From: Mary L B Pendergraft (pender@wfu.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 07 1998 - 14:37:15 EDT
At 02:44 AM 7/7/98, Larry Swain wrote:
other things and..
>On another note, I have often wondered about the ESTIN here-one would like
>to read it as either a Platonic "being" statement but would expect hO WN or
>something similar or some Hebrew reference to Ex 3.11-in which again one
>would EGO EIMI or at least AUTOS ESTIN...but neither is the case, so we're
>left with ESTIN -"He is", and probably does refer to belief in that God
>exists.
Yes, I think that's clear, and that's why I suggested in an earlier post
that DEI refers to logical necessity: to paraphrase, if someone is
approaching God, then--logically--it's because he believes God exists and
rewards those who seek him. No one would approach a God he didn't believe
existed.
>
>One of the respondants here did say that a Greek audience would not
>necessarily have believed in God's existence-but that isn't quite true. A
>Greek audience would have had no problem believing in the existence of God,
>what's one more? They would have instead sought to make (and did by the
>way) the Hebrew YHWH in some way equivalent to what they knew-Zeus. The
>discussion about whether God exists (or gods exist) is a modern one (with
>notable exceptions such as the Pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno who posited
>that the gods are made in the image of whatever race worships them).
Umm, Xenophanes? Zeno and the Stoics in general did tend to reject
anthropomorphic images of divinity and held, inter alia, that traditional
myths and so on often just represented truths allegorically: so the
tradition of Philo and Origen is an old one.
Mary
Mary Pendergraft
Associate Professor of Classical Languages
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem NC 27109-7343
336-758-5331 (NOTE: this is a new number) pender@wfu.edu
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