part One: The classical philosophers from the Pre-Socratics to Aristotle 2. The origin of the Greek idea of the ‘beginning’, 17 3. Orphics and Pythagoreans, 28 4. The Pre-Socratics of the fifth century B.C., 56 PARMENIDES 5. Anaxagoras and the atomists, 69 6, Plato, 87 7. Aristotle, 107 Part Two: The ‘beginning’ in the philosophy of creation during the Hellenistic period until the Fourth Gospel 8. Summary of the earlier development, 143 9. Hellenistic developments of the doctrine of the ‘beginning’, and the creatio ex nihilo, 154 10. Hellenistic creation myths, 172 11. The ‘beginning’ in late Judaism and early Christianity, 190 Index, 206