What if I told you that some of the ways we think about God, Heaven, and the Christian life didn’t actually come from Jesus—but from an ancient Greek philosopher you’ve probably never heard of?

His name was Plutarch.

You don’t need to care about ancient philosophy to feel his influence. It’s in the hymns we sing, the sermons we hear, and the quiet assumptions we make about faith:

• That God is too holy to be near.

• That Heaven is the ultimate goal.

• That our bodies are just temporary shells.

• That this world is broken and not worth saving.

But what if those ideas aren’t the whole story?

What if they’re part of a subtle distortion—one that crept into early Christianity and still shapes the way we see God, salvation, and even ourselves?

In this article, we’re going to look at how Plutarch’s philosophy got woven into the Christian imagination—and how Jesus offers a radically different, more hopeful, and more human vision.

Let’s begin.

Plutarch was a Greek philosopher, historian, and priest at Delphi. He was born in AD 46, not long after Jesus’ resurrection, and died in AD 120. While not a Christian, his ideas deeply influenced the world in which early Christianity was formed—especially in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire. Amazingly, his thinking still shapes how many of us see God and the afterlife today, even if we don’t realize it.

Plutarch was part of a movement called Middle Platonism. He took Plato’s basic ideas and mixed in elements from Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. Like Plato, he believed that the soul is immortal and existed before the body, and that after death it returns to a divine realm.

He believed the soul was good and eternal, while the body was temporary and corrupt. Spiritual things were pure. Physical things were flawed.

If you were a Platonist like Plutarch, you’d believe things like this:

• There’s one ultimate, invisible, perfect reality behind everything we see—kind of like God, or “the Good.”

• The world we live in is just a shadow or copy of that perfect world. It’s beautiful, but broken.

• Our souls come from that perfect world, and deep down, we long to go back.

• To return, we need to live wisely and grow in virtue—using reason, not emotion.

That’s Middle Platonism in a nutshell.

And that was the dominant way of thinking in the Roman world when the Church was just getting started. Once you see it, you start to notice how much of this has shaped modern Christianity:

• God is a hidden reality behind what we see.

• Heaven is the perfect world; this world is a flawed copy.

• We came from Heaven and want to go back.

• To get there, we need Jesus—and we also need to live moral lives.

It all sounds familiar, right? But here’s the thing: these ideas introduced subtle shifts that changed the way Christians talked about God, salvation, and daily life. And those shifts are still with us today.

Let’s look at two big ones.

1. God Became Inapproachable

Middle Platonism taught that behind this messy, changing world was a perfect, unchanging divine source—something like “The One” or “The Good.” Early Christians, influenced by that way of thinking, started to describe God as eternal, invisible, and beyond human understanding. Holy, yes—but also far away.

That’s ironic, because just a few decades earlier, Jesus had walked the earth.

Jesus wasn’t distant. He was “God with us.” He wasn’t abstract or unknowable. He was God in flesh and bone, laughing with friends, touching lepers, weeping at funerals. He spent time with people religious leaders called sinners. He chose outcasts and misfits to be his closest followers.

And yet today, many Christians talk about God as if He’s too holy to be near us. We picture Him in blazing, unapproachable light—so perfect He can’t stand to be in the presence of imperfect people. That sounds more like Plutarch's view of god than Jesus.

But Jesus shows us God who is relational, not removed. A Father, not a force. He says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He says, “I am in the Father, the Father is in me, and I am in you.”

The beauty—and scandal—of Christianity is that God became touchable, killable, and knowable in Jesus Christ. The tragedy of Plutarch’s influence is that it told a different story: that God is holy, yes—but too holy for us. And that’s just not what Jesus shows us.

We are made in God’s image. He loves us. And He wants to be known.

2. We’re Not Just "Going to Heaven"

Plutarch believed the soul was eternal and that the body was a temporary prison. When we die, the goal was to leave the body behind and float off to some heavenly realm.

Sound familiar?

As a kid, I remember singing the old hymn: “Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away!” That’s how a lot of us imagine the Christian story ends. Life is hard, but someday we’ll leave this world behind and go to Heaven forever.

But that’s not actually what Jesus taught.

In Matthew 19:28, Jesus talks about “the renewal of all things.” That phrase—“palingenesia”—means a new beginning. A new Genesis. Not an escape from the world, but the restoration of it.

Jesus doesn’t just promise resurrection—he demonstrates it. He rises in a real, physical body. A transformed body, yes—but still a body. He doesn’t float away to Heaven. He walks, talks, eats, and breathes.

Paul says in Romans 8 that creation itself will be liberated from decay. In Acts, Peter says Jesus will remain in Heaven “until the time for the restoration of all things.” That word—apokatastasis—means everything will be made new. Not just our souls. Not just “spiritual” stuff. Everything.

In Revelation, John doesn’t see us going up to Heaven. He sees Heaven coming down to Earth. A new city. A new creation. Heaven and Earth united at last.

David envisioned the same thing in Psalm 2: “The earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

So where did we get this idea that the world doesn’t matter and Heaven is just about escape? From thinkers like Plutarch. Not Jesus.

Why This Matters

When we believe God is distant, we start to relate to Him like a distant Father—someone we might respect, but don’t really feel close to.

And when we believe the goal is just to get to Heaven, we disconnect from life here and now. We start to believe that what we do on Earth doesn’t really matter—because it’s all going to burn anyway.

Some people respond like Stoics—rejecting pleasure and focusing only on “spiritual” things. Others become more like Epicureans—deciding to eat, drink, and enjoy life since this world is temporary.

Either way, we lose sight of something essential: that Jesus came to restore everything—not just your soul, not just your Sunday mornings, but your body, your work, your relationships, your community, and the world itself.

When Jesus teaches us to pray, He says, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” That’s not a slogan. It’s a calling. We’re invited to participate in the renewal of all things right now.

And one day, this tired and broken Earth really will be restored.

So you may never have heard of Plutarch before. That’s okay. We’re not picking on him. We’re pointing to him because he gave voice to the dominant worldview of his time—and that worldview seeped into early Christianity in ways that still linger today.

But Jesus invites us into something better.

A God who is near.

A faith that’s embodied.

A world that’s worth saving.

And a hope that doesn’t float away—but comes down to dwell among us, once and for all.

>Next Article: Meet Tertullian, The Roman Attorney Who Helped Shape the Concept of Eternal Damnation