The claim that Christianity copied from paganism appears everywhere. Christianity supposedly borrowed its theology from Plato, its stories from pagan mythology, its rituals from mystery religions, and its holidays from whatever pagan festival happened to fall nearby. Sometimes there are real historical connections hiding underneath these claims, because Christians did not live in cultural isolation. But similarity, influence, dependence, and common intellectual vocabulary are four different things, and they are often collapsed into one.

What is interesting is that Christians were arguing over the direction of this relationship long before the modern internet discovered comparative mythology. In the early fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea assembled an enormous case in the Preparation for the Gospel that Greek religion and philosophy were not the sources from which Christianity arose. He argued almost exactly the reverse: the Greeks were late, they borrowed constantly from older peoples, and some of their finest philosophical ideas resembled Hebrew teaching because Greek thinkers had encountered older wisdom. His case runs especially through Preparation for the Gospel 9.6–9; 10.1–14; 11.8–10; and 13.12.

The Question Eusebius Was Actually Asking

Eusebius was not merely asking whether Christianity and Greek philosophy had ideas in common. Everyone could see that they did. Christians spoke Greek, read Greek books, employed Greek philosophical vocabulary, and lived in cities saturated with Greek intellectual culture. The harder question was genealogical: when Christian and Greek ideas resemble each other, which tradition is actually earlier, and what can the resemblance prove?

That question belongs to Eusebius’s much larger argument in the Praeparatio. As Aaron Johnson has shown, Eusebius is constructing a history of peoples as much as he is comparing abstract systems of theology. Christianity is presented as the restoration and continuation of the ancient Hebrew way of life, while Greek culture is portrayed as younger and substantially dependent upon older eastern peoples. Johnson describes Eusebius’s Plato as effectively a transmitter of Hebrew wisdom, while parallels between Plato and Scripture become part of his argument for Greek indebtedness.

That larger project is important for reading the following chapters. I have already discussed Eusebius’s intellectual setting and the architecture of the Praeparatio in The Historian Between Worlds (Part 1). Here the question is narrower. What did Eusebius actually think happened between Moses and the philosophers of Greece?

Before Eusebius Accused the Greeks of Borrowing, He Called Greek Witnesses

Eusebius begins laying the groundwork in Book 9 by doing something rather clever. Instead of merely insisting that the Hebrews possessed ancient wisdom, he gathers Greek and pagan writers who knew something about Jews. The point is cumulative: the Jewish people were not sealed away from the intellectual world of antiquity, completely unknown until Christians began making convenient claims about them. Greek writers had encountered Jews, described them, compared them with philosophers, and sometimes treated them with considerable respect.

In 9.6, Eusebius quotes Clement of Alexandria, who in turn gathers several earlier witnesses. Megasthenes reportedly observed that teachings concerning nature found among ancient Greeks could also be found among Indian Brahmans and the Jews of Syria. Clement then cites the Jewish philosopher Aristobulus, who made the much stronger claim that Plato had actually studied Jewish law. Finally comes one of the most memorable sentences preserved from Numenius: “For what is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek?”

That sentence can easily be made to say more than Numenius intended. Numenius was a second-century Platonist who took Jewish wisdom seriously, read Moses and the prophets, and believed that ancient eastern traditions could preserve genuine philosophical truth. His statement therefore establishes something quite significant: a pagan Platonist could see enough conceptual affinity between Moses and Plato to describe Plato in Mosaic terms. It does not, by itself, tell us that Plato sat somewhere with a copy of Exodus open beside the Timaeus.

Eusebius keeps accumulating witnesses in 9.7–9. Numenius knows traditions about Moses and the Egyptian magicians, while Josephus supplies the testimony of the poet Choerilus concerning Jews in the Persian forces that invaded Greece. The evidence is uneven in what it establishes, but Eusebius has made his first point. Jews and Greek intellectual culture were not two worlds that had never touched.

Christianity Copied from Paganism? Eusebius First Examined Greek Borrowing

Book 10 makes the accusation explicit. Eusebius does not begin by comparing one Christian doctrine with one Greek doctrine and simply announcing plagiarism. He first tries to establish a cultural pattern: Greek learning repeatedly came from peoples whom Greeks called barbarians, and Greek authors repeatedly borrowed from one another. The chapter headings themselves make his case almost brutally clear: serious learning passed “from Barbarians to Greeks,” Clement discusses Greek plagiarism, Porphyry supplies further examples, and Eusebius then turns to the antiquity of Moses and the prophets. The full sequence can be read in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, Book 10.

Clement becomes particularly useful because he had already developed the accusation long before Eusebius. In the Stromata, Clement announces that he intends to “exhibit now with greater clearness the plagiarism of the Greeks from the Barbarian philosophy.” His examples range well beyond Judaism, because his point is that Greek intellectual achievement did not emerge from a vacuum. The Greeks learned, adapted, combined, and occasionally claimed as their own what had circulated elsewhere.

Eusebius then sharpens the argument by using hostile or non-Christian witnesses whenever possible. If Christians alone accused Greek writers of borrowing, a Greek reader could dismiss the accusation as Christian polemic. But if Greek writers accused one another of plagiarism, and if Porphyry himself could document Greek literary borrowing, the possibility could no longer be rejected simply because a Christian raised it. Eusebius has not yet proved that Plato borrowed from Moses, but he has attacked the assumption that Greek ideas must have originated with Greeks.

There is a useful distinction here. Evidence that Greeks borrowed extensively from Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, or one another does not demonstrate that a particular Platonic doctrine came from Moses. It does, however, make cultural transmission historically ordinary rather than inherently implausible. Eusebius therefore builds the general possibility before arguing for particular cases.

Josephus Attacked the Myth of an Impossibly Ancient Greece

Eusebius’s next move is chronology. In Book 10 he quotes heavily from Josephus’s Against Apion, because Josephus had already fought a similar battle about Jewish antiquity more than two centuries earlier. Josephus objected to treating Greek literature as the default standard for deciding which people possessed a genuine ancient past. The Greeks, he argued, were comparatively late in founding many cities, recording laws, and writing systematic histories.

Josephus states the point with characteristic irritation: “almost all which concerns the Greeks happened not long ago: nay one may say, is of yesterday only.” He then points toward Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Phoenicians as peoples who preserved much older historical traditions. The complete argument appears in Josephus, Against Apion, Book I.

Josephus also argues that Greek acquaintance with Jews was older than his opponents allowed. He cites traditions concerning Pythagoras and Jewish teaching, including Hermippus’s report that Pythagoras imitated doctrines associated with Jews and Thracians. Whether every historical claim Josephus inherited can carry the weight he puts upon it is a separate question, but his argumentative method is clear. Greek silence is not evidence that Israel was young, especially when Greek literature itself emerged comparatively late and Greek authors knew less about eastern peoples than later readers sometimes imagine.

Eusebius takes that argument and folds it into his own. If Moses precedes the classical philosophers, then Mosaic teaching cannot have been copied from Plato, Pythagoras, or the Stoics. Chronology alone does not prove that the philosophers copied Moses, but it fixes the possible direction of dependence. An older text may influence a younger one; a younger text cannot be the historical source of an older one.

Tatian Made the Chronological Argument Aggressively

Eusebius next turns to Tatian, the second-century Christian apologist whose Address to the Greeks had already compared Moses with the foundational figures of Greek culture. Tatian’s purpose was not subtle. He wanted to establish that Christianity represented ancient wisdom rather than a recent philosophical novelty. His comparison therefore centers upon Moses and Homer as representative starting points for Hebrew and Greek intellectual traditions.

Tatian states his conclusion plainly: “our doctrines are older, not only than those of the Greeks, but than the invention of letters.” He deliberately calls Greek witnesses rather than Christian ones, because he expects hostile readers to distrust testimony drawn solely from Christian sources. From there he works through competing Greek chronologies for Homer and then presses Moses farther back into antiquity.

