Interspersed throughout the pages of this website is an on-going discussion of Newton’s view of the Hebrew prophet, Daniel, as a proto-scientist. The most recent Survival Praxis #30 is another deep dig. (Use the Search function on this website for more).
It is known to scholars that Isaac Newton studied ancient mythology to gain understanding and clues as to how the ancients saw and interpreted the natural phenomena of their time. For scientists, ancient records, however garbled by their authors, still remain an important “data set” by which we can interpret current measurements and observations. Newton’s friend and colleague, Edmond Halley, could not have “discovered” Halley’s Comet had he not had access to historical accounts of the comet’s previous appearances.
But first and foremost, Newton was a student of the Bible, and in particular, Daniel:
[A]mongst the old Prophets, Daniel is most distinct in order of time, and easier to be understood: and therefore in those things which relate to the last times, he must be made key to the rest. (Observations, p. 5)
And after citing Ezekiel’s adulations of him (28:3; 14:14, et al), and others of import, he summarizes:
Daniel was in the greatest credit amongst the Jews, till the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian: and to reject his Prophecies, is to reject the Christian religion. For this religion is founded upon his Prophecy concerning the Messiah. (Ibid, p. 8)
In his Principia, after acknowledging the Pythagoreans and their Greek intellectual heirs, he traces the ancient wisdom tradition – heliocentrism, the doctrine of catastrophism, etc. – to the Egyptians and the Chaldeans, whom he called not “astrologers” but “astronomers”:
“The Chaldeans, the most learned astronomers of their time,”
and of the Egyptians:
The Egyptians were early observers of the heavens; and from them, probably, this philosophy was spread abroad among other nations; for from them it was, and the nations about them, that the Greeks, a people of themselves more addicted to the study of philology than of nature, derived their first, as well as soundest, notions of philosophy; and in the vestal ceremonies we may yet trace the ancient spirit of the Egyptians; for it was their way to deliver their mysteries, that is, their philosophy of things above the vulgar way of thinking, under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols. (emphasis added)
Of Pythagoras, Clement of Alexandria has said that he learned his system from one, “Nazaratus the Assyrian” during his time in Babylon of which he denied the claim by others that he was the Prophet Ezekiel. He does not identify who this “Nazaratus” might be, but then says this:
He [Pythagoras] held converse with the chief of the Chaldeans and the Magi (Stromata), which, considering the timeline in the sixth century BC, could only have been Daniel.
Why this misdirection and obfuscation? We don’t always know. But in Clement’s time, in the age of Ptolemy, Roman flat earth cosmology, and a cloak-and-dagger war with the Davidians – association of the Wisdom Tradition with known descendants of the “king’s seed,” as was Daniel (1:3) – “science,” then as now, was considered subversive to the interests of the state. The Romans were ever on the hunt to destroy the Druids of the Celts, the Magi of the Parthians (Persians), and the Davidians (Nazareans) of the Jews. The Fathers sometimes wrote cryptically. From the times of the writers of the New Testament until Constantine, they had to know that whatever they wrote would be communicated to the Emperor’s advisors.
Then, as now, some things must be said “written between the lines.”
— JWS, January 13th, 2023
