In this brief essay I would like to present an argument that pastors should read and study the Greco-Roman Classics. This will serve as a defense of the practice and hopefully provide motivation toward such reading. Before getting to the really important items, however, I must seek to address at the very beginning objections and complaints that I expect some readers may harbor. I have formed these as questions:

1. Are you saying that I cannot be a good pastor or preacher without understanding, for example, the differences between Plato and Aristotle on the nature of the soul, the difference between Demosthenes’s periodic style and the thin style of Lysias, or without knowing more obscure things like that in the Titanomachy (battle of the gods and giants) Zeus called on the ultimate bullpen, three creatures of one hundred speedball hands each, called the Hecatonchires?
   
   No.
   
2. Are you saying that I have to be an expert in the Greco-Roman Classics, that I have to be able to read Greek and Latin (nedum Hebrew) like Theodore Beza or Philip Melanchthon did—while folding bulletins, so to speak—in order to serve my congregation well, and by grace fulfill my call before God?
   
   Again, no.
   
3. Are you saying that I should right now drop everything else that I am doing, discontinue all consumption of contemporary literature and pop-culture in order to subsist on a diet of primarily or exclusively classical literature?
   
   A third time, no.
   
4. Are you saying that studying classical literature will make me more intelligent, a morally better or more virtuous person, and that on such a basis I can then become a better pastor to my congregation and thus by grace better fulfill my call before God? And are you then slyly insinuating that you yourself are just such a person because, though an ignoramus by sixteenth-century standards, you may be a little further ahead in this field than some other pastors?
   
   Numbers 4a and 4b: no, no.
   
5. Are you saying that there is one ideal form and content of instruction in preparation for gospel ministry, and that you believe you have discovered it, and are prescribing it in this essay for all men who hold or desire the office of minister of Word and sacrament?
   
   Here comes five! No. But our Form of Government in Ch. XXI does specifically endorse “proficiency in the liberal arts.”
   
6. Are you aware that many of the men considered the best pastors and preachers, both within the pages of Scripture (Amos, Mark) and outside them (Bunyan, Newton), were men of little or no education, and certainly were not experts nor, so far as we know, desired to be such in the niceties of Homeric weaponry (what’s a greave?), Athenian democracy (bouleuterion), Latin meter (trochaic septenarius), etc.?
   
   Yes, I am aware.
   
7. So are you saying that the light of nature, as well as the history of the human race, and the particularities of the time and circumstances of Christ’s advent, as well as the history of both Eastern and Western churches, and particularly the history of the Protestant Reformation in its so-called Calvinist branches, as well as the example of our theological forebears in places like Heidelberg, Geneva, Edinburgh, and Cambridge, strongly tend toward the privileging of the reading of the Greco-Roman Classics as a very good preparation for and support to gospel ministry, and that while such a conclusion was merely assumed in previous generations, if we want to emulate the successes of our theological forebears, we must commit ourselves as much as possible, ceteris paribus, to emulating their system of education in preparation for ministry?
   
   Long question, Isocrates. But, yes, that is what I am saying.
   

It is quite likely that one could raise numerous other complaints and objections, and that I will not be able to anticipate all of them, no matter how carefully I have studied Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, and how well I know that the discovery of arguments requires imagination and the effort to put oneself into the sandals of the listener. But I have learned from Cicero and Quintilian about the need for a sound refutatio, anticipating the rejoinders of the hostile or irritable, and framing the debate on one’s own terms as much as possible.

