Justified True Belief

(●) He wrote nothing that survives, and the conviction that the universe is built to a number has never left us since. + Everybody meets him at about thirteen, in a geometry lesson, as the name attached to a rule about triangles. That is the smallest thing about him. Pythagoras founded a community in southern Italy that shared its property, kept silence, put hard limits on what its members were allowed to eat, and believed that a human soul had lived before and would live again; and out of that community came the idea that the order of the world can be written down as a ratio, which is the idea every physics department still runs on. Getting at the man is genuinely hard, and the difficulty has to be said at the start rather than tucked away. He left no book. The two full biographies of him, by Porphyry and Iamblichus, were written around eight hundred years after his death by philosophers who wanted him to have been a saint, which is roughly the distance between us and the Crusades. What survives from close to his own lifetime is a handful of remarks, and the earliest of them is a joke: the poet Xenophanes, a near contemporary born on the same stretch of Ionian coast, told a story about Pythagoras stopping a man from beating a puppy because he recognised the yelp of a dead friend. So the first thing on record about one of the most influential teachers the Greek world produced is somebody making fun of him. He is on a Christian shelf for four reasons, and none of them is the triangle. He is among the first Greeks on record insisting that a person is a soul rather than a body, and that what you do now has consequences after you die. His school fastened onto the strangest fact about the natural world, that it answers to mathematics at all. He gave the Greek world its first community living a shared life under a rule, eight centuries before the first Christian monastery. And he is the man who, asked what he was, is supposed to have refused to be called wise and coined a humbler word instead: philosopher, a lover of wisdom.

(●) c. 570 BC: Born on Samos, to a father who cut gems for a living. + The date is a reconstruction and should be read as one. Ancient chronographers worked backwards from a floruit, the year a man was reckoned to be at his peak, conventionally set at forty; put his move to Italy at about 530 BC and you get a birth around 570. Diogenes Laertius, who compiled his life of Pythagoras in the third century AD, names the father as Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver, and then does what he does all through the book: he sets two accounts of the family side by side and declines to choose between them. On Hermippus’ authority Mnesarchus was a Samian, a local man. On Aristoxenus’ he was a Tyrrhenian, which is the Greek word for an Etruscan, and came from one of the islands the Athenians took over after driving the Tyrrhenians out of them. Porphyry adds a third version, from a writer called Neanthes, making Mnesarchus a Syrian out of Tyre who came to Samos in a famine and was given citizenship there. Three stories, three homelands, and no way left to settle which of them a boy born around 570 BC would have called home. A gem-engraver is worth pausing on. He cuts a design into a stone the width of a fingernail, and the work is done by measurement and proportion, because a line half a hair too deep cannot be undone. It is not a bad trade for a boy to grow up watching if he is going to spend his life saying that the world is held together by ratios. Samos in those years was a place where measurement was taken seriously. In the decades while Pythagoras was living there the island’s engineers drove a tunnel 1,036 metres through a mountain to bring water into the town, starting from both ends at once and meeting in the middle with a mismatch small enough to be measured in centimetres. Herodotus, writing a century later, counted it among the three greatest works of all the Greeks, and named the engineer: Eupalinos son of Naustrophus, a Megarian. Across a narrow strait lay Miletus, where Thales and Anaximander had begun asking what everything is made of. Pythagoras grew up within sight of the first generation of men who had decided that the world could be explained rather than only sung about.

(●) c. 530 BC: At about forty he left Samos for good, and the sources say a tyrant was the reason. + Samos was ruled by Polycrates, a spectacularly successful pirate-king with a navy of a hundred ships, a taste for artists, and a habit of executing anyone who looked like a rival. The main accounts give the tyranny as the reason, and the earliest of them is the best: Aristoxenus, writing in the fourth century BC, says that at forty Pythagoras saw the rule of Polycrates growing too violent for a free man to live under, and left for Italy. He sailed west to Croton, a Greek city on the instep of the Italian boot, and never came back. The years before that are where the biography turns into legend, and it is worth marking the line. That he travelled to Egypt is asserted first by Isocrates about a century and a half later, and after that by everyone; that he also studied with Babylonian priests, Persian Magi (the priestly class of Persian religion, and the same Greek word that gives the New Testament its wise men from the east), Arabian kings, Jewish scholars and Celtic druids is the kind of claim that grows in the telling, and it grew enormously. The honest position is that a Samian merchant’s son in the sixth century BC could easily have seen Egypt, that Egyptian priests did teach a doctrine of the soul’s survival, and that no source close to his lifetime tells us what he did there. Why Croton? It was rich, it was famous for its doctors, and it was famous for its athletes: Milo of Croton, the strongest man in the Greek world, won the Olympic wrestling crown six times, and the later tradition makes him a Pythagorean whose house was where the school met. A city that already believed in training the body was perhaps ready to hear a man who proposed to train the soul.

