Zosimus

And Philo was also a Hellenized Platonist I think he has it backwards because he doesn't acknowledge or even bring up that the gospel of John in the New Testament shares many themes with the writings of Philo, a Hellenized Jewish Platonist who was very popular during the lifetimes of the authors of the New Testament. Here's a good overview from the Community of Christ (RLDS): Philo of Alexandria: Judaism as Greek Philosophy He also doesn't mention that the writings of Origen and Clement of Alexandria sound an awful lot like Philo, a Hellenized Jew that they had read and coopted. Or that Justin Martyr, who you quote above, was also heavily influenced by Plato. Origen: The First Christian Genius Justin Martyr: The First Christian Philosopher That is what he is saying. What he isn't saying is that it was largely the three hellenized Christians you quote above that did the replacing. And those three were heavily influenced by Philo, a hellenized Jew. While you agree with Hansen, he would not agree with you. Maybe a better way to approach Hansen's claim is that platonism was adapted by Philo, Origen, Clement, Justin Maryr and others to come up with some incorrect ideas, while many original truths resembling platonism were later deemed heretical by church councils. Origen is a good example. We Mormons see many of his ideas such as the pre-existence of souls, a pre-cosmic fall, and a universal restoration (apokatastasis) as being similar to our original truths, yet he was posthumously branded a heretic by a church that became suspicious of the teachings of a pre-cosmic fall, pre-existence of souls and a universal restoration. Those teachings felt too much like Greek philosophy. The problem was never Plato's ideas, it was the way Christians have either misused Plato to become a more cosmopolitan faith, or rejected Plato because he wasn't a Judean patriarch. Notice it was two Christian admirers of Plato that made the claim? I think it was Justin Martyr who also said that Socrates was a Christian. Although I’m sure he really wanted it to be true, It's clearly not true, or possible. Although I highly doubt Plato could get any of his ideas from the books of Moses, I would think that Judeans and Greeks got many of their ideas from the same earlier sources.

This is the tension in this discussion innit. Many of the things Mormons see as early Christianity is Platonism. Both Origen and Clement of Alexandria was heavily influenced by Plato. Origen, who you quote, was a student of the platonist Ammonius Saccas who also taught Plotinus, the founder of neoplatonism. This goes back to the earlier questions in this thread, if we remove the Hellenist influence from Judaism and Christianity, we'd not have all these works that allow us to recognize all these 'original teachings' that Joseph Smith restored. This is why it feels to me that Hansen has things backwards. The early Christians that had training in Plato somehow were the ones that managed to inject many of the 'original teachings' that were later rejected as heresies by the orthodox Church. Smith restored many of them

Isn't this the 'Hellenization model' you described as an oversimplification?

Do you have a reference supporting this? Greek manuscripts were found in Qumran. At least 27 manuscripts were Greek including Greek biblical fragments. (source) There's even some fragments of Enoch that might be Greek. If they were fleeing Greek influence and escape everything Hellenistic, I don't imagine they'd be reading Greek bibles translated in Alexandria. afaik the Enoch texts found in Qumran don't have much about premortal human spirits and Qumran doesn't have much to show for such a worldview. The only thing I can find is that Josephus said much later that the Essenes taught that souls composed of the finest ether were imprisoned in bodies. But it seems Josephus was riffing in an attempt to Hellenize the Essenes or as he says it, they were followers of "the Pythagorean way of life" and their belief in eternal souls imprisoned in bodies agrees with "the sons of Greece."

This feels like an oversimplification of what Givens is saying, and I think Givens is also, by his own admission, oversimplifying the earliest instances we have of the idea in writing. In his first two chapters, he covers a handful of early Mesopotamian and "Semitic' accounts of gods discussing and planning within a pre-mortal state. But these examples are hardly anything like what we find in his later chapters, ending with Smith. And there's nothing in the Mesopotamian and Semitic accounts that don't also appear in Indian (you yourself bring up atman in the Upanishads) or Persian or Chinese or Norse or anywhere in human history we find myths. The Atrahasis or the Laws of Hammurabi or the Bible or the Upanishads might hint at pre-mortality, but Givens is clear: “Positing as it does claims about God, the creation, and human origin, [the Timaeus] is a text that will present special appeal as well as special challenges to early Christian philosophers. Whereas the account in Genesis leaves ambiguous the question of whether God organized or introduced into existence physical matter, Timaeus makes matter clearly preexistent. Over the next centuries, the dialogue will be invoked time and again to fill in the voids left in the Judeo-Christian creation narrative, offering an account, no less plausible than Noah’s flood and Babel’s tower, of divine motives, human origins, and life’s purpose.” He also says: "All we know for sure is that, when we encounter Semitic treatments of human preexistence in the early Christian era, they are within a Jewish culture that has been affected by a host of influences, including Babylonian myth, Ugaritic traditions, and most important, the philosophy of the classical world." Many traditions have pre-mortal gods, but it wasn't until Plato that the idea became a challenge those traditions had to respond to. The early Christians were some of the first to accept the challenge, and Mormonism would not look like it does today without Plato. For example, Givens: “Implicit in several of Plato’s dialogues, including Timaeus, the ideal is most explicitly stated in Theaetetus, where Socrates tells Theodorus, “a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven, and escape means becoming as like God as possible.” Not only is this idea central to Platonic philosophy, it is inextricably connected in his thought with pre-mortal origins. Preexistence and theosis will increasingly be linked, to the eventual detriment of both, in the subsequent thought of Origen, the Neo-Platonists, and a host of others." That sounds way more like Mormonism than what we find in Akkadian poems or even the Bible. I think Hansen has got things backwards, the apostasy really kicked off when Christian philosophers rejected the "pagan" ideas of premortality and eternal matter and divine potential