By chapter 40, Tatian turns priority into dependence. He says Greeks had drawn from Moses “as from a fountain,” although they often altered what they had received. Eusebius likes the argument because it gives him both halves of what he needs: Hebrew antiquity makes influence chronologically possible, and traditions of Greek borrowing make the proposed route culturally possible.

Clement makes essentially the same chronological move in his Stromata. He explicitly says that before discussing Greek appropriation of Hebrew teachings, one must first establish the age of Moses. Eusebius therefore is not inventing this apologetic strategy in the fourth century. He is collecting and greatly expanding an argument already developed by Jewish and Christian writers before him.

Why Antiquity Carried So Much Weight

It is easy for a modern reader to wonder why these writers spend so much time arguing about who came first. In the ancient Mediterranean world, antiquity was itself a cultural claim. Ancient apologetic often privileged primitive wisdom over novelty, so rival communities attempted to establish themselves by reaching farther into the past.

That does not reduce Tatian, Clement, Josephus, or Eusebius to people playing a rhetorical dating game. Their chronological claims perform a specific logical function. If someone alleges that Moses resembles Plato because the Hebrew tradition absorbed Greek philosophy, showing Moses to be earlier eliminates that particular explanation. What chronology cannot establish by itself is whether Plato actually encountered Mosaic teaching.

That second question requires evidence of transmission. Eusebius knows this, which is one reason Book 9 precedes these comparisons with Greek testimony concerning Jews and why he repeatedly emphasizes Greek travel among Egyptians and eastern peoples. His argument needs both priority and possible contact. Similarity without either one would be far weaker.

Eusebius Then Puts Moses Beside Plato

Books 11–13 move from the general argument to particular philosophical parallels. Eusebius has already argued that Greeks borrowed, that eastern wisdom was older, that Moses preceded the philosophers, and that Greeks had some knowledge of Jews. Now he places passages from Hebrew Scripture beside Plato. The question changes from “Could borrowing have happened?” to “Do the texts look as though something has happened?”

One of the most interesting passages occurs in 11.8, because Eusebius is more careful than his reputation for polemic might suggest. He believes Plato followed Moses concerning incorporeal realities, but he offers several possible explanations. Plato may have received the teaching indirectly while studying in Egypt, he may “of himself … hit upon the true nature of the things,” or God may have allowed him to apprehend the truth through creation.

That is a significant qualification inside Eusebius’s own argument. He certainly believes Greek philosophy is indebted to older wisdom, and elsewhere he speaks freely about borrowing and plagiarism. Yet he does not require every true idea in Plato to have arrived through literary theft. Natural reason and divine providence remain possible explanations for agreement.

This distinction is useful when discussing claims that Christianity copied paganism today. Two texts can resemble each other because one borrowed from the other, because both inherited an older tradition, because both responded to the same intellectual problem, or because two thinkers independently reached similar conclusions. Historical dependence is one possible explanation for similarity, but resemblance itself is not dependence.

“I AM” and Plato’s Theory of Being

Eusebius’s most famous comparison comes immediately afterward in 11.9. He begins with Exodus 3, where God identifies himself to Moses as “I AM THAT I AM.” Eusebius reads the declaration metaphysically: God alone possesses absolute, unchanging being, while created and sensible things exist in change and decay. He then turns to Plato’s Timaeus.

Plato asks, “What is that which always is and has no becoming?” Eusebius thinks the resemblance to Exodus is too strong to be accidental, and he says Plato has imitated both the thought and even the form of the Mosaic declaration. The comparison gives Eusebius precisely the kind of evidence he wants: an older Hebrew statement about the being of God followed by a Greek philosophical distinction between true being and becoming.

