IN SIMPLICITY
Plato wrote details of a plan to make a society based on beliefs built around divine laws. Literary evidence in sources used to create the bible show Plato’s plan was used to create the Judaeo-Christian religions and beliefs foundational to Western Society.
Following are selected excerpts from a discussion between Mr Russell Gmirkin, author of Plato andthe Creation of the Hebrew Bible and Dr Ma’at.
3 min : 10 sec
Dr Ma’at reads the biography here:
https://www.routledge.com/authors/i15023-russell-gmirkin
Summarised below.
Russell Gmirkin is a well known Dead Sea Scrolls and biblical scholar. … His latest book Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible identifies Plato’s Laws as a key source for Mosaic law and for the notion of the Bible as an authoritative national literature. … His latest book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, identifies Plato’s Laws as perhaps the most influential such Greek text, a source for many of the Laws of Moses and for the very notion of an approved national literature (the Bible).
8:33 Dr Ma’at: – OK beautiful beautiful. And so Mr Gmirkin, … How exactly was the Hebrew Bible, those documents, put together? Could you explain that process to us please.
9:00 Mr Gmirkin – Certainly. Well it used to be believed that the Hebrew Bible evolved over centuries and centuries of time from practically the time of Solomon down to the Hellenistic Era, which is the time after Alexander the Great conquered the east.
Well, under some of the latest research, including the research I’ve written, the whole bible was basically put together in the 270BC and later – very very late.
9:45 Mr Gmirkin continued: – … drawing on all sorts of interesting Greek writers such as Homer andPlato and the Babylonian Priest Berossus and the Egyptian (or Kemetic) Priest Manetho and others.
10:15 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So they … wrote the 5 books of Moses, and then they immediately translated it into Greek. So you had the Greek and Hebrew editions both presented to the public at the same time …
10:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So after they wrote the books of Moses, and published them in Hebrew and Greek, … Then they started putting together a whole national literature that we know as the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament)
11:10 Mr Gmirkin continued: – In doing that they were following a literary agenda laid out by the philosopher Plato. In his book ‘Plato’s Laws’, he said that the most important task was to create a set of laws for a new nation, and the lawmakers, whatever they did they had to convince the citizenry that those laws were:
- ancient
- and they were Divine
- and they had never been changed.
- And that way, under superstition or belief, the citizens would always obey the laws and support them.
12:00Mr Gmirkin continued: – And then Plato said beyond that you should create a whole national literature, of every genre.
- Hymns
- and history
- and poetry
- and proverbs
and they should be carefully censored so that they were consistent with that myth of the ancient origin of the Laws and it would be semi-Divine, they would be used in national education exclusively and the people would not be exposed to any other literature and in this way their whole national consciousness and memory would be reprogrammed within a generation, so they would come to believe after the next generation that were raised in those schools that only used those sacred texts, that those laws had really been written a thousand or two thousand years earlier.
13:05 Mr Gmirkin continued: – And so it was a means of erasing the national memory and replacing it with one that viewed the Laws as eternal and divine.
14:32 Mr Gmirkin: – … let me make a couple of comments about Deuteronomy and Plato’s Laws:
1. Part of Plato’s Laws said that the lawmaker should assemble all the citizens of the new nation that was being founded and recite to them all the new laws and constitution at the foundation of their new colony. That’s the exact same plot as is in the book of Deuteronomy, so that has Plato’s fingerprints all over it.
2. And another aspect of Plato that you fi nd there is the laws are described by the word Torah or Teaching or instruction and Plato originated the idea that laws should not just be a tyrannical command but that they should have educational values. And so the laws were educational as well as prescriptive. So there’s another Platonic content.
3. Another thing is that Plato invented the idea of having persuasive introductions where you would introduce the laws with all manners of persuasion so the citizens would want to believe and obey those laws and that’s found throughout Deuteronomy as well. So really Deuteronomy is the most Platonic of all the 5 books of Moses.
16:05 Mr Gmirkin continued: – but a number of Laws and Constitutional content within the books of Moses, within the laws of Moses, come out of Plato. Infact he invented a new form of government. He called it nous or intelligence after the name of his God but Josephus called it a theocracy.
16:40 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Basically it was a form of government that was a rule by God and god’s agents would be priests and theologians. He said there should be a high priest, and a supreme council, and they would administer the government and they would also supervise the literature and make sure that all the citizens believe the proper religious and ethical values. Well, this very closely corresponds to the high priest and the Jewish Sanhedrin or senate (council) that was instituted around 270BC or very shortly before. That was a new form of theocratic government, what we would call today, ‘The Kingdom of God’, the rule by God. That was a form of government that Plato invented.