Now that those preliminaries are out of the way, I would like to proceed to develop my argument along three different lines. The first line of argument is purely a historical one, and the jumping off point is Romans 2:14–15. Here Paul says,

When Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bear witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

I claim that reading of the Greco-Roman Classics can help pastors in their ministry by deeply and thoroughly acquainting them with the circumstances of Christ’s advent. Given the time in which we live, an age of much strife and contention, when everything is politicized, it is important to understand the crux of this claim. When Paul in verse 14 describes the Gentiles, he says that they do not have the Mosaic law. Nevertheless, they do φύσει, (physei) by nature, what the law requires. So they naturally know that adultery is wrong, that murder is wrong, that they should take care of their children, and so forth. And Paul says moreover that they do what the law requires. So it is a safe conclusion that although they do not understand the moral basis for these imperatives in the same way that someone with the Mosaic law does, they know nevertheless that they ought to avoid certain wrongs and seek certain rights. We must ask ourselves, however, what sorts of examples Paul had in mind when he mentions the Gentiles who naturally do what the law requires. The notion of a common human inheritance, expressed by the Roman poet Terence, for example,[1] means that it will be impossible to find a culture that is completely lacking in sound moral teaching of the sort enshrined, primarily, in the second table of the law.

But it is of course decidedly unnatural to hold that Paul had in mind Confucianism, the tenets of Buddhism, the ethical system of the Aztecs, the Iroquois, the Innuit, etc., as he knew nothing of these nations. No, undoubtedly Paul had in mind the inheritance of Greco-Roman literature. Given his quotation of the comic poet Menander (1 Cor. 15:33), as well as the philosophers Aratus (Acts 17:28) and Epimenedes (Titus 1:12), this is what we would call an open and shut case. Paul knew enough, for example, about Stoic and Epicurean philosophers to tweak his contemporaries representing those schools in Acts 17, and he likely knew enough about Plato to understand just how shocking to the Platonic mindset was the notion of a body sown corruptible being raised incorruptible (1 Cor. 15). Space does not allow a full demonstration of the fact that Homer’s epics simply were Greek education, but one can consult E. R. Dodd’s The Ancient Concept of Progress[2] to see just how Homer was the Bible for Greeks.

The point is simple: The authors of the New Testament, and Paul especially, lived and moved in a culture that was shaped by Greco-Roman influences—the literatures that animated men’s minds—more than by anything else. Therefore, no matter how interesting and useful is the study of other cultures and nations, philosophical systems and programs of ethics, the Christian generally will always have a strongly vested interest in understanding the world into which Christ was born. There is nothing prejudicial or bigoted about such a conclusion, and turning away from the study of the Greek and Roman Classics, as many are doing, would have disastrous consequences for the Christian community at large. God seems to have gone to great lengths to provide us with a considerable amount of extrabiblical material—the works of Josephus, Herodotus, Plato, Philo, Seneca, Suetonius, ad infinitum—that is eminently useful for understanding his divine oracles. It was his decision, not ours, for Christ to be born in a Judean province of the Roman Empire, where he undoubtedly learned to speak Greek, a province that had been subjugated to Macedonian rule some 300 years prior and gone through a vigorous but failed program of Hellenization under the Seleucids. It was God’s decision, not ours, that Augustus was minting coins engraved with F. Divi Iulii (son of the god Julius) at precisely the time our Savior with his pottery-smashing iron scepter was born in the most abject humility in Bethlehem.

But it is not just the world of the New Testament and the circumstances of the composition and meaning of the Gospels, letters, etc., that start to cloud up opaquely if the Christian community neglects the Greco-Roman Classics. It is also a good portion of the Old Testament as well. The books of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and part of Isaiah are much more difficult to understand without the Greek historians like Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. (But maybe Ambrose overdid it a little when he expounded Plato in Milan during sermons on Genesis? Or maybe not, as Platonism was the “worldview” of all educated persons at the time. How else to understand the cosmos?)

Christians should not feel embarrassed about their study and privileging of the Greco-Roman Classics, in the first place, as a tool for understanding God’s inspired Word. If in God’s providence, Christ had been born in another time and place (the Himalayas, Indonesia, New Mexico), we would feel a corresponding and natural affection for and devotion to the stories and culture of that setting. It is therefore not quite right to call Christian attachment to the Greco-Roman Classics a historical accident. Rather, we should realize that this is forever a part of God’s providence. And it is also very important to note that simply because, all other things being equal, one believes it is more important for a Christian to read the literature of one culture, this does not in any way entail the approval, much less adoption, of all the ideas and moral lessons of that culture, nor neglect of or contempt for other literatures and histories.