Kinda the opposite. the Platonic/Gnostic idea was that creation was the organization of pre-existing matter by a demiurge. Early church fathers came up with "out of nothing" to reject that idea of a lesser creator god and eternal matter, and to insist that the one God was the source of everything, matter included.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir67qcZTRUk These must be the same plates we discussed a few months ago here, now becoming a proper conspiracy

How do Heartlanders reconcile Cowdery and other early leaders, closer to the original source, making statements that the Lehites landed in Chile or somewhere on the coast of South America? The articles below report on the Lamanite Mission missionaries (Cowdery, Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, Peter Whitmer Jr.) preaching in Kirtland en route to Missouri, and the first article explicitly names Cowdery as the source. This is the earliest known mention of Chile as the landing, just months after the Book of Mormon was published, and before the Williams document everyone usually cites. Observer and Telegraph (Hudson, Ohio), 18 November 1830 "According to the narrative given by one of these disciples — Oliver Cowdery — at their late exhibition in Kirtland… This new Revelation, they say is especially designed for the benefit, or rather for the christianizing of the Aborigines of America; who, as they affirm, are a part of the tribe of Manasseh, and whose ancestors landed on the coast of Chili 600 years before the coming of Christ, and from them descended all the Indians of America." Another report on early LDS missionaries teaching a South America landing: Fredonia Censor (New York), 7 March 1832 "The Revelation commenced about 600 years before Christ, with a prophet of the name of Lehi, of the tribe of Joseph… He with another family who accompanied him, built themselves a ship and landed on the coast of South America, where they increased very fast…" Do you accept a landing in Chile? Is your narrow neck then Panama or somewhere in North America?

I've got a lot of thoughts wrt Nibley's Ancient State. In summary, Smith thought himself as a restorer, in a long line of restorers, of an "old forgotten doctrine of the divine plan" or "primordial revelation", as Nibley calls it in "Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic" Nibley himself sums up well in Eloquent Witness: "The idea of an “archaic wisdom,” prisca arcane, or “primeval revelation,” a knowledge of the ancients far in advance of later times, has always intrigued philosophers and theologians. But today it is the scientists who are taking it seriously. Joseph Smith was well acquainted with the idea..." According to that essay, Nibely was a Patternist. This loops him in closely with the likes of Bryant and Faber who laid the foundations of Patternism. Nibley makes the case himself, he just fails to acknowledge that the material was available in 1820s America. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Ethan Smith straight up copies Faber. Bryant and Faber influenced a number of Americans writing in the 1820s. For sure, Paine wasn't the first, he was the most widely distributed. Afaict Paine picked up his claim that Hilkiah forged the Book of the Law to justify Josiah's reforms from Voltaire. It was in the little pocket version of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary which was widely circulating in America. Voltaire seemingly gets it from earlier sources like Spinoza. This conflict between the skeptics and the Biblical apologists goes back a long way, at least as far back as Scaliger, who was a major influence on Nibley. He heaps praise on Scaliger in a separate essay in Ancient State. Like Campbell, I am impressed how well the Book of Mormon resolves all the great controversies of the period roughly between Scaliger forward to Joseph Smith.

If King Benjamin was the first to formulate it, then he wouldn't have done it by merging 1 Corinthians and Romans. The simpler explanation is that Rev Boston did the merging, Edwards borrowed from him a year later, and then Joseph wrote it into Mosiah 3:19.

Boston's sermons with both phrases had been republished in New York in 1811 by Evert Duyckinck, who coincidentally also published Anthon's Classical Dictionary, which IMO was another source for Book of Mormon narrative elements

Very funny, after you posted this I also looked up "plan of salvation" in Google Books and one of the same books that came up for my search on "natural man is an enemy to God" popped up again. Both phrases are in one text: Human nature in its four-fold state by Rev. Boston (1735) Plan of salvation is in there three times, and it looks like Wesley lifts his passage from Boston almost verbatim Boston: "Every natural Man is an Enemy to God, as he is revealed in his Word. An infinitely holy, just, powerful, and true Being, is not the God whom he loves, but the God whom he loaths. In effect, Men naturally are Haters of God..." Wesley: "Every natural man is an enemy to God, as he is revealed in his word, — to an infinitely holy, just, powerful, and true Being. In effect, men are naturally 'haters of God'..."

Also variations found in a sermon by Jonathan Edwards in 1736, and then published within America MEN NATURALLY GOD'S ENEMIES. AUGUST, 1736. SERMON, VII. "A natural man is as full of enmity against God."

WW Phelps was an editor of one in nearby Canandaiga. Phelps has a lot of telling phraseology that gives away his learning. He certainly had access to books, journals and editorials from all over the country, and Europe. Phelps read the Book of Mormon just 3 days after it was published and a year later was called to "to head printing and publishing for the Church" I think we often overlook that much of the unique theology in Mormonism was developed after 1830, when Joseph was swimming in theological, philosophical and political conversations, and lots of print

That was my first thought, but George's journal has far more detail, such as: "When the spies first began to question us, it was observed that they picked out the greenest looking fellows in the Camp to quiz. As I was only 16, very large of my age, my eyes weak and naturally deficient of sight, wore a pair of striped bed-tick pantaloons, which were worn off on the inside, nearly up to my knees on account of my interfering as I walked, my straw hat having been smashed by accidentally sitting on it in the tent, Joseph invited me to throw myself in a position to answer such questions; and on passing through the towns I generally fell somewhat in the rear cutting a sorry figure which naturally singled me out — on the principle that children and fools always tell the truth. In this way I had many amusing conversations with inquisitive strangers. I tried to treat them with kindness and urbanity, but presume very few of them gained much information by talking with me." And if History isn't sourcing the account from GAS, then I don't know where else it would be coming from