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The Egyptians
June 8, 2025 · 28 min
We often credit the Greeks with inventing Western philosophy. But how often were they borrowing from another great society? This week, we’re exploring the ancient world to uncover the hidden influe...
Series Season 9 June 8, 2025 · 28 min · Season 9
We often credit the Greeks with inventing Western philosophy. But how often were they borrowing from another great society? This week, we’re exploring the ancient world to uncover the hidden influe... ...more Show the full description Show less We often credit the Greeks with inventing Western philosophy. But how often were they borrowing from another great society? This week, we’re exploring the ancient world to uncover the hidden influe...
Series Season 9
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Authentic with Shawn Boonstra confronts life’s toughest questions head-on: What is our purpose? What is true love? Explore the depths of human existence and
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In this video 0:00 The Roots of Western Thought
The Roots of Western Thought 0:00 There are a number of key historical influences that have really radically changed the way we think here in the West. And sometimes I'm convinced that most of us don't really understand where a lot of our0:11 ideas come from. So today, we're gonna start unpacking the important history of Western thought.0:38 I remember taking my first philosophy course back in my first year of college and how it really struck me at the time how we've been exploring the meaning of human existence for a really, really0:50 long time. I mean, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but here I was, this 17 year old kid from a really small town who suddenly found himself exposed to some pretty deep thinking,1:02 supposedly the wisdom of the ages. And as I looked around the classroom and saw these other kids who also seemed to love what we were studying, I suddenly didn't feel as alone as I used to.1:14 I mean, let's be honest, not a lot of high school kids invest any real time exploring the deep existential questions of human existence. And I'd always felt like a little bit of an outsider when I wanted to discuss1:25 things that I thought might be more important than 19 eighties pop culture. And, of course, I was the 1 who was out of step with what normal kids actually think about, at least back in my day. Today, when I1:37 look at the alarming rates of teen anxiety and depression, I'm tempted to believe that maybe Gen z is a little more invested in the big questions of the universe than we were back in my day, or at least1:49 they seem to be spending more time struggling with the fallout from centuries of bad philosophy. But let's get back to that first year survey class where I finally discovered that I was hardly
2:01 alone with these thoughts. I mean, yeah, some of those kids were there because they needed the credit for some other field of study, but some of us really were there to study the great minds that built Western
2:13 civilization. And not just those minds, but also the ones that gave a lot of people a different way to think about the universe over in the Far East. And I I still remember the final exam like I
2:25 took it yesterday. Each of us was handed a blank examination booklet. It had a blue cover, and it kind of reminded me of those exercise books you used to get for writing back in elementary school.
2:38 Once we were seated for the exam, the invigilator passed up and down the aisles and put an exam sheet on each of our desks face down. Then he went back up to the front of the room, sat behind a desk, looked at his
2:50 watch, and said, you may begin. And I'm guessing that as I'm describing that whole process that some of you might be reliving the nightmare of finals week. In fact, sometimes I still dream that it's
3:01 time to write the final, and I can't find the exam room. Or worse yet, I know that I haven't studied all semester. I've been cutting class and in the dream, now it's time to write that exam and expose my
3:13 semester long negligence. Not that that ever happened, of course. Now, when I flipped over that test paper, I discovered 3 questions, and all you had to do was
3:25 answer 1 of them. So I chose the first question which said, why didn't God create the world 1 day earlier? The blank examination booklet was probably 20 or 30 pages long, and
3:37 the exam was supposed to last 2 or 3 hours. I don't remember which. But, you know, I was finished in less than 5 minutes. Why? Because I wrote 1 single sentence. I said,
3:49 God could not have created the world 1 day earlier because the moment of creation was also the beginning of time. Well, lucky for me, it turns out that was exactly the answer the professor
4:00 was looking for. And even though my answer was that brief, he actually gave me 1 of those very, very rare A's that I ever got in college. Trust me, I didn't get a lot of those because
4:12 like a lot of first year students, I spent more time goofing off than actually going to class. And don't tell my kids that. I mean, 1 of them is still in college right now. Now, to to be fair,
4:24 I've always loved learning. And in later years, when I finally got my act together, I became far more diligent when it came to studying. And the library that Jean and I have at our house, well, it's actually starting to
4:36 get out of control. But again, let's go back to that first year philosophy course because I'm actually trying to drive at something really very important. I wish I could find my original first
4:47 year philosophy textbook. I know I've got it somewhere. I mean, I never get rid of books, but I can assure you that that book started like almost every survey textbook about philosophy.