(●) c. 530 BC onward: At Croton he founded not a school but a way of life, with a rule and a probation. + What he set up has no earlier parallel in the Greek world. It was not a lecture hall you attended; it was a household you joined, and joining cost you rather more than money. Diogenes Laertius reports that candidates handed their property into a common fund and then kept silence for five years, listening to him without ever being allowed to see him, and were admitted to the house and to his presence only after they had passed an examination. It is Iamblichus, writing much later and much more warmly, who supplies the curtain he is supposed to have spoken from behind, and who says that a candidate who failed was sent away with twice what he had brought in, while the members raised a tombstone for him and thereafter treated him as dead. Members lived under a body of rules called akousmata, which simply means "things heard": short commands handed on by word of mouth, with no explanation attached to them. A good many are moral and unremarkable once somebody tells you what they are for, and Diogenes Laertius hands on the decoding along with the rule. Do not step over the beam of a balance, meaning do not overstep the bounds of fairness. Do not help a man off with a load; help him on. Others are dietary, and the strangest of those is the one everybody remembers, the prohibition on beans, for which the ancient sources offer half a dozen incompatible explanations and had clearly stopped knowing the reason themselves. Meat was restricted or refused outright, and that one is not squeamishness at all: it follows straight from what he taught about the soul (T1), because of what the animal on the table might turn out to be. Two details are worth holding on to. Women were admitted as members, which was close to unheard of, and one of them, Theano, is remembered by name as his wife or his student and possibly both. And the community held a daily habit of accounting: coming back through his own door, each member was to go back over the day and ask what he had done wrong, what he had got right, and what he had left undone. More than eight centuries before the first Christian monastic rule was written, the shape of one was already in place.

(●) c. 510 BC: The brotherhood took hold of the city’s politics, won a war, and made the enemies that killed it. + A society of men who share their money, keep each other’s secrets and obey a single teacher is a religious order from the inside and a political faction from the outside, and in Croton it became both. Pythagoreans took the leading offices. In about 510 BC Croton went to war with its neighbour Sybaris, a city so wealthy that its name has meant self-indulgence ever since, and destroyed it utterly; Diodorus Siculus says Milo the wrestler led the army, wearing his Olympic crowns and got up as Heracles with a lion skin and a club. Victory is what finished them. There was land to distribute and a constitution to revise, and a brotherhood that decided such things among itself, behind a closed door, looked to everyone else exactly like what it was. The sources name a wealthy Crotonian called Cylon who applied for membership and was refused, on the ground that he was unfit for it, and who spent the rest of his life organising the resentment of everyone else who had been kept outside. It is the oldest problem with a holy society. The discipline that makes the members serious about the truth is the same discipline that makes the city outside certain they are being governed by a secret.

(●) c. 500 – 490 BC: A mob burned the house where the brotherhood met, and the sources cannot agree how he died. + The end of the brotherhood is better attested than the end of the man, and on the one point the sources agree: a meeting-house was set on fire with the members inside it, and most of them died. Diogenes Laertius puts the fire at Milo’s house and blames a man who had been judged unfit to be admitted. After that the accounts scatter, and Diogenes sets three of them side by side without choosing between them. - He escaped the burning house, came to a field of beans, stopped rather than trample the crop his own rule forbade him to touch, and was cut down there by his pursuers. He would rather be caught, the story says, than cross it. - Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle and one of the earlier witnesses, has him reach Metapontum up the coast, take refuge in the temple of the Muses, and starve there over forty days. - Hermippus puts him in a battle between Agrigentum and Syracuse, killed while avoiding a bean field as the line broke. The first version is too neat to trust and the third belongs to the wrong war. Dicaearchus is the soberest and the earliest, and Metapontum is where the tomb was afterwards shown, so an old man dying of exhaustion and grief in a foreign town is the likeliest thing that happened. That the ancient world preferred to tell it with the beans says something about how he was already remembered by then: as a man whose rules were not negotiable, even at the edge of a field with men behind him.

