In The Republic, written nearly 400 years before Jesus’s crucifixion, Plato describes a perfectly just man who endures scourging, torture, and a public execution that many Christians believe foreshadows the fate of Christ. Was Plato, perhaps unknowingly, given a glimpse of the Messiah’s sacrifice?
In Book II, Plato presents a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon where they explore what would happen to a perfectly just man. This occurs as part of their larger discussion about whether justice is valuable for its own sake or merely for its rewards. To test this, Glaucon proposes stripping away all external rewards from justice to examine its pure essence. Plato writes that the just man “will be scourged, tortured, bound, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every kind of suffering, he will finally be ἀνασκολοπίζω (anaskolopizō).” This Greek word is often translated as “crucified,” though it can also mean “impaled.”
The dual meaning of anaskolopizō reflects the ancient world's various methods of execution, where both crucifixion and impalement were practiced as forms of capital punishment. However, the surrounding details Plato provides – the scourging, binding, and public nature of the execution – bear striking similarities to the Gospel accounts of Christ's passion, regardless of how one interprets this specific term.
For Christian readers throughout history, these words have sent shivers down their spines. The parallels to Christ's passion are difficult to ignore: the scourging that matches Jesus's flagellation at the hands of Roman soldiers, the binding that recalls His arrest in Gethsemane, and ultimately, the public execution itself.
What makes Plato's description even more remarkable is its historical context. While both crucifixion and impalement were practiced in the ancient world, they were not yet the primary methods of execution in Plato's Greece. The detailed description of this specific form of death, combined with the emphasis on the man's perfect righteousness, creates a portrait that Christians might reasonably see as divinely inspired foreshadowing.
A Divine Preparation? Early Christian Interpretations
Early Christian theologians, particularly in the first few centuries after Christ, were amazed by these parallels. Justin Martyr, one of the most important early Christian apologists, viewed Plato's writings as evidence that God had prepared the Greek world philosophically for the coming of Christ. He developed the concept of "logos spermatikos" – the "seed of the Word" – suggesting that God had planted seeds of truth in pre-Christian philosophy that would later flower fully in Christ. He argued that Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato had access to partial truths through these "seeds of the Word", though he believed the full truth was only revealed in Christ, whom he identified as the complete Logos.
Like Justin Martyr, Saint Augustine, who was deeply influenced by Platonic thought before his conversion to Christianity, saw such philosophical foreshadowings as evidence of God's universal work in human history. He believed that truth, wherever it appeared, was God's truth, and that the Lord had used even pagan philosophy to prepare the way for the Gospel.
The Church Fathers found it particularly meaningful that the greatest philosopher of the ancient world had seemingly anticipated the core paradox of the Christian message: that the most righteous would suffer the most grievously, and that true justice might require the willing acceptance of unjust punishment. This aligned perfectly with Christian understanding of Christ's willing sacrifice for humanity's redemption. Plato describes a man who chooses to maintain his justice even when stripped of all rewards and recognition, facing death rather than compromising his principles.
The linguistic nuance of ἀνασκολοπίζω does not diminish the passage's significance. That Plato chose a term encompassing multiple forms of execution might suggest he was describing not just a specific method of death, but the broader concept of a righteous man enduring the most shameful and painful form of public execution his society could devise – exactly what crucifixion represented in Jesus's time.
We might wonder: Was Plato a prophet? Did he knowingly predict Christ's crucifixion? I would not go so far as to declare him a prophet, at least not in the traditional sense. But his writing suggests something equally fascinating - that God may have been preparing people for Christ's message in different ways throughout history. Just as Jewish prophecy prepared the Jewish people for the Messiah, perhaps Greek philosophy prepared others to understand Christ's sacrifice. Plato's description of the just man shows how philosophical thinking can point toward religious truth.
Header image source: Cornelis Engebrechtsz., CC0, via Wikimedia Commons and George E. Koronaios, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons