So I’ve posted related to this topic, but I was thinking of putting up a few posts on this larger theme of Greek philosophy corrupting early Christianity. Like I said in this video, that was a common Protestant idea going back to the 1600s, very prominent in Smith’s day, and was even in a book he owned.

Such an idea seemed to have gotten picked up by Mormon intellectuals around the turn of the 19^th century and seems to still be fairly popular among a lot of Mormons.

I’ve argued that it appears that Joseph Smith knew of such Protestant claims and rejected them. Instead of Christianity being corrupted by Greek philosophy, it was the loss of the larger truth of the ancient theology (including Greek philosophy) that was the problem.

So I’d like to do a few more posts on why I think it was a mistake for later Mormon thinkers to adopt this claim of philosophical corruption.

First, let me quote a few lines from Wouter Hannegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy for historical context. It’s pages 33-34 of my dissertation:

Protestant scholars seeking to purify Christianity from what they believed were Catholic corruptions began to target what they believed to be Platonic corruption in Christianity and those who, like Marsillio Ficino, believed that Christianity and Platonism overlapped. “But critics who investigated the Florentine agenda more closely were bound to discover a disconcerting truth: to a surprising extent, those paganizing heretics seemed to have the Fathers of the Church on their side!” Since many of the early fathers had been heavily Platonic, the answer for these Protestant scholars was to argue that these fathers had themselves been corrupted by Plato. “It is not hard to see that [this claim] carried an enormous polemical potential from Protestant perspectives, since it strongly suggested that Roman Catholicism and its dogmatic tradition as a whole might be exposed as a pagan perversion.” Such Protestant scholars even developed a hermeneutic for determining who the corrupt Platonists were among contemporaries and determined that the tenets of a Platonist were the belief that the soul was uncreated and the denial of creation ex nihilo.[1]

[1] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 94-95, 105-7.