Then comes Numenius in 11.10. Eusebius quotes the pagan Platonist’s discussion of true being and argues that Numenius explains both Platonic doctrine and the much earlier teaching of Moses. That provides the context for the famous judgment already quoted in Book 9: “For what else is Plato than Moses speaking Attic Greek?”

Numenius is especially valuable because he is not a Christian apologist trying to manufacture a Christian pedigree for Plato. He was a second-century Platonist who treated Jewish tradition as one of several ancient eastern repositories of wisdom. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s discussion of Numenius notes that his interest in Moses was principally philosophical: he believed Moses and Plato held comparable conceptions of the first principle and associated God with being.

That gives us a firmer conclusion than either extreme permits. Numenius does not prove that Plato historically read Moses, because Numenius lived centuries after Plato. But he does prove that the proposed philosophical affinity was not merely a Christian invention of Eusebius. A pagan Platonist independently regarded Jewish wisdom as philosophically ancient and sufficiently close to Platonism to explain Plato through Moses.

Aristobulus Made the Stronger Historical Claim

Eusebius returns to the question in 13.12 by quoting Aristobulus, an Alexandrian Jewish philosopher generally placed in the second century BC. Aristobulus does not merely say Plato and Moses arrived at similar ideas. He claims actual dependence: “It is evident that Plato closely followed our legislation, and has carefully studied the several precepts contained in it.”

Aristobulus knows the obvious historical problem. Plato lived before the famous Greek translation of the Torah associated with Ptolemy Philadelphus. So Aristobulus claims that portions of the Hebrew narratives and law had already been rendered into Greek before Alexander and even before Persian supremacy, giving Plato access to Mosaic material. He adds Pythagoras to the same genealogy, saying that Pythagoras transferred Jewish precepts into his own teaching.

This is the strongest form of the ancient Jewish borrowing argument, and it also exposes where the historical case becomes less secure. Aristobulus’s supposed very early Greek versions of Mosaic material are not independently preserved. Modern reference works therefore describe the early translation as something Aristobulus supposed in order to explain how Plato and other Greek thinkers could have borrowed from Moses.

The distinction should remain clear. Aristobulus is excellent evidence that a second-century BC Jewish intellectual claimed Platonic dependence upon Moses. He is not, by himself, evidence that Plato actually possessed one of the earlier translations Aristobulus describes. Eusebius inherits the former fact and accepts the latter claim.

Clement Was Not Embarrassed by Greek Philosophy

Clement of Alexandria occupies an interesting place in this argument because he could accuse the Greeks of plagiarism without rejecting philosophy itself. He regarded philosophy as containing genuine insights and could use Greek learning constructively. His complaint concerned its ultimate source and its pretension to originality, not the mere existence of truth among pagans.

That position is more sophisticated than “Greek thought is pagan, therefore Greek thought is false.” If Plato says something true, Clement does not need to deny it. He can grant the truth and then ask where Plato obtained it, whether through contact with older wisdom, partial apprehension through reason, or providence. Eusebius follows much the same path.

This also explains why the Praeparatio quotes pagan literature on such an enormous scale. Eusebius does not need his opponents to be wrong about everything. In fact, his case often works better when they are right about something. Their fragments of truth become witnesses that point beyond the systems in which they appear.

Josephus Was Arguing About History Before Eusebius Was Arguing About Plato

Josephus contributes something different from Clement. His central concern in Against Apion is not the metaphysical relationship between Moses and Plato, but the antiquity and credibility of the Jewish people. Greek authors had treated a lack of prominent Greek testimony as evidence that Jewish claims to antiquity were suspect, and Josephus attacks the assumption underneath the argument.

He counters by calling Egyptian, Phoenician, Chaldean, and Greek witnesses. Then he points out that Greek writers themselves knew Jews and sometimes described Jewish teachings as influencing figures such as Pythagoras. Josephus’s work therefore supplies Eusebius with the historical scaffolding upon which the later philosophical comparison can be built.