(●) After his death: His followers split over what he had actually taught, and both halves survived him. + Within a generation or two the movement had divided into two parties who each claimed him. The akousmatikoi, the hearers, kept the rules and the silence and held that the master’s sayings were to be obeyed, not investigated. The mathematikoi, the learners (the word behind "mathematics" simply means the things that get learned), pursued the arithmetic, the geometry, the astronomy and the music, and were regarded by the hearers as having dropped the religion and kept the sums. The quarrel was not symmetrical. Iamblichus reports that the hearers denied the learners were Pythagoreans at all and traced their mathematics to a member named Hippasus instead, while the learners allowed that the hearers were Pythagoreans and thought themselves the better sort. Both were right about themselves. It is from the second party that the written record begins. Philolaus of Croton, in the second half of the fifth century BC, was on Diogenes Laertius’ account the first Pythagorean to publish a book, and the fragments of it are the earliest Pythagorean writing anyone has. Plato was accused in antiquity of buying that book and building the Timaeus out of it, which is unfair to Plato and a fair measure of how much he owed the school; he had certainly been to southern Italy, and the mathematics and the immortal soul he came home with never left him. The name kept its power for a very long time. A young Roman lawyer travelling in southern Italy stopped at Metapontum and would not turn aside to the house where he was lodging until somebody had shown him the place where Pythagoras died and the seat the man used to sit in. He tells it on himself, in a dialogue he set in 79 BC and wrote thirty-four years later, in the middle of a conversation about why places move us the way they do. His name was Cicero.

What He Taught

(T1) The soul does not die with the body, and it comes back wearing something else. + A farmer buys an ox, works it for six years, and one evening finds himself wondering, seriously rather than sentimentally, who is in there. That is close to what Pythagoras taught, and to Greek ears it was outlandish. The technical word is metempsychosis, from the Greek for "the soul changing over": the belief that at death a soul leaves one body and enters another, human or animal, and that this has happened many times before and will happen again. Xenophanes, who was alive at the same time as he was, already reports it as the thing Pythagoras was known for, and reports it as a joke (Q). Empedocles, a generation later, wrote of a man of superhuman knowledge who could reach back across ten or twenty lifetimes of men and see everything that is; Timaeus of Tauromenium took the lines as a portrait of Pythagoras, though Diogenes Laertius notes in the same breath that others read them as a portrait of Parmenides. The doctrine explains the diet: if the soul in the ox may once have been your neighbour, killing it for dinner is a different kind of act. Two consequences follow, and they are why he matters here. The first is that a human being is not identical with the body, so death is not the end of the person, and how you live now settles something that outlasts you. Before Pythagoras, the standard Greek picture of the afterlife was Homer’s: a grey twilight full of witless shades, where Achilles says he would rather be a hired labourer alive than king of all the dead. Pythagoras replaced that with a soul that is more real than the body and is going somewhere. Plato took it from him, the whole later tradition took it from Plato, and Christian thought inherited the question already framed. The second consequence is where Christians stop. Coming back is not resurrection. On the wheel of rebirth there is no single life to be judged, no body to be raised, and no end to the process except escape from it. Scripture puts one life on the table and a court at the end of it: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). The hope it offers is not a soul travelling on into another animal but a body raised, which is a stranger promise and a better one.

(Q) "Stay, smite not! ’Tis a friend, a human soul; I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp!" + Source: Xenophanes, elegiac fragment, quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VIII.36 (Hicks translation). Pythagoras is walking past a man beating a puppy, and stops him. Hicks renders the verse in a deliberately archaic English: "whenas" is simply "when", and "a friend, a human soul" is the point of the whole story, that the yelping animal is somebody he used to know. This is the earliest surviving mention of Pythagoras by name, and it is mockery. Xenophanes was born on the same Ionian coast at about the same time, perhaps a decade or so later, and spent his life attacking Greek religion for making gods in the image of men; he clearly found the dead friend in the dog ridiculous. It is worth noticing what the mockery concedes. Inside his own lifetime, the one thing everybody knew about Pythagoras was that he taught the soul’s survival and its return (T1).

