Ep. 45: Clash of Civilizations
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2021
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Paul stood in the Athenian court on the Hill of Mars (the Areopagus) to plead his case for Christianity before the Epicureans and Stoics, no one knew what would happen. Would he be laughed out of town? Or put in chains? What nobody expected was what eventually came to pass. In this episode of "Young Heretics," Spencer Klavan discusses how the obscure faith of this Jewish scholar took over the world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The question on today's young heretics is, where did all the philosophy go? |
| 0:09.8 | What I mean by that is the philosophical systems that we've been discussing. |
| 0:16.1 | I mean, mainly stoicism and epicurianism, but also skepticism and, you know, the various branches |
| 0:21.7 | of the Platonic Academy. I've been talking about them as what they were, I believe, which is |
| 0:27.7 | systems of life, real ways that people thought about how to live in the world and organize |
| 0:32.6 | themselves themselves in relation to others. This is, you know, last week we talked about Marcus |
| 0:38.1 | O'Reillyis, who's maybe the prime example of this, you know, an emperor of Rome, who is living, |
| 0:43.2 | trying to live by stoic ethics. And with the exception of the few revivalist movements, |
| 0:49.6 | right, such as stoicism in modern day, among a few people, like these are gone. They've vanished |
| 0:56.8 | from the earth. It's kind of like we talk, you know, about fairly, fairly frequently about the fact |
| 1:02.4 | that the Jewish people have survived for thousands and thousands of years, and all of their sort |
| 1:08.7 | of ancient oppressors, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, are cultures that have enempires that have |
| 1:14.1 | basically been wiped from the map. There's this weird survival of Christianity and Judaism from |
| 1:22.2 | antiquity that seems to have kind of eclipsed all of these ostensibly at the time, much more |
| 1:29.7 | successful and thriving philosophical worldviews, the pagan philosophies that we've been talking about |
| 1:36.8 | should, by all accounts, have crushed Christianity out of existence. And yet Christianity is here. |
| 1:43.9 | There are, like, you know, a lot of Christians, millions of Christians in the world, and |
| 1:48.4 | and and and stoicism and Epicurianism, not so much. So I'm going to start by reading this |
| 1:56.4 | prediction from Isaiah, who's a prophet that I spend a lot of time with in the Hebrew Bible. |
| 2:02.4 | This is in the 700s BC already. Chapter 14, my own translation, which you can find at Rejoice |
| 2:07.2 | hyphen evermore.com. Isaiah says, outsiders will be joined onto them, grafted onto Jacob's household. |
| 2:15.7 | Then the people will take them in, bring them to the place that belongs to them, and the house of |
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