Last updated: November 3, 2026

Plato was not a Christian, and he could not have been. He lived from about 428 to 348 BC, roughly four centuries before Jesus was born, and he practised the religion of classical Athens, with its many gods, temples and sacrifices. Yet his philosophy shaped Christianity more than that of any other thinker outside the Bible. Through Jewish writers in Alexandria, through the early Church Fathers and above all through Augustine, Platonic ideas about the soul, eternal truth and a perfect Good became part of how Christians described God.

So the honest answer to “was Plato a Christian?” is no, followed by a long and rather wonderful “but”. That “but” is what this post is about.

A Cat Who Was Already Fishing

The meme above tells the story in three panels. A cat labelled Plato sits by the water with his rod and his bucket, minding his own business. In the second panel he is still fishing, alone. In the third another cat, labelled Early Christianity, has sat down right next to him, dipping its line into the same pond. Nobody asked Plato. He was simply there first, with the best spot on the bank.

The fishing is not an accident either. Several of Jesus’ first disciples were fishermen from Galilee, and he promised to make them “fishers of men”. Within a few generations their movement had spread into a Mediterranean world where educated people did not ask “what does the prophet say?” but “what is the argument?”. To answer them, Christians needed a vocabulary for God, the soul and truth that Greeks would recognise, and the richest one lying around belonged to a philosopher who had been dead for centuries.

What Plato Actually Believed About the Gods

People who ask whether Plato believed in God usually picture a choice between a Christian believer and a modern atheist. Plato was neither. He grew up with the gods of Homer, the festivals of Athens and the temples on the Acropolis, and his teacher Socrates was executed in 399 BC on a charge of impiety, of not honouring the city’s gods and corrupting the young, a story told in Did Democracy Kill Socrates?. In Plato’s account of Socrates’ last hour, the dying man reminds his friend that they owe a rooster to Asclepius, the god of healing. Whatever that line means, it is not the sentence of an atheist.

But Plato’s gods were not Homer’s gods. In the Republic he complains that the poets tell scandalous stories about divine adultery, theft and revenge, and he insists that a god must be good, must never change and must never lie. In the Euthyphro Socrates asks a question that still troubles theologians: is something holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy? That kind of relentless questioning is the subject of The Socratic Method Explained. And in the Timaeus the visible world is made by a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who looks to eternal patterns and shapes a good copy of them out of disorder.

Above all the gods stands something that is not a god in the usual sense: the Form of the Good, which in the Republic plays the role of the sun, making everything else knowable and giving it its being. Plato also argued in his last work, the Laws, that the gods exist, that they care about human beings and that they cannot be bribed, and he proposed punishments for open atheism. So did Plato believe in God? He believed in gods, in a divine craftsman and in a supreme Good, but in nothing like the personal God of Abraham who speaks, makes covenants and becomes human. If you want the background to the Good and the Forms, start with Plato’s Theory of Forms Explained.

Everyone Spoke Greek

By the time Jesus was born, Plato had been dead for over three hundred years, and his ideas had travelled. Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century BC carried Greek language and culture from Egypt to the edge of India, and for centuries afterwards Greek was the language of trade, science and philosophy across the eastern Mediterranean. Jews in Alexandria translated their scriptures into Greek, the version known as the Septuagint, and some of them read Plato with enthusiasm.

The most important of these readers was Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who lived at the same time as Jesus and Paul and who could call Plato “most holy”. Philo argued that Moses was the greatest of all philosophers and that the Greeks had taken their best ideas from him, and he read the Hebrew scriptures as allegories full of Platonic truths. He also made heavy use of the Greek word logos, reason or word, for the way God orders and reaches the world. When the Gospel of John opens a few decades later with “In the beginning was the Word”, the Greek is logos, and educated readers would have heard philosophy in it.

Paul himself, according to the Acts of the Apostles, preached to Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus and quoted a Greek poet to them: “For we are also his offspring.” Christianity was born Jewish, but it grew up in a Greek speaking house.

