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THE EFFECT OF KEY PHILOSOPHICAL PARADIGM SHIFTS ON BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION. Paradigm shift has become a term used loosely and faddishly by people who misuse their words. Like the boy who cried wolf, some use powerful words like “literally” and “awesome” in trivializing and devaluing them for their true uses. Yet, some things are literally true, some things really stimulate awe, and there really are paradigm shifts that honestly deserve a spe shift” to signal a mas*ive change in the way a community thinks about a particular topic. Examples of paradigm shifts may include Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Each changed the world of thought (some for better, some for worse) in a fundamental way. From a political perspective, Constantine’s Edict of Milan, issued in AD 313, constituted the formal beginning of a major paradigm shift that signaled the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval period. I will in this note attempt to survey key philosophical paradigms that have affected the The Patristic Period – 100-600 A.D. The Fathers of the Church found it necessary to distinguish Christianity from Judaism, from “mystery cults” and from Hellenistic thinking that was now infected by Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism. The Fathers strove to demonstrate how the Bible could and should be applied to the Christian’s life. Plato (429-347 BC) taught that in the visible world, we  perceive only shadows or copies of the ideal ‘forms’ of all things. Plato taught that the knowledge of these ‘forms’ was the basis of morality and ethics. This essentially is Clas*ical Greek philosophy. As Plato’s ideas mixed with other Greek philosophies and Jewish beliefs the ‘forms’ of ‘Clas*ical thought’ were understood as thoughts in the Divine mind, the good’ as*ociated with God. This shaped a sharp “Dualistic’ distinction between the spiritual realm