Topics Philosophers

Question I have heard Christian apologists say that the concept of the fundamental equality of human kind originates in Genesis 1:27 and that it was wholly alien to ancient Greek thought. Can anyone think of anything in ancient Greek texts that would undermine the apologists' argument?

Accepted:
November 7, 2013

Comments

I can't help you with the Greek texts. But I'd encourage you to indulge in the heresy of questioning 'the fundamental equality of human kind'. What does it mean? That every member of Homo sapiens inherently possesses the same worth, the same dignity, the same value, or the same natural rights simply in virtue of belonging our species? I don't think that claim stands up to scrutiny. Species membership, as such, can't have moral significance. Nor does the claim look more plausible if we assume that God made every member of our species 'in his own image'.

Let me talk about political equality, to narrow things down. I agree there is a sense of “equality in the eyes of God” in the Bible passage, and offhand I can’t think of that idea’s appearing anywhere in pre-Christian Greek thought. (I may well be overlooking something obvious, but nothing comes to mind.) But political equality, the idea of equal treatment under the law, is another matter. When archaic Greece first started to emerge as new and newly-reorganized cities on the Greek mainland, on the islands, and along the coast of Asia Minor, their politics, poetry, and architecture reflected the idea of isonomia “equality under the law.” For a capsule description of this cultural and political construct see J-P Vernant The Origin of Greek Thinking, a short but superb book.

Monarchs had largely disappeared from Greece by this time (800-600 BC). Cities were laid out with a central space, the agora, that symbolized citizens’ contributions to public discourse and policy. The military had changed so that armies were made up of citizen soldiers not just aristocratic warriors. Even in oligarchies and tyrannies, the assumption was that a government ruled by popular consent. All these elements of isonomia contribute to the idea of equality you may be asking about.

Plato certainly acknowledges such equality. Even in the Republic, his description of a class-structured society, his “noble lie” encourages the belief that all citizens are brothers and sisters, all equally born from the earth of the city and therefore equally part of its political organization. I find that as explicit a political concept of equality as you’re going to find in history, and it appears in Greece well before any substantive contact between Athens and Jerusalem.