A Philosopher in a Cloak

The first Christian who openly wore his Platonism was Justin, later called Justin Martyr, born around 100 AD in Samaria. In his Dialogue with Trypho he tells how he went shopping for a philosophy. A Stoic teacher could not tell him anything about God, a Peripatetic wanted his fee settled first, and a Pythagorean sent him away because he had not studied music, astronomy and geometry. Then he found the Platonists, and it was love at first lecture: “the perception of immaterial things quite overpowered me, and the contemplation of ideas furnished my mind with wings, so that in a little while I supposed that I had become wise.”

An old man he met by the sea told him that the Hebrew prophets knew more than the philosophers, and Justin converted. But he never took off his philosopher’s cloak. He taught in Rome and argued that Christianity was the true philosophy, and he made a remarkably generous claim. The divine Logos, he said, had planted seeds of truth in every human being, so that those who lived by reason were in a sense Christians before Christ, and he named Socrates and Heraclitus among them. For an educated pagan this was a very different pitch from “abandon everything you know”. It said: everything good you have learned was pointing here. Justin was executed in Rome around 165 AD, which is how he got his name.

What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?

Not every Christian liked the idea. Tertullian of Carthage, writing around 200 AD, asked the question that still names the whole debate: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” For him philosophy was the mother of heresies, and the faithful needed no curiosity beyond the Gospel.

In Alexandria, the city of Philo, the answer went the other way. Clement of Alexandria, a convert who taught there around 200 AD, saw Greek philosophy as a gift with a purpose. “Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness,” he wrote in his Stromata, “and now it becomes conducive to piety, being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith.” Philosophy was the schoolmaster that led the Greeks to Christ, the way the Law had led the Jews.

His successor Origen went furthest of all. According to the church historian Eusebius, he was put in charge of Christian teaching in Alexandria at about eighteen, and he became the most learned Christian of the third century. Origen used Platonic ideas so freely that he taught that souls existed before they entered bodies, which sounds very much like Plato and not very much like Genesis. Long after his death, some of the views attributed to his followers were condemned at a church council in 553. Origen shows the risk that came with the method: borrow enough of Plato, and at some point you are no longer translating Christianity into Greek but turning it into something else.

Plotinus and the Books of the Platonists

The Platonism that reached Christianity in its strongest form was not Plato’s own. It came through Plotinus, a philosopher from Egypt who taught in Rome in the third century AD and who is now called the founder of Neoplatonism. At the top of his system stands the One, beyond being and beyond thought, from which everything flows like light from the sun: first Intellect, then Soul, then the material world. Evil, for Plotinus, is not a rival power but an absence, a lack of good, the way darkness is the absence of light. And the soul’s task is to turn around and climb back toward its source. C.M. Black tells his story in Before Edgy Cinema, The One Began With Plotinus. Neoplatonism also had its own martyr: the mathematician and philosopher Hypatia, killed by a Christian mob in Alexandria in 415, whose story is in Hypatia of Alexandria.

The decisive encounter came in Milan in the 380s. Augustine, a brilliant and restless professor of rhetoric, had spent years among the Manichaeans, who believed in a cosmic war between equal forces of good and evil, and he could not imagine anything that was not made of some kind of matter. Then he read what he called “the books of the Platonists”, Latin translations of Plotinus and Porphyry. In Book VII of his Confessions he describes the effect. For the first time he could think of God as spirit and of evil as a lack rather than a substance.

He also noticed what was missing. In those books, he writes, he found in other words that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. What he did not find was that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The Platonists could see the destination, Augustine concluded, but not the road to it. Even so, he kept a high opinion of them for the rest of his life and once remarked that with a few changes of words and opinions they would become Christians. Through Augustine, the most influential theologian of the Latin West, Neoplatonism moved into the foundations of Western Christianity.

What Christianity Borrowed

It helps to see the main transfers side by side, because in each case Christians took something from Plato and changed it on the way.

The first two rows are the deepest. Plato left a puzzle: how do the eternal Forms relate to the divine craftsman of the Timaeus? Christian thinkers solved it by putting the Forms inside God, as the thoughts by which he makes the world. That gave them a way to say that truth, beauty and goodness are eternal without having anything eternal beside God. The soul is the most familiar row. When people today speak of their immortal soul going to heaven, they are speaking a language Plato would have understood, even though the Bible itself talks far more about the resurrection than about souls leaving bodies.

