Part 4 in a series on Athens or Jerusalem: Establishing the Spiritual Heritage of Jesus’ Followers

As the Gospel went out from “Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the ends of the world” what became known as Christianity also moved away from Jerusalem spiritually and abandoned thousands of years of her Hebraic heritage.

Instead of developing a Jewish understanding of the Messiah Jesus and the Bible, the Church was swallowed up in the Hellenistic worldview of Plato, a crucial figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with that of his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle. The schools of Platonic thought became the foundation of Western religion and much of how we understand Christianity. Major church Fathers, the likes of Saint Augustine and Origen, were nurtured on the Greek philosophical concepts that remain worlds apart from the biblical record penned by the Children of Israel.

To be sure, Plato and the schools of Greek philosophy taught us much about the importance of...