The Parables of Jesus and Socrates

In 1937, Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky began to study the gravitational forces in a far away constellation named Coma Berenices, which can be found roughly three hundred million light years away from the earth. What he found was puzzling: the movement of the galaxy clusters within the constellation were moving at a very fast rate;much too quickly for the amount of mass that Zwicky was able to calculate visually. Perhaps what puzzled Zwicky the most was how the planets, which were circulating at such a fast rate, stayed in orbit. Under the normal laws of physics, planets have the potential to become detached from their orbit and be flung off into space if they move too quickly. As it turns out, the phenomenon that Zwicky had discovered was what scientists now call “darkmatter” or “dark energy.”These phenomena are called “dark” because they are completely invisible, yet they account for over 90%of all gravitational force in the entire cosmos, and they explained why Zwicky was unable to see what caused the planets to move so quickly and yet remain within orbit. But what does a discussion about the discovery of dark matter and energy have to do with Greek philosophy and the New Testament? The answer is this: even though Greek philosophy may not always be easily detected in the New Testament, we can be sure that certain philosophical schools were integral to how the ancients understood both themselves and their respective contexts, including both Christian and Jewish contexts. By extension, this essay will argue that in order for New Testament writers to have successfully dialogued with certain groups, allusions to philosophy were unavoidable. Not only this, but already established philosophical questions may have been rather influential for helping the earliest Christians shape statements about their beliefs. This will be illustrated by how the Parable of the Sower, found in each of the Synoptic Gospels, addresses certain questions concerning belief and disbelief, knowledge and ignorance. It will be argued that the ways in which Jesus talks about belief, for example, echo theways that Socrates talks about it in the Parable of the Cave. This does notmean that the Synoptic Gospels directly imitated