(T2) The world has a structure you can count, and a plucked string is the proof. + Stretch a string, pluck it, and listen. Now stop it exactly halfway and pluck again: the note that comes out is the same note, higher. Not a similar note, the same one, which is why a man and a boy singing the same tune an octave apart sound like one melody rather than two. Stop the string at two-thirds of its length and you get the interval musicians call a fifth, the sound of a bagpipe drone under a tune. At three-quarters you get a fourth. The three sounds that Greek ears found most agreeable turned out to be the three simplest ratios there are: 2:1, 3:2, 4:3. This is the discovery the Pythagoreans built everything on, and it is a genuinely astonishing thing to have found. Beauty in sound, which feels like the most private and unmeasurable thing in the world, is a matter of small whole numbers. Whether the man himself found it is past settling: the ancient stories of how he did it describe procedures that would not in fact work, and Aristotle credits the ratios to the school rather than to him. The four numbers that generate all three ratios are 1, 2, 3 and 4, and their sum is 10; the brotherhood arranged those ten as a triangle of dots, four along the bottom, then three, then two, then one, called the figure the tetractys, and swore their oaths by it. From there they generalised, and the generalisation is what Aristotle records (Q). If number is what makes sound beautiful, perhaps number is what makes anything anything: the heavens moving in ratios like a scale being played, the soul itself a kind of tuning. Some of what they built on that was numerology and some of it was astronomy, and the school never sorted the two apart. The honest verdict is that they overreached spectacularly and were pointing at something real. The something real is still there and is still strange. Nobody has explained why the physical world should answer to mathematics at all, why relationships worked out on paper by people thinking about nothing in particular should turn out, centuries later, to describe how planets move or how atoms hold together. That the universe is written in a language the mind can read is the oldest evidence there is that it was meant to be read.

(Q) "The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this study, but also having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things." + Source: Aristotle, Metaphysics I.5, 985b23 (Ross translation). Aristotle is surveying his predecessors before setting out his own account, and this is the most careful ancient testimony there is about the school. He goes on in the same sentence, a few lines further down at 986a2, to say that because they saw the ratios of the musical scales expressible in numbers, "they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number." The phrase "so-called" is Aristotle being scrupulous rather than sneering. Writing about a century and a half after Pythagoras died, he already could not tell which doctrines came from the man and which from the movement, and he refuses to pretend otherwise: throughout his discussion he says "the Pythagoreans" and almost never "Pythagoras". That caution is the right model for anyone writing about him (T2).

(T3) Philosophy is a common life under a rule, not an opinion held alone. + Ask most people what a philosopher does and they will describe a solitary activity: a man in a chair, thinking. That is not what the word meant when it was invented. Pythagoras made philosophy something you moved house for. The members at Croton pooled what they owned, ate the same restricted food, kept silence at the same hours, examined their consciences at the same point in the same day, and understood all of it as one practice with one aim, the purification of a soul that was going to outlive the arrangement (T1). The maxim that came out of it, "friends have all things in common", passed into Greek proverb and stayed there. Its companion, that friendship is equality, is the sharper of the two: a shared purse is a claim that the difference between a rich member and a poor one has stopped mattering. Christian readers will hear something familiar, and should hear it carefully. When the church in Jerusalem began, "no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common" (Acts 4:32). Five centuries later Benedict of Nursia wrote a rule for monasteries built on common property, fixed hours, silence and a probation for newcomers, and the ancestry of that shape runs back through the Greek philosophical schools to Croton. The likeness is real and it is not agreement. What holds the Pythagorean house together is a rule and an oath sworn to a teacher; what holds the Jerusalem church together is a person its members claim to have watched die and then eaten breakfast with. And the two communities face opposite directions at the door. Croton had a five-year silence, an examination, and a wall around what members were told. The church was under orders to go outside and say it to everyone: "What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops" (Matthew 10:27).

(Q) "Friends have all things in common." + Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VIII.10 (Hicks translation). Diogenes has it from the historian Timaeus of Tauromenium, who said Pythagoras was the first man to say it, and pairs it with a second maxim, that friendship is equality. The same section reports the arrangement the two maxims describe: property handed into a common fund, and a five-year silence before a candidate was admitted to the house. By the fourth century the words were common property. Plato quotes them as a proverb in the Republic, Aristotle repeats them in the Nicomachean Ethics, and neither man feels any need to explain where they came from (T3).