But someone at this point may object that the argument only claims the need for a general knowledge of the Greco-Roman world to exist within the broader Christian community. Why can that not be done by experts, and why should a Christian minister devote any of his time to such a study? Is that good stewardship? I will acknowledge there is some weight to this objection, so far as it goes. In the same way that the Christian minister does not need to be an expert in music—though some persons in the Christian community must be—in order for him to use music properly and well as a minister of Word and sacrament, so it is quite reasonable to think that it is fine for him to rely upon experts in Greco-Roman literature for the insights that he needs to understand and expound God’s Word.

But although the objection has some weight, it is of limited value. I take it that no one would deny that the Christian minister, as he has opportunity, should seek to grow in his knowledge of and ability with music, as he helps lead the congregation in worship. But the case for the particular literature I am advocating is even stronger, as its connection to the explanation of the sacred Word is closer. And in my experience, at least, I have not found Christian ministers generally devoted to gaining a deeper understanding of the Scriptures by reading about the context into which Christ was born, where he lived and worked, suffered, died and rose again. Instead—and this is my experience, it may not be universal—I have found that there is a general tendency to read the Scriptures in isolation. Our strong and proper belief in their divine inspiration can sometimes eclipse our appreciation for the very human circumstances of their composition, rendering us incurious. Why does Mark, for example, structure all his sentences so simply? In fact, some of his sentences, as I read them, are so simple that it is impossible to imagine a less complicated way to express these ideas in Greek (e.g., Mark 1:16b: ἦσαν γὰρ ἁλιεῖς, ēsan gar halieis, “they were fishermen”). One cannot appreciate this truth if one has not read more broadly in Greek literature of the time. And there is a very sound theological reason for Mark’s stylistic choices, quite apart from the probable historical one that Mark was a man of lower education who was relying upon the memories of another rather uneducated man, the apostle Peter. (And if someone at this point believes it sounds arrogant or disrespectful to describe Mark and Peter as uneducated, I would ask whether the questioner is unknowingly equating formal education with moral development. In other words, only if one thinks knowledge is a virtue, or that knowledge only comes from formal education, can ignorance or lack of formal education be a vice. But I do not hold those views.) The sound theological reason that Mark wrote his gospel, in some places, in the simplest Greek imaginable is so that it may be heard, understood, and read by the simplest people imaginable, who have just as much a “right unto, and interest in the Scriptures” (WCF 1.8) as the most educated person.

To summarize this line of argument is as follows: It is impossible for the Christian community as a whole, the church, to have a sound and accurate understanding of God’s Word, or at least one as deeply as we ought to and often do desire, without having a good knowledge of the circumstances of its composition, specifically Christ’s advent and earthly ministry. If no one in the Christian community has this knowledge, we are all deeply impoverished. It is right and proper that Christian ministers, whose faithfulness in ministry requires first and foremost a salubrious explanation of God’s Word, to lead the way in this project as much as they are able. If the reader can at this point feel his hackles getting up, he is encouraged to go back and read the series of objections and brief answers at the beginning of the essay.

The first argument in favor of ministers of the gospel reading the Greco-Roman Classics was an easier one to make, based as it was on a simple historical fact: Christ was born in a province of the Roman Empire where the lingua franca was Greek and where God had been, in some ways that will probably always remain mysterious to us, preparing his people, and indeed the whole world, to receive the revelation of his divine Son. But before moving to the second argument, one more example of the inextricability of Greco-Roman culture and the Christian faith is in order. It seems we can behold God’s providence quite clearly in the system of Roman roads that had been developing for a couple hundred years before Paul began walking all over creation to preach the gospel. Indeed, by 50 A.D. it was possible to walk and sail from Palestine to northern Spain, and perhaps up toward the English Channel, with fair confidence that you would not be mugged or wrongly imprisoned. This, as well as the common Greek language, explains in human terms the incredibly rapid spread of the Christian faith.

