Did Philosophy Predict Jesus 400 Years Before the Crucifixion? The Just Man in The Republic

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]The just man will be whipped and put on the rack, will be thrown into chains and have his eyes burnt out. Finally, after all these injuries, he will be crucified.

[00:00:16]This was a phrase taken from a book written over 400 years before the estimated date of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. It comes from Plato's The Republic, book two. In a conversation where Glaucon, the brother of Plato, is having a discussion with the philosopher Socrates about justice.

[00:00:38]Glaucon begins by asking Socrates to categorize justice among three types of goods, those being intrinsic goods or things we value for their own sake, instrumental goods or things that are burdensome in and of themselves but valued for the reward such as physical fitness, taking bad tasting medicine, or working for a living. And the third category is the gray area between these two goods, things we value for both their own sake and their results, which tend toward abstract concepts such as health, intelligence, and wisdom.

[00:01:12]Socrates places justice in the gray area, which he actually calls the finest class of the three.

[00:01:19]Glaucon, however, disagrees. Glaucon believes that justice belongs to the second class and that most people view justice as a burdensome necessity.

[00:01:29]To prove that no one is just of their own accord, Glaucon tells the story of the ring of Gyges, a mythical ring which grants invisibility. He argues that if a just man and an unjust man both possessed this ring, they would follow the same path of greed and adultery for no one is just voluntarily but only under compulsion.

[00:01:54]Glaucon believes justice is nothing more than a social construct enforced by the fear of punishment or the loss of one's reputation and that an invisible man has no fear of those reprimands.

[00:02:08]At this point, the conversation turns to focus on the just man and the unjust man. In The Republic book two, paragraph 360e, Plato records Glaucon as saying, "As for the choice between the lives of the people in question, the only way we can make it properly is by contrasting the completely just man with the completely unjust man.

[00:02:31]How shall we contrast them? Like this.

[00:02:34]We will subtract nothing either from the injustice of the unjust man or from the justice of the just man. We will assume that each is a perfect example of his particular way of behaving."

[00:02:49]So, Glaucon has set up the hypothetical.

[00:02:52]The just man is perfectly just with no faults and the opposite is true of the unjust man. Glaucon continues, "So, for a start, let's make the unjust man's behavior like that of a skilled practitioner of a profession. Perfect injustice consists of appearing to be just when you are not. We must credit the completely unjust man, then, with the most complete injustice. To the person who commits the greatest wrongs, we must not deny, in fact, we must grant the enjoyment of the greatest reputation for justice.

[00:03:35]Besides him, let us put our imaginary just man, a simple and honorable man who wants, in Aeschylus's words, and Aeschylus was a Greek playwright known as the father of the genre of tragedy, a simple and honorable man who wants not to appear to be good but to be good. We must deprive him of the appearance since if he appears to be just, the appearance of justice will bring him recognition and rewards and then it will not be clear whether his motive for being just was a desire for justice or desire for the rewards and the recognition.

[00:04:15]So, we must strip him, the just man, of everything but justice. We must put him in a situation which is the opposite of our previous example. Despite doing nothing wrong, he must have the worst possible reputation for injustice.

[00:04:33]Then, if it is unaffected by disgrace and its consequences, the purity of his justice will have been tested in the fire.

[00:04:41]Let him live out his life like this without any change until the day of his death, appearing to be unjust though actually being just. That way, they can both attain the extreme, one of justice, the other of injustice, and the judgment can be made which of them is happier.

[00:05:01]And if both their situations are as I have described, it shouldn't be beyond us, I imagine, to give a full account of the kind of life which awaits each of them. So, that is what I must do now.

[00:05:14]And if my language is rather crude and uncivilized, Socrates, don't imagine it's me talking. No, it's the people who recommend injustice in preference to justice. They will claim that in this situation, the just man will be whipped and put on the rack, will be thrown into chains and have his eyes burnt out.

[00:05:35]Finally, after all these injuries, he will [music] be crucified and realize that the important thing to aim for is not being just but appearing to be just.

[00:05:49]So, this passage is a rather heavy one to unpack. The most crucial component of our understanding is whether or not the term crucified is truly the word Plato used. The original Greek word here was anaskinduleuthesetai and apologies if my pronunciation is off point. This word is defined as to be impaled or fixed on a pole or stake. It is almost identical to the Greek term for impale. The word is actually closer to the ancient Persian punishment of impalement, which we can be particularly sure of because the historian Herodotus uses similar verbs to describe Persian executions and the Athenian punishment of fastening a criminal to a wooden board or pole to hang until death. So, technically, the philosophers are not talking about crucifixion, at least in so far as the exact method of execution Christ suffered, particularly because this is happening centuries before the Roman punishment using the cross was even invented. Still, there is a clear and striking parallel to actual crucifixion, which is why older English translations from the 19th century use the term crucified. They're trying to convey the concept of public, humiliating, torturous execution on wood to a Christian English audience.

[00:07:04]But these translators aren't misrepresenting the words of Glaucon. In fact, they're pulling on a train of thought that has quite profoundly struck various other figures throughout history. Because this thought experiment exists within a larger dialectic. It is a hypothetical, after all. The list of crude tortures, whipping, racking, binding, eye burning, and impalement is deliberately describing the world's hostility to true justice. Justice, as Glaucon says, seems self-defeating. It seems easier to appear to be just than to be truly just.

[00:07:39]Yet, in the hypothetical of the just man, we find a parallel to the life of the only truly and wholly just man in history, Christ.

[00:07:51]This passage from The Republic does not predict or prophesy Christ, but if we are to believe the writings of the early church father Clement of Alexandria, Plato all but predicts the history of salvation.

[00:08:04]Early Christians who were familiar with Plato believed that this discussion was logos or divine reason at work in pagan philosophy, preparing the way for the gospel. Not only does it mirror the passion of the Christ, but it also bears a resemblance to Isaiah 53. "Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness. And when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not.

[00:08:50]Surely, he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet, we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes, we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted. Yet, he opened not his mouth. He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment. And who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death.

[00:09:43]Because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put him to grief when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin. He shall see his seed. he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

[00:10:04]In his book City of God, St. Augustine sees Glaucon's just man as emblematic of Christ.

[00:10:11]He also says that the Platonists seek the same goal of ultimate good and light, but lack the means of Christ to achieve their goal.

[00:10:20]Philosophy yields knowledge, something the early Christians believed as they preserved many of the philosophical texts we have today.

[00:10:28]But only Christ brings true wisdom. St. Augustine actually directly credits Platonic philosophy for pushing him along his journey beyond materialism and toward the search for greater transcendent virtue. But of course, the destination of his journey was Christ and not Athens.

[00:10:46]We see a similar interpretation of philosophy from Thomas Aquinas, though he was more of an Aristotelian. Aquinas viewed philosophy as a vital but subordinate science that participates in the infinite and divine reason of God.

[00:11:00]On this passage directly once again, the infamous author C.S. Lewis directly stated in his book Reflections on the Psalms that Plato is talking and he knows he is talking about the fate of goodness in a wicked and misunderstanding world. But that is not something simply other than the passion of Christ. It is the very same thing of which the passion is the supreme illustration.

[00:11:25]If Plato was in some measure moved to write about it by the recent death, we may almost say the martyrdom of his master Socrates, then that again is not simply something other than the passion of Christ. The imperfect, yet very venerable goodness of Socrates led to the easy death of the hemlock and the perfect goodness of Christ led to the death of the cross, not by chance but for the same reason, because goodness is what it is and because the fallen world is what it is. If Plato, starting from one example and from his insight into the nature of goodness and the nature of the world, was led to see the possibility of a perfect example and thus to depict something extremely like the passion of Christ, this happened not because he was lucky, but because he was wise.

[00:12:17]To Lewis, Christianity is the myth become fact, and that what the philosophers dreamt up was actualized by the cross. It's a fiction.

[00:12:26]Philosophy anticipated and groped toward the suffering of the perfect man as a logical necessity, yet they did so in the dark because Christ fulfilled and judged, such that this philosophical question that seemed tragic became the ultimate good.

[00:12:42]Of course, the Christian understands that persecution and suffering are to be expected as natural consequences of following the example and life of Christ. Socrates spends the rest of his The Republic showing that justice harmonizes the soul and that even though the just man has suffered, to be just puts him at peace regardless.

[00:13:06]To the Christian, this is Christ's victory even in apparent defeat.

[00:13:13]The passage on the just man is again not a prophecy in the classical sense. After all, none of these Greek philosophers were Hebrews nor prophets, but it is a masterful philosophical exercise that by pure reason arrives at the foot of the cross.

[00:13:30]The world crucified the just man, yet in his death and resurrection, he was victorious and set an example for us to follow.

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