(T4) No human being is wise; the most a person can be is a lover of wisdom. + Before him, the word for a man of outstanding understanding was sophos, a sage, and Greece kept a list of seven of them. It is a title, and titles are awarded. The story the ancients told is that Pythagoras refused it. Asked by Leon, the ruler of Phlius, what he was, he would not say a wise man; he said philosophos, a lover of wisdom, and the word he is supposed to have coined that afternoon is the one the discipline has carried ever since (Q). He explained himself, according to Diogenes Laertius and at greater length in Cicero’s version, with a picture drawn from the one event every Greek knew. To the great games three kinds of people come. Some come to compete for the crown. Some come to sell things to the crowd. And some come only to watch, which is the best of the three, because they want nothing out of the day except to see what happens. Life is the same festival: most people are there for the prize or the profit, and the philosopher is the one who came to look. Whether the exchange with Leon happened is beyond checking, and the trail runs back only as far as Heraclides of Pontus, who studied under Plato and put the story into a dialogue of his own more than a century after Pythagoras died. Cicero has it from Heraclides four and a half centuries after the fact, and Diogenes Laertius later still. What is not in doubt is that the distinction stuck, and that it is a distinction about humility. To call yourself wise is to say the search is over. To call yourself a lover of wisdom is to admit that you do not have the thing you are after, that it is greater than you, and that you will die still wanting it. Christian writers found that a very congenial admission, and Augustine repeats the story approvingly in the City of God, adding that to profess oneself a sage seemed to Pythagoras the height of arrogance.

(Q) "When Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked him who he was, he said, ‘A philosopher.’" + Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VIII.8 (Hicks translation). Phlius was a small city near Corinth, and "tyrant" in Greek means a ruler who took power outside the normal constitution, without the modern sense of cruelty. Cicero, telling the same story in the Tusculan Disputations, calls Leon the leading man of the Phliasians instead. Diogenes credits his version to Sosicrates, a writer of the second century BC; Cicero credits his to Heraclides of Pontus, a pupil of Plato. The reply is where the ancient world thought the word came from, which is not the same as knowing that it did. What is certain is that the comparison of life to the great festival games follows immediately after it in the same section (T4).

(Q) "Where did I trespass? What did I achieve? And unfulfilled what duties did I leave?" + Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VIII.22 (Hicks translation), giving the three questions in verse. This is the community’s daily discipline, and Diogenes sets it at the doorway: every member was to say the lines on coming in through his own door, going back over the day and answering three questions about it, in order. Where was I in the wrong. What did I get right. What did I fail to do that I should have done. The same three questions, in the same order, turn up in the Golden Verses, a Pythagorean poem of much later date, which moves the accounting to the last waking moment and tells the reader not to let sleep close his eyes until he has done it. From there they pass into the Roman moralists and then into Christian practice as the examination of conscience. A Stoic doing it in the first century, a monk doing it in the sixth, and a believer doing it tonight are all keeping a rule first written for a house in Croton.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The fathers read him as a pagan who had overheard something true, and some of them thought they knew where. + A Christian teacher in the second century arguing with educated Greeks had a problem and an opportunity. The problem was that the gospel looked new, and in the ancient world new was an insult. The opportunity was that the best pagan thought agreed with Christians on a surprising number of points, and Pythagoras agreed on the ones that mattered most: that the soul outlives the body, that the body’s appetites need discipline, that the universe is ordered rather than random, and that a human being should not call himself wise. Clement of Alexandria, who ran a Christian school in Egypt around AD 200, went at this hardest. Philosophy, he argued, had been given to the Greeks as a tutor to bring them to Christ, in the way the Law had been given to the Hebrews, and he quotes Pythagorean sayings all through the Stromata, sometimes decoding the odder ones as moral instruction in disguise. Behind that reading lies what theologians call general revelation: the knowledge of God genuinely available to anyone through creation, conscience and reason, as distinct from the special revelation given in Scripture. Paul assumes it on Mars Hill when he quotes Greek poets back to Greek philosophers (Acts 17:22-31). Some went further and claimed a borrowing. The Jewish philosopher Aristobulus, in the second century BC, argued that Pythagoras had taken doctrines from the books of Moses, and Clement and then Eusebius of Caesarea repeated it approvingly; Eusebius devotes long stretches of the Preparation for the Gospel to the case. It is almost certainly false, and the dates are what sink it. Nothing of Moses existed in Greek in his lifetime, or for a long while after it: the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jewish scholars in Alexandria, began with those five books about two and a half centuries after Pythagoras died. No source from anywhere near his own lifetime knows of such a debt; the earliest claim of one comes from the biographer Hermippus of Smyrna, roughly three centuries after the fact, and it survives only because Josephus was glad to quote it. The argument lasted because it was useful rather than because anybody checked it. Not everyone was admiring. Hippolytus, a Roman churchman of the early third century, opened his Refutation of All Heresies by tracing what he regarded as the heretics’ systems back to the philosophers, and laid the number-speculation of the gnostic teacher Valentinus squarely at Pythagoras’ door. Augustine, writing two centuries later, took the calmer view: he set Pythagoras at the head of the Italian school of philosophy, told the story of the coining of "philosopher" with evident approval, and left the rest without a verdict.

