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Louis Markos. From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics. IVP, 2007. 264 pp. $24.00 (paper), ISBN 9780830825936.
John Taylor. Classics and the Bible: Hospitality and Recognition. Duckworth, 2007. 204 pp. $31.00 (paper), ISBN 9780715634813.
Having been struck by the title of the former book, I was reading it with a view to reviewing it when I came across the latter, and decided after a preliminary perusal that a review of both together would be more fruitful.
As a teacher of the Classics (mostly in translation) at a Christian College, I found both books useful, well written, and "provocative" in the best sense of the word. They deal with much of the same literary corpus - the Bible on the one hand, and the "Classics" on the other, by which both authors mean Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and some of the better-known Greek tragedies. In addition, Markos includes the poet Hesiod (appropriately, in view of his discussion of Hesiod's work Theogony or "Genealogy of the gods"); Taylor includes Herodotus and Plato as representatives of history and philosophy respectively. But both authors refer frequently to many other texts, both ancient and modern.
The two books are written to rather different authences, and in correspondingly different styles. Markos is writing for an educated Christian authence who is presumably unfamiliar with Homer and the other Classics, or at least wary of getting too involved in these stories. Accordingly, he adopts a persuasive tone, encouraging his perhaps reluctant readers to see in these "pagan" texts not only morally edifying lessons, but also foreshadowing of future divine revelation as found in the Bible. Thus the archaic Greek poet Hesiod creates a type of creation story which, although somewhat unusual (and in some ways even repugnant) to a Christian who is only familiar with the Genesis creation story, nevertheless in a way anticipates it, exemplifying Markos' thesis that enlightened pagans who lacked special revelation still could perceive faint glimmers of the truth, truth that would be realized fully only upon the arrival of the inspired Scriptures. He notes the important roles of Thomas Aquinas and Desiderius Erasmus in synthesizing Christianity and pagan humanism, in contrast to the much more negative views of Martin Luther.
The argument...