17:50Mr Gmirkin continued: – So in my book on Plato and the creation of the Hebrew Bible, I surveyed all the laws of the ancient near east, of the Bible and the Greek world and I found that a few laws in the bible come from the ancient near east, like the laws of Hammurabe and some middle Assyrian laws but just a very light sprinkling (of them) but the majority of those laws have remarkable parallels with Athenian laws and also specifically with Plato’s laws.
18:20Mr Gmirkin continued: – So you can point to various laws and say this corresponds very closely to the Greeks, it was not written a thousand years earlier by Moses.
Mr Gmirkin continued:
That’s my central argument which has been very well received in Europe, more so than in America where they haven’t got the memo yet, it hasn’t been very well read there
21:30Mr Gmirkin: – The very first tangible evidence for the existence of biblical writings is the Septuagint translation from Hebrew into Greek of the 5 books of Moses around 270 BC. Before that there’s not a whisper of evidence of any biblical writings. …
Dr Ma’at: a Brother… tagged me in a post today and he … asked me to ask you if Western Civilisation established themselves or built their civilisation on Plato’s Laws, on the process that you outlined in your books. So what are your thoughts on that Mr Gmirkin?
33:50Mr Gmirkin continued: – Plato, advocated the idea of having ancient divine laws and he did that because the laws of Sparta, they said their laws came from Apollo, and Crete’s … came from Zeus. And the country that had the longest surviving constitution also had this myth that some God had given them their original laws and Plato said this is an awesome idea. If you want your nation to last, convince the citizens by any means you can that those laws were:
- given to them by the gods
- in ancient times to the founding generation
- and they have never been changed through time.
34:40Mr Gmirkin continued: – So that whole idea … is true of … the laws of Moses. That’s exactly how they are presented in the bible. … and Plato also invented the idea of a national … sacred literature where the whole nation just reads this one set of approved books, censored approved myths. And only those books so that everyone will think the same. Scholars have … wondered where did the idea of the bible come from? Well it came right out of Plato’s Laws.
And Plato said that the reason why he came up with these ideas is he wanted a citizenry that would be docile, compliant, obedient and he wanted to be able to actually program their consciousness and their soul from the cradle, … right through to the grave.
35:55Mr Gmirkin continued: – So Plato kind of invented, I guess you’d call it propaganda or persuasive techniques so everyone believed the same thing.
Plato invented belief systems and he invented sacred literatures and we’ve got that in the Hebrew bible and then the Christian Bible picked that up and various other nations have also adopted that sort of a thing.
And just like Plato predicted, if you can take children, as young as possible, you can teach them anything and they’ll believe it and they’ll be loyal to it for their whole life and they’ll pass it on to their children and so on and so forth.
36:50 Mr Gmirkin continued:– and he had a very profound and I would say sinister understanding of human psychology. He was a social engineer and his dark genius has been cast down through history from his time to our own. And the ancient Jews when they reinvented their nation and created the books of Moses and the Hebrew bible around 270 BC, they were the only nation who actually implemented Plato’s literary agenda and his agenda for a constitution by legislation. They invented it and sure enough they’re with us to this day eternally just like Plato predicted. He was brilliant, but not necessarily in a good way.
37:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – He wanted philosophers like himself to be kings over the nation he was conceiving in his imagination. So there was one level of expertise by the ruling class who would have all this inside information, they would study international laws, they would study astronomy and science and all that, but they administered a second layer for the general population that was not knowledge and science, it was belief, they were creating a belief system to make the rest of their subjects compliant and obedient and so I think modern religions are basically that second layer of compliance. And programming of beliefs and it’s with us to this day.
Dr Ma’at: – You were talking about Plato and his method – it worked! What he envisioned, it worked!… What era did Plato live in?
39:25 Mr Gmirkin continued: – He was Born somewhere around 420 BC … and continued to live toabout 350 BC. …
Dr Ma’at: So I asked you that cause I just wanted to get the timeline down. This is over 2000 years ago and to this day his ideas on how to program consciousness are still effecting the world – it worked!
So like you said it was sinister but it was genius, to be honest with you, I mean, it was. I have to call aspade a spade, it was genius because we’re still dealing with that today.
…
59:00 Dr. Ma’at: – So Mr Russell what do you think people should do with this information?
So lets suppose someone picks up your book ‘Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible’ and they read the text about who really wrote the bible. What do you want for your readers? I call it breaking the chains. Are you trying to unlock the mind, what are your goals? What should the reader do with this information?
59:35 Mr Gmirkin: – Every person is on a journey of self liberation and knowledge is exactly that’s what unlocks the chains. That’s what makes you free. Everyone is programmed in one way or another by society or by their family or their church or whatever group it is, to be pre-disposed to believe a certain way. And one of the hardest things to do for anybody is to examine and scrutinise their own beliefs and challenge them.
The above are selected excerpts transcribed from the video titled: Mr. Russell Gmirkin and Dr. Ma’at: Who Really Wrote the Hebrew Bible and Why?