4:59 It started in ancient Greece. And obviously, there's a really good reason for that. I mean, Greece really was an important cradle for Western thought. And to this day, names like Plato,
5:11 Socrates, and Aristotle are practically household words, even for people who've never actually read any of their books. It was the Greeks who formed the philosophical foundation for
5:23 both their own culture and the Romans who came after them. Other cultures like Persians and the Arabs also tapped into Greek philosophy. And for a while, as Western Europe was
5:35 sliding recklessly into the dark ages into this deep period of ignorance, it was actually those Eastern cultures who preserved classical learning. And of course, we we also know that
5:47 as Rome itself was starting to teeter and collapse under pressure from the barbarians, the Celts, people in places like Ireland and Scotland started to collect ancient manuscripts and they made
5:59 thousands and thousands of copies. And as a minister, I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out, it was the Celts of the fifth and sixth centuries who also preserved the scriptures,
6:11 taking copies out across most of Western Europe. So, of course, a modern first year textbook about philosophy is almost always going to start in ancient Greece.
6:23 I mean, the very first chapter in Will Durant's well known book, The Story of Philosophy, starts with this section on Plato and his love for Socrates, another famous Greek thinker who never
6:35 actually wrote anything down, not that we know of. So Plato, he took Socrates teachings and worked them into his own stories or dialogues to illustrate what Socrates taught. Now the other big
6:47 name would be Aristotle, who is sometimes considered to be the father of modern science. And as I've talked about the subject with folks, most people tend to lean 1 way or the other. Either you're a
6:59 big fan of Plato, which I'm not, or you're a fan of Aristotle, where personally, I find a lot more things to agree with. Now, the reason you know
7:10 all these names or at least recognize them is because most of us were taught that the way we think today started with the Greeks. And for the most part, that's true. I'm perfectly
7:22 comfortable giving the Greeks that kind of credit because they kind of earned it, as long as we remember that the Hebrews also had a massive impact on the way that you and I think. I mean, who's really gonna
7:34 deny that the Bible, the best selling book of all time, has profoundly shaped the course of our civilization? I mean, just read some of the works of our most successful and influential
7:45 philosophers over the last, say, thousand years, people like Descartes or Thomas Hobbes, and what you're gonna find is that they quote the Bible over and over and over and over. Now that
7:57 doesn't mean they were dedicated Christians because honestly, some of them really weren't, but they still refer to the scriptures about as often as they ever quoted from the Greeks. Now,
8:10 all that being said, I personally think that most of our first year philosophy books are really missing a key ingredient, an influence that's hard to deny once you see it. There's
8:22 another ancient civilization that predates the Greeks, and it's entirely possible that a lot of Greek thinking actually started somewhere else. Of course, students of history in the Bible
8:34 know that the Babylonians and the Persians were also ancient dominant cultures, well ahead of the Greeks. But there's another 1, another civilization also mentioned in the Bible
8:46 that deserves to be acknowledged. And I'm gonna tell you who they are, but you're gonna have to wait until I come back from a really quick break.