The second argument in favor of Christian ministers studying Classics centers around the diagnostic value of ancient literature. Put plainly, the Greco-Roman authors, poets, philosophers, and historians seem to have been uniquely capable of diagnosing the problem with the human condition. They did not easily confuse circumstances with character but, as in the case of Aristotle, typically identified one’s character as the sum of one’s actions (Nichomachean Ethics II.1). This, in addition to the beauty and cogency with which they described their insights and conclusions, largely accounts for their enduring nature. They seem to have known with a penetrating honesty that human nature is unbelievably elevated in aspiration and ability. It is a microcosm of the universe in its grandeur. At the same time, human nature is abysmally base in its selfishness and rapacity. A few pointed examples will suffice. The poet Ovid (43 B.C.–18 A.D.) famously puts the following Pauline words into the mouth of the murderous witch Medea, who soon kills her own children: “video meliora proboque deteriora sequor” (The better things I see, approve, the worse I yet pursue).[3] Homer, the source of all Western culture, famously sets forth the broken human condition as the first word in the first work of Western literature: wrath (μῆνιν, mēnin). It is human wrath, during the ninth year of a war of aggression, of course, occasioned by an adulterous quarrel over a stolen woman or vengeance (motives are not as clear as we would like), that arose when the gods inspired Paris to steal another man’s wife. Heraclitus had taught the Greeks about the fragility and beauty of human experience, that war “was the father of all things,” as it gave birth to poetry, beauty, deeds of bravery, and also much sorrow.[4] It was the most unnatural time, when fathers bury their sons. Greek authors had the uncanny ability to hold in their minds strongly conflicting, yet deeply honest evaluations of the human condition. Indeed, the only utopian literature of the Greek time, of which I am aware, Plato’s Republic, may never have been intended as a program for implementation, but rather as a parable of the human soul, disordered and in need of medicine. Or as Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has put it, “The early Greeks were capable of their unique achievements largely because they could bear, as their religion shows, very much more reality than most human beings.”[5]

But someone may object: “If true, isn’t this diagnostic facility and precision of Greco-Roman literature simply a trait of any good literature? So why do I need to read these particular individuals? Won’t Tolkien, Lewis, O’Brian do?” Again, this objection is coherent. However, one must remember two qualifiers: 1. Western literature itself enjoys a privileged position in the reading of the Christian minister (see the historical claims of the first argument); 2. All Western literature that follows Greco-Roman authors is highly dependent upon and derivative of them. Cases with self-evident classical themes and characters from authors like Dante, Milton, and Swift are obvious, and need no comment. But even Dostovesky’s five great novels, for example, that so brilliantly elucidate the contrast between human aspiration and deprivation, require for their full and proper appreciation an understanding that, for example, the sympathetic femme fatale, Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, is drawn after Sophocles’s heroines like Antigone. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is inconceivable without Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Dickens does not exist without the Plautine comedy. There are no speeches of Winston Churchill—no Allied victory?—without Cicero, etc. Examples of this type can be enumerated ad nauseam.

The third argument, though there may be more, concerns the entertainment value this literature provides. It should be enough to stop there. That is, the literature of the Greeks and Romans—more so in poets and orators than historians, perhaps—has survived so long because it is so endlessly interesting. Time has a sifting effect on the efforts of human artistry, and, in some wonderful providence of God, it is often the best literature that survives. This is not an argument that older is better—though advocates of stability and order, true conservatives, should be susceptible to such. Instead, it is an argument that works of human production that have survived the ravages of the ages deserve a second and even third look. The agonistic nature of literature corresponds directly to the finitude of men and the limitations and selfishness of his attention. Only the truly remarkable will continue to be valued, unearthed, and enjoyed repeatedly. In the case of Homer, men have known from the beginning that his accomplishment represents the singular phenomenon of a genre’s simultaneous invention and perfection. Indeed, contemporary classicist Barry Powell argues that the Greek script may well have been invented for the express purpose of recording Homer’s poems.[6]

