Early Christianity as learning process taken from Hellenistic tradition

Review of Early Christianity and Greek Paideia by Werner Jaeger

Though I was taken aback at how slim this text is, it offers a crucially important point of view: the Christians not only adopted a methodology of inquiry from the Greeks and selectively incorporated concepts from Plato, the Stoics, and even sophists into their early theology.

In the early stages, that of enthusiastic evangelism, Jaeger emphasizes that C…