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9:27 Let's go back to 1 of the earliest Greek philosophers, a guy whose name often shows up at the beginning of textbooks. It's Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek city in the province of Ionia, which wasn't
9:39 actually in Greece, but in Asia Minor. Thales was important because he was 1 of the first people in the world to try and reconcile this ever changing dynamic world that we live in with some
9:50 kind of stable underlying principle that would hold it all together. It's the famous philosophical problem of the many versus the 1. Thales came to the conclusion that the basic
10:02 element that holds everything together must be water, which sounds a little ignorant and superstitious to a 20 first century mind, but I can assure you that Thales wasn't some kind of simpleton. You'd
10:14 actually have to study what he said to see why that thinking actually made a lot of sense back in his day. The problem we have with Thales really is that we no longer have most of his writings and what we
10:26 do know about him comes from statements made by other people. It turns out that he was 1 of the first people to break away from using mythology to explain the natural world, and he turned to logic
10:38 to explain it instead. And it was an important step forward toward the scientific method. But for our purposes today, what I really want you to see is where Thales went to school because it turns
10:50 out it wasn't in Greece. Some people believe that his family was actually from Phoenicia and they later moved to the city of Miletus, but his diploma didn't come from Phoenicia either. I mean, he probably
11:02 learned some things from the Greeks and the Phoenicians, but that's not really what I want you to see today. It turns out he studied on the other side of the Mediterranean down in North Africa. Here's what the Greek
11:13 historian, Diogenes Laertius says, he, that's Thales, had no instructor except that he went to Egypt and spent some time with the priests there. Hieronymus informs us
11:25 that he measured the height of the pyramids by the shadow they cast, taking the observation at the hour when our shadow is of the same length as ourselves. Now that was pretty
11:37 clever. He waited until his own shadow was the same length as him because at that moment, the shadow of the pyramid would be exactly the same as its height. I mean,
11:49 that sounds pretty simple to a modern mathematician, but this was an age of discovery. And a lot of what these people learned way back then gave us the tools we need to do the things we do today. But
12:00 now take all that and put it aside for a moment and I want you to notice where he was when he figured this problem out, in Egypt. Now reading ancient history can be somewhat problematic. I mean, we really have
12:12 no way of knowing if all the details found in an ancient book are actually true because, well, we weren't there and we don't have a lot of corroborating sources. But I have no reason to believe that
12:24 Diogenes made this up. It wouldn't make sense. And here's what I discovered. A lot of very important Greek thinkers actually went to Egypt to study, which makes sense because Egypt was
12:36 very ancient and very advanced. And if that's where they studied, that makes for some pretty impressive ties to the story you find in the Bible. I mean, where did Moses, 1 of the most influential
12:48 people of all time, get his education? Well, it was in the Palace of Egypt, and I'll come back to that in just a moment. What I really want to do before we look at Moses is take a look
13:00 at just how many notable Greek philosophers studied in Egypt. You probably remember learning the Pythagorean theorem back in grade school. Remember, a squared plus b squared equals
13:12 c squared. It's how you figure out if a triangle is a right triangle if 1 of the corners is 90 degrees. Well, it turns out that Pythagoras got a lot of his ideas also in Egypt where he studied
13:24 with the Egyptian priests. Another Greek thinker by the name of Isocrates said this, Pythagoras of Samos, who was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy. Where did he bring
13:36 that philosophy from? From Egypt. He's telling us that in some ways, Greek philosophy actually came from somewhere else, which brings me to the biggest name in Greek philosophy
13:47 or at least 1 of the biggest names and that of course is Plato. Plato had a distant ancestor named Solon, who was 1 of the so called 7 sages of ancient Greece, 1 of the most
13:59 respected minds in all of Greek history. And the record tells us that Solon went to Egypt to study, where the Egyptians told him that the Greeks were really just mental infants
14:11 compared to them. Apparently, there was a little bit of arrogance in ancient Egypt. Here's the story the way Plato told it. And a very old priest said to him, Solon, Solon, you Greeks are
14:23 ever children. There is no such thing as an old Greek. What do you mean by that? Inquired Solon. You are all young in mind, came the reply. You have in your minds no belief rooted in old tradition
14:35 and no knowledge hoary with age. The Egyptian priest was reminding the Greek philosopher that their culture was recent and nowhere near as sophisticated as the Egyptians.
14:48 So naturally, Solon wanted to learn about ancient Egyptian wisdom. And from this point in the story, Plato goes on to share a lot of ancient history from the very, very, very distant past,
15:00 and he reveals that Solon brought a lot of that knowledge home to Greece. And it turns out Aristotle also borrowed from the Egyptians. I mean, just listen to this statement in his book, Politics.
