I've recently discovered the work of Margaret Barker, who's uncovered links between ancient Judaism, the Pythagoreans and Plato - roughly via the idea of the High God beyond all gods, and a mysticism that sees various kinds of gnosis written into the natural world.

Mention links between Socrates/Plato and Judaism/Jesus, as I do in a piece in Third Way entitled 'The Philosopher Jesus', and you'll spark a reaction - often quite hostile, since it's important to many Christians to preserve a radical sense of the uniqueness of Jesus, and of the awkwardness of Jesus: any sense of a perennial philosophy offends against that.

I've some sympathy with that, as perennial philosophies can be lowest common denominator philosophies too, so bland as to be the kind of thing any reasonable person might ascribe to. However, the grit returns when you read the sources, rather than the syntheses. Anyway, a bit of the Third Way piece:

Of course, their successors went further, eventually declaring Jesus was God. Nobody said that of Plato. However, ideas developed by Plato allowed the church fathers to make that astonishing move. It revolves around the concept of logos. It’s an ambiguous Greek idea, meaning everything from word, to discourse, to principle, to reason. For Plato, logos was a connector. Love and reason, the great forces of his philosophy, were bound together in logos. The motif played a related part in his thought. One of his predecessors, Heraclitus, had taught that everything changes. Another, Parmenides, that nothing changes. Plato sought a balance between the two – and it was with logos that he found it. With logos, he discerned a timeless world that exists through this world of change and chance. But that world is not disconnected from this one. It’s the good in people and things that love draws us towards: in beauty and truth logos speaks. We are ‘in between’ creatures, Plato taught, ‘in between the beasts and the angels,’ as Augustine was later to put it, following the ancient Greek.

Other philosophers explored logos too. The Stoics interpreted it as a cosmic principle, a kind of divine plan. The goal of the Stoic way of life was to align yourself with logos, and so find that which is most true within you. The Jewish thinker, Philo of Alexandria, took logos to be the world soul that drew all things together.

John begins his gospel, ‘In the beginning was the logos,’ and that thought opens up the possibility of thinking of Jesus as divine. Paul made a similar move, aligning Jesus with the Stoic logos and developing his concept of the cosmic Christ. The final switch from seeing God in Jesus to calling Jesus God is perhaps not so astonishing once you understand its background in the Greek logos.