I like to joke that I have not encountered an idea for which there is not a 3000-year-old example. The writer of Ecclesiastes said, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us,” (Ecclesiastes 1:9–10, ESV). While this comes from a 3000-year-old text, my conviction about its truthfulness has only grown the more I read ancient texts.
Our technologies may differ from the past. However, let me pause and note these are only enhancements of old technologies. And when you think about it, they are only extensions or imitations of engineering already found in the natural world. For example, our advances in artificial intelligence, as the name implies, is only the imitation or extension of our natural intelligence. Microscopes and telescopes only extend and enhance the technology already present in our eyes. My claim, however, is not about technology. It is about ideas, beliefs and values.
It was in reading Josephus, a first-century historian, that I saw that the ideas many of our freshman students debate about the sovereignty of God and human freewill are not substantively different from the ideas posed by their sixteenth-century namesakes (i.e., Calvin, Molina, Arminius), and are some of the very ideas that distinguished the sects of Judaism at the time of Jesus: the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes (see Josephus, "Antiquities" 13:171–172). Nothing is new!
Moreover, has the most common argument against Christianity been significantly improved upon from its ancient formulation by Epicurus in the third century BC (which comes to us by way of another dead philosopher, David Hume)? “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”1 Seems the same as what I hear today.
Reading dead people and getting a historical perspective on ideas helps us to see today’s ideas in the context of a long conversation. Ideas that seem new are actually old. Reading dead people and getting this historical perspective has alleviated much personal anxiety about certain ideas. It has also given some deeper resources to respond because our responses are not new either.