It is very common to compare Socrates with Jesus Christ insofar as they both act as "founding fathers" of Western culture. For two thousand years, each generation has built its own image of Socrates and Jesus; and Christianity has tended to see in Socrates a kind of cultural ancestor, who embodies the figure of the unjustly persecuted good man.

Traditionally they have been considered two martyrs of thought and miles of people in all times have been inspired by their moral example. Comparing is, however, a complex exercise because the Jewish world of the first century before our era had nothing to do with the world of the fifth century in which Socrates lived: the Greek cultural context was polytheistic and the Hebrew was monotheistic.

In Athens, and in classical Greek culture, there is no concept of "sin", which does exist in the Jewish world. Evil and guilt were not linked in Greece in the way they were in the Jewish tradition. Israel were also militarily occupied by the Romans, and although Athens did not live in its time of greatest expansion, in the time of Socrates It was a city that was hardly free and rich - or at least we could easily remember its time of splendor. Nor did the religious instances lose in Athens the power that the Temple of Jerusalem had at the time of Jesus.

In outline, and although we identify what to clarify, we can present a series of similarities and differences between Socrates and Jesus

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