due to Philo’s testimony about the state of Judaism in the period when Christianity appears–and to the rebirth of lively interest in that environment because of the discovery of the Qumran manuscripts.
But it is odd to see how different authors who have recently dealt with Philo give us conflicting pictures. Hartwig Thyen offered a recent balance sheet of these studies.2 First of all, there are disagreements about who the man himself was. Völker takes him for a mystic who abandoned the world.3 Goodenough sees him as an official involved in politics.4 Wolfson regards him as a philosopher preacher.5 The same contradictions appear when Philo’s writings are interpreted. Völker sees a spiritual exegesis of Scripture without particular speculative concern. By contrast, Wolfson considers the endeavor to be a remarkably coherent philosophical system. Goodenough discovers the transformation of Judaism into a mystery cult.6 Jonas detects one of the first forms of Gnosticism.7
Doubt appears especially in the attempt to situate Philo’s fundamental orientation. In the period before 1938, Bréhier,8 Goodenough, and Pascher9 see him as the representative of a syncretistic piety with no more than a Jewish coloring. By contrast, Völker and Wolfson present him as a believing Jew, adopting Hellenistic forms of expression. This was already Heinemann’s position.10 Today it seems that Bultmann, Jonas, and Thyen again lean toward a syncretistic interpretation.
The uncertainty seems to stem from this Alexandrian Jew’s extraordinary subtlety. We will try to show that first. Many studies appear to commit the error of wanting to look at the work without taking the man into account. Give the prominent position of his family, Philo was in contact with and moved quite easily in widely differing environments. We find him celebrating Passover with the Jewish monks of Lake Mareotis, arguing philosophy at the didaskaleion of Potamo, and negotiating with the Roman Governor Flaccus on behalf of the Jewish community of Alexandria.
Understandably, such flexibility makes him difficult to pin down. Yet the overall sense of his life and of the body of his work leaves no room for doubt. He was passionately devoted to the Jewish community and its faith. His whole activity was dedicated to explaining the Bible to the Jews and defending it before the pagans. Such episodes of his life as we know show him at the service of his brethren in Alexandria.
Yet, this Judaism has no Pharisaical rigidity or zealot fanaticism. Philo is imbued with Greek humanism, with everything the term implies not only about culture but also about good breeding. He is one of the most remarkable products of the παιδεία of his time. His subtle allegories release the faith of his fathers from its Semitic shell to wrap it in the most refined contemporary philosophical forms.
Sometimes that may involve our thinker’s showing certain complaisance toward strange doctrines. His enterprise was not risk free. But this Jew of great character and great culture is in no way a syncretist. He enjoys with moderation the bodily goods a refined civilization puts at his disposition and its intellectual goods with even more moderation. But he takes them for what they are worth, and the absolutely indisputable witness of his work is what he renders to the supreme value of spiritual goods.
2. Thyen, “Die Probleme des neueren Philo-Forschung,” 230–46.
3. Völker, Fortschritt und Vollendung bei Philo von Alexandrien.
4. Goodenough, The Politics of Philo Judaeus.
5. Wolfson, Philo.
6. Goodenough, By Light, Light.
7. Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 70–121.
8. Bréhier, Les idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon d’Alexandrie.
9. Pascher, Ἡ Βασιλικὴ Ὀδός.
10. Heinemann, Philons griechische und jüdische Bildung.
Chapter 1
Life of Philo
Philo the Jew is a contemporary of Christ. But he belongs to a completely different world, although not without relation to Christ’s world. The life of Christ unfolded within the environment of Palestinian Judaism, among an Aramaic speaking populace that was moved by intense national feeling. By contrast, Philo is the most eminent representative of Diaspora Judaism, specifically in Alexandria, which is the Diaspora’s principal home. He was Greek speaking. His citizenship was Roman. A greater contrast is hard to imagine.
By Philo’s time the presence of Jews in Egypt was not something recent. Towards the fourteenth century B.C. descendants of Abraham had sojourned there. But after the Exodus nothing seems to have remained of this first group. In fact, the Jewish emigration into Egypt began after the fall of Jerusalem in 681 [sic, translator] and during the following centuries. On the isle of Elephantine vestiges have been found of one of the colonies whose members wrote in Aramaic. But with the foundation of Alexandria, Greek speaking Judaism, properly so-called began. On Josephus’s account, Alexander attracted Jews there from the beginning (Antiquities of the Jews, XIX, 5, 2).
The colony continued to grow in the last centuries before our era. Philo reports that in his time there were a million Jews in Egypt and one hundred thousand in Alexandria. They lived especially in the Delta quarter to the east of the city. But they were also found in other neighborhoods. When Roman domination replaced the Lagids, the Jews received their own statute and authorization to live according to their customs. They constituted a city apart. They exhibited great loyalty to the Roman Empire. The Empire found support among them, whereas the native population often bore its loss of independence unhappily.
This situation was not unlike that of other Diaspora Jewish colonies. What gave Alexandrian Judaism its peculiar character is that the encounter between Jewish faith and Greek culture took place there. Its most eminent representative is Philo. Alexandria was the center of Greek culture in this period, replacing Athens. Alexandria was where the grammarians edited Homer, Callimacus wrote his poems, and Greek science found one of its great representatives in Euclid.
The Alexandrian Jews adopted this culture, but at the same time they remained loyal to their faith. So their problem was to give that faith Greek expression. This endeavor is embodied above all in the Bible of the Seventy, which would be the foundation of Judeo-Christian Hellenistic literature. We will come back to it. But if the translation of the Bible was the most important manifestation of Alexandrian Jewish literary activity, it is not the only one. Exegetical schools were created where methods of interpretation were applied to the Bible that the Stoics and Pythagoreans applied to Homer. We will also have to discuss that again. To Alexandrian Judaism must be attributed the Wisdom of Solomon,