15:12 He said, the Egyptians appear to be of all people the most ancient, and they have laws and a regular constitution existing from time immemorial. We should therefore make the best use of what has already
15:24 been discovered and try to supply defects. Then we also have Democritus, the man who gave us the atomic theory. You know, the idea that the universe is actually made up of tiny particles
15:36 hanging in a vacuum. That was a major, major leap forward in the world of science. And where did Democritus go to school? Well, I'm sure you're not gonna be surprised at this, but it also happens to be
15:47 Egypt. Here's what Diogenes said about him. According to Demetrius in his book on men of the same name and Antisthenes in his Successions of Philosophers, he traveled into
15:59 Egypt to learn geometry from the priests, and he also went into Persia to visit the Chaldeans as well as to the Red Sea. Now, I could keep going, but I think I've made the point. The Greeks built their
16:11 philosophy at least in part on the backs of the Egyptians. And of all the philosophy that made its way into Western thinking through the Greeks, there's 1 idea that
16:23 really, really changed the way we think about human nature, and that's Plato's theory of dualism. Dualism teaches that you and I have 2 separate natures at the same time. 1 that
16:34 belongs here in the material world, this world that we can touch, and another 1 that belongs to the spirit world. In other words, the real you is actually just a ghost that lives inside of a meat machine we call
16:46 the human body. The real you, he said, is a ghost. The Greeks and the North African Gnostics who borrowed Greek philosophy believed that the physical world was some kind of a big mistake, that
16:58 some kind of lesser God actually botched the work of creation and ended up trapping us in these miserable physical bodies. The universe these people taught was originally a nonmaterial
17:10 mind that unfortunately ended up congealing and becoming the world we see. And to these people's way of thinking, that development was not a good thing. And it turns out that idea
17:23 also came from Egypt. And after I take a really quick break, I'll show you what Plato said about the origins of Egyptian thought. I'll be right back after this.
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18:07 Plato says something rather remarkable in his book, Phaedrus. Just just listen to this. He writes, in Necrotus in Egypt, there was 1 of the ancient gods of Egypt, the 1 to whom the bird they call
18:19 the ibis is sacred, whose name is Thoth. Now you and I might call him Thoth. This deity was the inventor of number, arithmetic, geometry, and
18:30 astronomy, of games involving drafts and dice, and especially of writing. Now, this might prove to be the source of Egyptian learning, an ancient teacher so
18:42 wise and so gifted that we credit him with all of Egyptian culture. He was so gifted that according to the Egyptians, he eventually achieved divinity, which is why Plato
18:54 actually refers to him as a god. They say that this guy invented Egyptian hieroglyphics and he introduced the Egyptian people to the sciences of architecture, astronomy, math, medicine,
19:06 geometry, and a whole lot more. And then on top of all of that, he gave them the gift of religion. So, the people began to collect his writings, quietly passing them down from 1
19:18 generation to the next, eventually only giving them to carefully selected initiates. A group of intellectual elites who would keep these writings away from the wrong people to protect them from
19:30 corruption. We we think that a lot of his material was actually housed at the famous library of Alexandria, so it was still in circulation thousands of years after Thoth actually
19:41 lived. That would also mean, unfortunately, that a lot of it was lost when that library was tragically burned to the ground. But a lot of his key ideas actually survived and some of
19:53 them are still in circulation to this day. And I think you might be surprised to discover just how many well known thinkers have studied those writings from Leonardo da Vinci, Roger Bacon, and William
20:05 Blake to people like Copernicus and Isaac Newton. This guy was so impressive that the Greeks actually gave him a Greek name. They called him Hermes Trismegistus. And a surviving
20:17 story tells us that 1 night, this ancient Egyptian thinker was visited by a being of, and I quote, infinite dimensions. Who are you? He asked. I am Poimandris,
20:29 the noose of the supreme. Now, the word nous is an old word from classical philosophy that means intelligence or understanding or thought. And what it's supposedly describing
20:41 is the great cosmic mind, the mind of the universe. You see, the ancients believed that there was a mind in the universe before anything material was created. The whole universe was really just
20:52 made up of thoughts. And the way the ancient pagans told this story, those thoughts were kind of like waves of energy spreading out from a cosmic mind. And they were so full of life, these thoughts,
21:04 that they actually became living beings in their own right. Eventually, they transformed into a fine mist, kind of like a a cloud of gas. And over time, that cloud of cosmic thoughts became
21:16 more real and more solid becoming liquids and then eventually solids. So the ancient pagans believed that that wasn't supposed to happen. You and I were just supposed to
21:28 be spiritual disembodied beings, nobody at all. And that's apparently where the Greeks got the idea for their dualism. They stole it from Egypt, which of course brings
21:40 me back to Moses because he also went to school in Egypt, and he was raised in the pharaoh's palace. And yet, the first 5 books of the Bible, the ones that Moses wrote, completely contradict
21:52 the Egyptian and Greek way of looking at the universe. The God of the Bible makes a distinctly physical world and puts distinctly physical beings in a garden, and then he calls it very good.