Heaven as a more real world behind this one is another inheritance, and the clearest literary example comes from C.S. Lewis. At the end of The Last Battle the children discover that the old Narnia was only a shadow of the real one, and Professor Kirke mutters: “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” Anyone who has read the Allegory of the Cave will know exactly what he means.

What Christianity Refused

The borrowing had limits, and the limits are just as revealing. Plato’s craftsman shapes a world out of pre-existing chaos. The Christian God creates from nothing, so matter is not a stubborn raw material but something God made and called good. Plato could imagine the soul as a prisoner of the body and philosophy as practice for dying. Christians confessed the resurrection of the body, which educated pagans found faintly ridiculous; the philosopher Celsus mocked it as the hope of worms. Plato toyed with reincarnation. The Church rejected it.

Above all, Platonism had no room for the claim at the centre of Christianity, that the eternal Word became a particular man in a particular province at a particular date, suffered and died. Plato’s Good does not enter history. It waits at the top of the ladder for those clever and disciplined enough to climb. Christianity said that God had come down the ladder for those who could not climb at all, including the fishermen. That reversal is why Augustine could admire the Platonists and still insist they had missed the point, and it is why so many of the fiercest early heresies were the ones that took Plato too far, like the Gnostics, who despised the material world as the work of an inferior god. Plotinus himself wrote a treatise against them.

Platonism for the People

The partnership lasted. For most of the Middle Ages the Latin West knew Plato’s writings mainly through part of the Timaeus, translated by Calcidius in the fourth century, which is one reason the Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens holds that very book. A writer from around 500 AD who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, after the man Paul converted in Athens, poured Neoplatonism into mystical theology so effectively that he was read as an authority for a thousand years. In Renaissance Florence the priest and scholar Marsilio Ficino translated all of Plato into Latin, published in 1484, convinced that Plato and Christianity taught the same truth. Even Thomas Aquinas, who preferred Aristotle and built on him instead, as we explain in Plato vs Aristotle: The Key Differences, inherited a theology full of Augustine and therefore full of Plato.

In 1926 the Anglican theologian William Inge put it bluntly: “Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology.” Friedrich Nietzsche had said the same thing as an accusation forty years earlier. In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1886) he called Christianity “Platonism for the people”: the same split between a true world above and a worthless world below, now preached to everyone. His later verdict on that true world, and on the God behind it, is the subject of what “God is dead” really means.

Christian historians have argued about this ever since. The German church historian Adolf von Harnack, around 1900, described the development of doctrine as the Hellenisation of the Gospel, a simple message of Jesus buried under Greek metaphysics, with words like substance and person that appear nowhere in the New Testament. Others answered that the Church Fathers did not dissolve the Gospel into philosophy but used philosophy to defend what was new in it. Pope Benedict XVI, in his much discussed Regensburg lecture of 2006, argued that the meeting of biblical faith and Greek reason was no accident but belonged to the essence of Christianity. Where you land depends a good deal on your own view of faith and reason, a question with a long history that runs through Pascal’s wager and Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

So, Was Plato a Christian?

No. Plato was born around 428 BC and died around 348 BC, so he lived roughly four hundred years before Jesus. He was a citizen of a polytheistic city who believed in gods, in a divine craftsman and in an impersonal highest Good, and who wanted the gods purified of the scandals the poets told about them. He had no idea of a God who chooses a people, speaks through prophets or becomes human. Calling him a pagan is accurate, as long as you remember that he was the kind of pagan who made Christians nervous because he came so close.

What Plato did have was an intellectual toolkit, and the early Christians picked it up because it was the best one available. Justin wore it like a cloak, Clement saw it as a schoolmaster, Origen pushed it too far, Tertullian wanted it thrown out, and Augustine turned it into the foundation of Western theology while insisting that its owner had missed the most important thing. The result is a religion that began among fishermen on a Galilean lake and ended up speaking about God in words first sharpened in an Athenian school. Plato never asked for the company. Like the cat in the meme, he was simply sitting in the best spot when Christianity came by with its rod. If you want to know who sat by that pond before him, meet the philosophers before Socrates, and for the wider question of what lies behind the visible world, read What Is Metaphysics?