Christian ministers would need to be remarkably antagonistic to the judgment of the ages, quite progressive, actually, to disregard the wealth of interesting material preserved in the Greco-Roman Classics. But, as Americans are a very practical people (the most Cartesian, De Tocqueville claims, though they have seldom read Descartes), we may extend the argument beyond the supreme entertainment value alone and add this: Great literature fires the imagination and strengthens its faculties, shaping the mind for enhanced purposes. The following are some examples: Vergil’s genius for description: Neptune stuck his calm head above the waves and surveyed the watery chaos (Aeneid I); Seneca’s unrivalled pithiness: Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdimus (“We’re not short on time but wastrels of it,” De Brevitate Vitae); Aristophanes’s biting wit in his play The Frogs: tragedians Euripides and Aeschylus weigh their verses on a scale in the underworld to see who was the “weightier” poet; Plato’s extraordinary dexterity with a chain of argument: “Is holiness loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because they love it?” (Euthyphro 10a). These examples and innumerable more demonstrate something of the strength of God’s most powerful creation, the human mind. By training one’s imagination and reasoning on the literary examples of masters, we become more capable of expressing and representing the many shades and nuances of the human experience. This is a point that has been understood, of course, from the very beginning of the church’s life, and made famous by the insights of men like Basil of Caesarea (Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature)[7] and Augustine of Hippo (City of God, passim). At the same time, we learn with Solomon of the vanity of vanities: Everything worthwhile has previously been expressed and then forgotten, only to be treated as novel once more. Again, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones shares a salutary quote:

One of the best reasons for studying the past is to protect oneself against that insularity in time which restricts the uneducated and those who write to please them. The ordinary man feels superior to the men of past ages, whose technology was inferior to what he is used to and whose ethical and political beliefs were not those which he has been taught to consider as the only right ones.[8]

Before concluding, I would like to return to the beginning of this short essay and voice another possible objection. It was not put first because some examples, snippets really, of classical literature needed to be given before this one would seem plausible. This objection originates from a dynamic that I have noticed in these sorts of discussions, at least among some readers and thinkers who consider themselves very conservative (for lack of a better term). It could be termed aesthetic subjectivism. Confessional Christians rightly reject the argument that moral disputes cannot be adjudicated simply because people disagree, or because some hold that everyone's opinion is equally valid. But they do not extend this proper resolve on moral and ethical claims to aesthetic evaluations. Instead, when it comes to evaluating different works of literature, paintings, music, and really any production of human ability and artistry, we are remarkably prepared to accept the notion that everyone’s conclusions, even if mutually exclusive, are equally valid. But it is at present impossible for me to see how this notion can be rendered consistent with Paul’s injunction in Philippians 4:8 to think on “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” If Paul’s command here is restricted to questions of morality only, then there is no problem. But if, as is usually the case, it is extended to all manner of human activity—and this seems like a natural way to think of what he says in the letter’s context—then inevitably we are required to make more than a minimalist evaluation of the relative merits of different aesthetic choices and products. It is not persuasive that Paul simply means we are to think on things that do not contain profanity, obscenity, do not incite to vice, etc. How would the categories of excellence, purity, etc., fit this mold? Rather, Paul’s instructions seem to assume gradations in quality and an obligation to make such determinations, and these are, at least in part, aesthetic, and not subjective. So, some literature is better than others. It is my contention that literature of the Greco-Roman Classics, for the reasons enumerated above, is better than other kinds of literature (this argument entails that there are also best and worst categories of literature, but I am not arguing as to those). Therefore, Christian ministers, all other things being equal, should devote some time to the study of Greco-Roman literature.

Endnotes

[1] Homo sum, humani nihil a me alieunum puto. Heauton Timorumenos, 77. “I am man, I consider nothing human alien to me.”

[2] E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1973), 142.

[3] Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.20–21.

[4] Heraclitus, Fragment 53, DK B53.

[5] Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (University of California Press, 1971), 164.

[6] Barry Powell, Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[7] Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature, edited by N. G. Wilson (Duckworth & Co., 1975).

[8] Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus, 156.

David C. Noe is the pastor of Reformation Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was formerly professor of Classics at Calvin University. Ordained Servant Online, November, 2025