22:05 That completely contradicts the pagans who wanted more than anything to escape this flawed physical existence and ascend to a higher spiritual plane. They wanted to return to that great cosmic mind.
22:17 So how do we explain that the Greeks were educated in Egypt, but so was Moses? I mean, why in the world does Moses tell a completely different story? Well, the answer is found in the
22:29 New Testament book of Hebrews chapter 11, where the author says this, by faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated
22:41 with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith, he
22:53 left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. Okay. So it turns out there is an invisible world, but that's not us. Moses
23:05 rejected the learning of Egypt to wander the wilderness with the Hebrews, following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, a phenomenon that Paul says was actually the presence of Christ. He says
23:17 that in first Corinthians chapter 10. So now we suddenly have a really interesting situation. Moses wrote the Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible, which have been a massive
23:28 influence on the development of Western civilization. But at the same time, a different system of thought that came out of Egypt became another important foundation for the West, thanks to the work of Greek
23:40 philosophers. I'll be right back after this.
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24:17 About a hundred years after Christ, some of the Christians in North Africa and a few other places attempted to harmonize the biblical worldview with Greek philosophy. What that led to in
24:29 some cases was Gnosticism, a way of thinking that sounded a lot more Greek than Hebrew. Now, the famous apologist Justin Martyr was not a Gnostic, but he
24:41 was a student of Plato and so you already find the teachings of Plato showing up in his work, including a little bit of Greek dualism. Now again, Justin Martyr was not a Gnostic and we
24:53 still respect his writing today. He's not considered a heretic. The church actually rejected those Gnostics because they were so far off base. And now I'm talking about books like the
25:04 Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas. Those books were never part of Orthodox Christianity because they were not in agreement with the biblical worldview. Justin Martyr, on the other hand,
25:17 is considered an Orthodox Christian for the most part. But when you read his first and second apologies, you suddenly discover a lot of Plato. I mean, he was trained by
25:28 a disciple of Plato and his way of thinking about life and death sounds more like Greek mythology than it does the Bible. The influence of the Greeks on early Christian scholars
25:40 was understandably profound, which means that when you and I go back and read the works of early Christians from the first few centuries, we still need to be very careful and check what they're saying against the
25:52 words of the Bible. Just because their writings are really, really old and the people who wrote them lived within decades of the resurrection of Christ, that doesn't really mean that their doctrine is always
26:04 necessarily biblical. The Greek influence is really pretty powerful. And if you think about it, a hundred years is actually a long time. I mean, just look at the way that Western thinking has shifted between the early
26:15 part of the twentieth century and now, or look at the way that thinking has changed between my generation and today's generation. Even a hundred years can be a long time when it comes to the transmission or the
26:27 changing of ideas, which means that you should check everything against the original. That would be the Bible. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Mandela effect, but this this phenomenon where falsehood makes its
26:39 way into contemporary culture in a way that everybody just assumes is the truth. It's called the Mandela effect because 1 prominent person back in the eighties was absolutely sure that Nelson
26:50 Mandela actually died in prison. He didn't, but wouldn't you know it? To this day, a lot of people think that's true. So what if there are ancient artifacts in our religious thinking that everybody thinks
27:02 are the truth, but you're not actually gonna find them in the Bible? What if there are things that everybody thinks are biblical philosophy, the Bible's view of the universe, but they actually prove to be Greek ideas
27:14 or even Egyptian? You'd wanna know that. Moses walked away from that entire pagan system, and God used him to write 1 of the most influential portions of the Bible, the 1 that's held in the
27:26 highest esteem by everybody to this day. Now, if Moses thinking contradicted the pagan way of thinking, you're gonna wanna look at that. You know, there's 1 way in which the Egyptian story and the
27:38 biblical story actually agree. That Egyptian philosopher Thoth said that Poimandres, that being who taught him how to think appeared in the form of a serpent. And Moses also said, it was a serpent who
27:50 brought a different way of thinking to all of humanity. That should make you wonder about sources. That's why I'm daring you to read the Bible. You might think you know it. You might think you understand
28:02 the Bible's view, but do you really? Have you read it for yourself? Thanks for joining me today. I'm Shawn Boonstra, and this has been another episode of Authentic.
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