The order is important. Eusebius does not simply notice that Moses and Plato sound alike and leap immediately to plagiarism. He first spends pages trying to establish Jewish antiquity, Greek lateness, Greek borrowing from eastern peoples, Greek acquaintance with Jews, and traditions of Jewish influence. Only then does he begin laying Plato beside Scripture in detail.

Tatian Was Less Cautious

Tatian presses the accusation harder. For him, Moses is earlier, the Greeks are later, and Greek sophists corrupted what they received. His rhetoric is deliberately confrontational because his Address to the Greeks is itself a direct attack upon Greek claims to cultural superiority.

Eusebius appreciates that argument but embeds it in a much larger documentary structure. Tatian can sound like a prosecutor delivering a closing statement. Eusebius behaves more like an archivist who has brought several boxes of evidence into the courtroom and apparently intends to read all of them aloud.

That difference is part of what makes the Praeparatio so valuable. Eusebius preserves Clement, Tatian, Josephus, Aristobulus, Numenius, Porphyry, and numerous Greek historians rather than merely telling us what they said. His method allows us to separate the testimony of the earlier writers from the conclusions he eventually draws from them.

Numenius Is Perhaps the Most Interesting Witness

Numenius is different from the others because he does not belong to the Christian or Jewish side of the debate. He was a pagan Platonist, yet he explicitly included Jews among ancient peoples whose traditions deserved philosophical consideration. He read Moses as someone who spoke meaningfully about God and regarded Jewish wisdom as belonging within the ancient philosophical conversation.

His famous description of Plato as Moses speaking Greek should therefore be taken seriously, but taken in the sense in which Numenius uses it. He is identifying philosophical kinship and treating Moses as an ancient sage whose understanding of ultimate reality anticipated themes prized by Platonists. Modern scholarship consequently reads his interest as primarily philosophical rather than as an attempt to reconstruct Plato’s sources.

That still leaves Eusebius with something substantial. A pagan philosopher had already broken the simple opposition between “Hebrew revelation” and “Greek philosophy.” Whatever we conclude about direct Platonic borrowing, Numenius shows that ancient readers themselves perceived deep connections between Mosaic theology and Platonist metaphysics.

So Did Plato Copy Moses?

The evidence supports several conclusions of different strength. First, ancient Greek intellectual culture was not hermetically sealed from eastern peoples; Greeks borrowed extensively, traveled, translated, and participated in a Mediterranean world of cultural exchange. Second, Jews and Greeks were in documented intellectual contact by the Hellenistic period, and writers such as Numenius later treated Moses as an important ancient philosopher. Third, Jewish and Christian writers well before Eusebius argued that Greek philosophy had absorbed Mosaic teaching.

The stronger proposition, that Plato himself directly read Mosaic texts and deliberately incorporated them into his philosophy, rests chiefly on ancient claims such as those of Aristobulus rather than on surviving evidence of Plato’s direct access to the Torah. Eusebius accepts that historical reconstruction. The surviving evidence establishes the ancient claim much more securely than it establishes the proposed act of borrowing itself.

There is another complication already visible in Eusebius. He himself allows that Plato could discover a truth independently or apprehend it through the knowledge of God available in creation. Therefore even within the Praeparatio, conceptual similarity does not automatically equal plagiarism. Eusebius’s argument is cumulative, not mathematical.

That is exactly where many modern “Christianity copied paganism” arguments go wrong. They find a resemblance, skip chronology, skip mechanisms of contact, skip differences, and then turn resemblance into genealogy. Eusebius sometimes pushes the evidence farther than a modern historian would, but his massive discussion at least recognizes that claims of dependence require a history.

Greek Influence Is Not the Same Thing as Pagan Origin

There is another distinction that frequently disappears in these conversations. Greek philosophy and pagan religion are not interchangeable categories. Plato’s metaphysics, Stoic ethics, the cult of Dionysus, Homeric mythology, temple sacrifice, and mystery initiations all belonged to the wider Greco-Roman world, but they were not one coherent thing called “paganism.”

