Eschaton

No one ever claimed they did this - this is a strawman you've invented in your mind, and then turned to AI to try to refute. However unlike others who have responded to you I will agree that Jesus seems to have avoided gentile centers. However that wouldn't have insulated him from Greek ideas. But we know very little about what Jesus actually taught - the gospels are full of ideas that later Christian communities came up with. There are only a handful of teachings that we can even say probably went back to Jesus himself.

That's true of Crossan, but Wright is more of an all-purpose conservative Christian scholar who kind of lets his theological bias lead him by the nose. I'm not sure who told you all that, but its simply not true. Despite their rejection of the idolatry of the Greeks, they certainly picked up Greek theological ideas ran with them. They might not even have been aware of it was Greek. The same thing happened with the Babylonians, by the way. Every time a new nation invaded Israel, they influenced the Israelite literature of the time. See: Runia, D. T. (1993). Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN 9789023227137. It's simply not his area of expertise. That's a fact. Why rely on unqualified scholars when there are so many who specialize in this area?

Yeah, none of this is really accurate. I think you're kind of making this up as you go along, especially since you're mentioning NT Wright and JD Crossan in the same breath. The New Testament was not written by working class Galileans by the way - but by highly educated Greek speaking converts. John 1 copies wholesale the ideas of the Platonist Philo. Origen, the primary Christian father who advocated for the pre-existence of the soul, was a Neoplatonist. She's not totally wrong on everything, she's a creative researcher. Her work does get used - just not the kooky stuff that gets picked up by LDS apologists. Terryl Givens isn't a qualified or published critical Biblical scholar. No one accused Smith of copying Plato - it's just that the Jewish and Christian factions that did hold to the pre-existence of souls got the idea from Plato, or others in their faction who got it from Plato. And it's a long line of telephone from Plato to certain Jewish and Christian writers, and on down to Joseph Smith.

It's not because her arguments and evidence are poor? Everyone else is hopelessly biased except the one fringy Biblical scholar who just happens to confirm some of your own theological biases? This doesn't seem a little too convenient by half to you as you type it out?

Why do you suppose Margaret Barker has been unsuccessful in convincing the vast majority of critical scholars to her views? It's not rational to shop around to find fringe scholars to tout just because they say the things you want to hear. That's practically ad unpopulum.

Correct, not everything comes from Plato, but the pre-existence of human souls in Jewish and Christian thought does. There is no pre-existence in Jeremiah - instead that refers to the foreknowledge of God. Jesus inherited the apocalyptic tradition, which already had baked-in Hellenization, having arisen during Israel's period of Greek occupation. Without the Greeks a figure like Jesus wouldn't have arisen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_period

Not outdated at all, it's mainstream Biblical scholarship. Barker is outside of the mainstream on many of her theories. You seem to be using her because it suits your theological bias You've kind of moved the goalpost here. I'm saying the pre-existence of spirts comes from Plato, which it does. Some ancient Israelites did have the idea that the "shades" of the dead would have a shadowy half life in the underworld. I don't think "shades" are coterminous with spirits exactly, but that's really a different topic. Israel didn't spend 400 years in Egypt, although of course Egypt still had some influence. You won't find the pre-existence of spirits in pre-hellenistic Judaism. You found it in apocalyptic literature precisely because it was developed during Israel's Greek period.

Jewish apocalypticism arose precisely in the Greek period of Israel's history. Greek theological ideas and Platonism generally entered Judaism during this period. The idea of "souls" to begin with as something other than simple "life-force" isn't present in the oldest Jewish texts. Of course the oldest Jewish texts didn't arise out of a vacuum either. The oldest threads of Israelite religion are derivative of the beliefs of the Canaanites. Judaism itself we might understand the term, with its strict adherence to the law of Moses, doesn't really arise until pretty shortly before the time of Jesus. Prior to then it's more of a culture with certain feast days and an allegiance to the national god or gods. Johannine Platonism is basically just drawing from Philo, a middle Platonic Jewish writer. The logos was created to give God platonic distance from crude matter and creation, after all. All Judaism, Christianity and ultimately Mormonism is a mix of all of these influences (not just Greek and Canaanite, but also Persian, Edomite, Babylonian, etc). If you want to identify Greek ideas as apostasy, then you'll need to cut out the pre-existence and afterlife rewards and punishments from your belief system. Or I guess you'll do as you're doing here - pretend the Greek theological ideas in Mormonism aren't Greek, somehow.

John's gospel is full of middle Platonism. The idea of the pre-existence of souls is also straight from Plato.

Hebrew only comes into existence at around 1200 BCE, so it wouldn't have been the language of Enoch (who was a figure of legend to begin with). But yes the Book of Enoch was composed late, in the apocalyptic period. https://www.bartehrman.com/book-of-enoch/