Temperament in the Bible

I read something the other day, in a moment of revisiting temperament types (it’s what I do when I feel like I must be the world’s biggest fruitcake) and I have to say, this amused me. I’m not putting any stock in it, but it’s a nice try!

The observation of a four-part human nature dates back even further in Judeo-Christian writings. As early as 590 B.C. the Old Testament prophet Ezekial beheld mankind as embodied in “four living creatures” each with “four faces”—that of a lion, that of an ox, that of a man, and that of an eagle—a vision repeated around 96 A.D. in The Revelation of St. John. Also the Church chose to have four gospels in the New Testament, written by men of four temperaments: the spontaneous Mark, the historical Matthew, the spiritual John, and the scholarly Luke. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, explained (in 185 A.D.) why four gospels were necessary: “Living Creatures are quadriform,” he wrote, and so “the Gospel also is quadriform.”

People Patterns: A Modern Guide to the Four Temperaments, by Stephen Montgomery.

But could this be some proof that Irenaeus was, at least in some ways, influenced by prevailing philosophy/psychology (namely Hippocrates and Galen, who got their ideas of four "humours" from Plato and Aristotle)? :) Though I'm not convinced that's quite what Irenaeus had in mind (see point 8 here).

The history of these ideas is really quite interesting.