Early Christians could therefore reject pagan sacrifice while using Greek philosophical vocabulary. They could attack myths about Zeus while admiring something Plato said about immaterial reality. They could also recognize genuine philosophical insights without believing those insights supplied the historical origin of Christian revelation.

I explored more of Eusebius’s movement between Hebrew revelation and Greek philosophy in The Historian Between Worlds Part 2. What becomes especially clear in Books 9–13 is that Eusebius refuses the simple choice between total separation and total dependence. Greek thought can contain truth, and yet Greece need not be the fountain from which that truth first flowed.

What Eusebius’s Argument Can Still Correct

The modern claim that Christianity copied paganism often begins with a true observation. Christianity developed in the Greco-Roman world, Christians interacted with non-Christian philosophy, and Christian thinkers sometimes adopted conceptual tools already circulating around them. None of that is especially controversial, and none of it establishes that Christianity’s central theological claims were simply repackaged pagan religion.

Eusebius forces a better set of questions. Which text is earlier? Is there evidence of contact? Is the resemblance broad or unusually specific? Does the supposed source contain the same idea, or are we creating similarity by stripping both traditions of their differences? Most importantly, is borrowing the best historical explanation, or merely the easiest one to announce?

His own answers should also be tested by those questions. When Aristobulus says Plato possessed material from an early Greek version of Mosaic law, the claim needs evidence beyond Aristobulus’s assertion. When Numenius compares Moses and Plato philosophically, that comparison should not automatically be converted into a historical statement Numenius himself was not trying to establish. Eusebius gives us a useful method even where applying the method carefully can narrow some of Eusebius’s conclusions.

Eusebius Reversed the Charge

Eusebius’s great reversal was therefore larger than the slogan “the pagans copied us.” He challenged the cultural map on which such arguments depended. Greece was not the ancient, self-generated fountain of all serious philosophy, with Hebrews and Christians arriving late to borrow whatever they could carry away. Greek writers themselves knew that wisdom, stories, religious practices, mathematical knowledge, and philosophical ideas moved between peoples.

For Eusebius, Christianity’s ancestry ran backward through Israel to the ancient Hebrews and ultimately to the God who had revealed himself long before Plato. Greek philosophy sometimes preserved genuine insight, but when it agreed with Hebrew revelation, Eusebius saw no reason to assume automatically that Moses needed Plato to explain Moses. Sometimes he accused the Greeks of borrowing. Sometimes he allowed independent discovery. Sometimes he saw providence.

That broader supernatural world is also why Eusebius’s critique of paganism cannot be reduced to disbelief in every spiritual reality claimed by pagans. Biblical monotheism can acknowledge a populated supernatural world without granting the worship owed to the Creator, a distinction I explored in One God, Many Elohim: Does the Divine Council Make Christianity Polytheistic?. Eusebius’s question is not merely whether spiritual beings, philosophical truths, or ancient parallels exist. It is what they are and where they belong in the order of reality.

So was Christianity copied from paganism? The historical evidence does not support that sweeping genealogy. Christianity arose from the scriptural and theological world of Israel while developing in sustained contact with Greek language, philosophy, and culture, and those contacts require examination one claim at a time rather than a universal theory of borrowing.

Eusebius would push the conclusion farther. He believed that when Greece stood closest to the truth, it often stood closest to Moses, and the traditions he collected show that he was hardly the first person to notice the resemblance. Clement accused the Greeks of borrowing, Tatian made Moses older than their philosophers, Josephus challenged Greek claims to antiquity, Aristobulus claimed direct Platonic dependence, and Numenius looked at Plato and saw Moses speaking Greek.

The old debate therefore does not end with a convenient reversal in which Christians accuse pagans of everything pagans are accused of today. It leaves us with a better historical rule. Before saying that one religion copied another, establish the dates, establish the contact, compare the ideas precisely, and only then decide which direction the evidence actually runs.