(†) His ratios became the shape of Christian education for a thousand years. + This is the piece of him that had the longest run, and it happened almost by accident. Around AD 500 a Roman senator named Boethius, a Christian who would be executed by his Gothic king within a few decades, set out to translate the Greek learning into Latin before it was lost. His textbooks on arithmetic and on music are Pythagorean from the first page, and it is in the arithmetic that he coins the name for the four mathematical disciplines: the quadrivium, the fourfold road, meaning arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The cathedral schools and then the medieval universities taught those four out of his books, on the stated ground that a mind trained on number is being trained to see something above number. His music book carries the legend that fixed the story in the medieval imagination: Pythagoras walking past a smithy, noticing that the hammers rang at intervals, and finding on investigation that their weights stood in the ratios 2:1, 3:2 and 4:3. The story is charming and physically impossible, since a hammer’s pitch does not vary with its weight in anything like that way. What it preserves is the real discovery under it, which anyone can check on a string (T2). The theology that grew around this is worth stating plainly, because it is not Pythagorean. Augustine wrote six books on music, five of them on rhythm and metre and the last one turning the whole apparatus toward God, and his interest there is that number is a thing God thought before the world had it. Measure, number and weight are how the Latin Bible he used describes the making of the world, in a verse from the book of Wisdom, one of the books his Bible carried that the Hebrew Scriptures do not, and he quoted it all his life. Order in the cosmos is then not a bare fact but a signature, and Scripture speaks that way without apology. "Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?" (Isaiah 40:12). "He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names" (Psalm 147:4). The line runs on past the Middle Ages. Johannes Kepler, a devout Lutheran, called the book he thought his best the Harmony of the World, worked out the ratios of the planetary motions as intervals of a scale, and closed it with a prayer thanking the Creator for what he had been allowed to see in the works of his hands. And the puzzle the Pythagoreans stumbled into is not closed: in 1960 the physicist Eugene Wigner published a famous essay on what he called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, arguing that there is no explanation from within science for why the world should be describable this way at all. His last word on it was that the fit between mathematics and physical law is "a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve", which is close to a theological sentence and was written by a man who did not intend one.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the wheel of rebirth, a salvation built out of rules, and a truth kept for members. + The other column of the ledger, drawn from what he taught and what his own community did. - Rebirth against resurrection. He taught a soul passing from body to body without end, and escape from the cycle as the goal (T1). Scripture gives one life, one death and a judgment: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). And the Christian hope is the opposite motion from his. He wanted the soul free of the body; the gospel promises the body back, raised, because it was good in the first place (1 Corinthians 15:20). - Purity by rule. The Pythagorean way up was diet, silence, and a list of things not to touch. Paul knows this kind of religion and names it exactly: "Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch", rules that "have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh" (Colossians 2:21, 23). The problem is not that the rules are hard. It is that the thing wrong with a person is further in than any rule reaches. - A truth for members only. Five years of silence, an oath, a curtain, and doctrines that outsiders were not told. Set against it the plainest sentence Jesus spoke about his own method, under interrogation, with his life on the line: "I have said nothing in secret" (John 18:20). A gospel that has to be earned by initiation is a different kind of thing from one announced to shepherds. - Number is not a person. Grant the whole Pythagorean insight, that the world is ordered by ratio and proportion, and you still have a structure rather than someone. A ratio does not forgive anybody. The Christian claim is not that the order is an illusion but that it is authored, and that the author is the one Isaiah describes weighing the mountains in scales (Isaiah 40:12). He is worth the shelf anyway, and the church has always thought so. A man who told the Greeks that the soul is the real self, that the world is ordered rather than arbitrary, and that no human being should call himself wise, was standing a long way further up the road than most of his neighbours. He simply had no way of knowing that the road ends at a person.