Philo

Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (c.20 BC - c. AD 50). The writings of Philo are the most important surviving documents from the world of Hellenistic Judaism. They furnish us with a great deal of first hand information concerning the religion of the Jews outside of Israel, New Testament background and the interaction of Judaism within a Gentile culture. Philo was deeply influenced by Middle Platonism, Aristotle, the Neo-Pythagoreans, the Cynics and the Stoics. He stood at the end of a long Jewish tradition whose thoughts he developed, as evidenced by his references to the works of his predecessors. Like them he attempted to interpret the Old Testament Scriptures in such as way as to bridge the gap between Judaism and intellectual paganism rather than attempting to produce his own philosophical system.

Philo's Interpretation of Genesis
Philo made extensive use of allegory in his writings, but it would be a mistake to assume that he was the first of the Alexandrian Jews to allegorise Scripture. In fact, he stood almost at the end of a long tradition of men who wrote as Jews for Gentile ears. Previous writers, however, had not thought of their interpretations as allegorical, but rather as ‘proper’ or ‘fitting’ in that they corresponded with what the interpreter understood as the nature and character of God. Philo recognised several levels of interpretation that he regarded as ‘literal’, ranging from the literalistic to sophisticated. He claimed to find in the text itself indications that it was not intended literally. For example, the Trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are seen as being intended symbolically because no such plant have ever existed on earth. For Philo a “literal or better, a literalistic interpretation is to be rejected when it is either blasphemous or ridiculous. The kind of literal interpretation that was rejected by Philo is the kind of interpretation that was rejected by Jewish interpreters as far back as Aristobulus.”

Philo was, on the other hand, the first writer who attempted to maintain the validity of both the literal and allegorical interpretations of Scripture, because he considered both to be divinely inspired.

This appears most clearly in the Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus. In both of these works, literal and allegorical interpretations lie side by side. Philo is obviously more interested in the allegorical interpretation, but, for the most part, the literal interpretations are also considered valid and valuable. The same is true in... [On the Creation and Allegorical Interpretation]. Of the twenty seven times that allegorical terms appear, only five involve the rejection of a non-allegorical interpretation.”

In Migration 89-93 Philo maintains that “while the Seventh Day is meant to teach the power of the unoriginate and the non-action of created beings” it should nonetheless still be observed. Likewise festivals are kept as “a symbol of gladness of soul and thankfulness to God", and circumcision portrays “the excision of pleasure and all passions, and the putting away of conceit.” He believed that such an interpretation did not mean that the physical acts did not need to be practised.

Philo was the first writer to give a comprehensive account of Genesis. In his synthesis of the Genesis account of creation with that of the philosophers Philo anticipated many of the teachings of the Neoplatonists. The world was not without beginning, but had an origin, having been created by God, but does not say whether this was out of nothing or from pre-existing matter (the latter being the most likely). Moses said that God created everything in six days, not because God required a length of time to do His work, for God does all things simultaneously. According to Philo the world was created in one act of power, but Moses wrote that it was created in six days to show that there was a hierarchy and order among created beings. Rather six days are mentioned because the created things needed order, and order involves number. The most suitable number for productivity is six, being the first perfect number. Numerology clearly formed an important part of Philo’s hermeneutic. Philo’s Stoic and Platonic dualism show through when he says that before the visible world came into being, there was an invisible and incorporeal pattern. Likewise the “coats of skins” in which God clothed Adam and Eve really mean ‘physical bodies’, which are like tombs for the soul. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are symbolic, signifying

...reverence towards God, the greatest of the virtues, by means of which the soul attains to immortality; while by the tree that is cognisant of good and evil things he signifies moral prudence, the virtue that occupies the middle position, and enables us to distinguish things by nature contrary the one to another.

Adam represents Mind and Eve, Sense Perception. The Serpent enters the scene to unite Mind and Sense-Perception so they might act together. In Philo’s Platonic interpretation of the Fall, Adam’s (Mind’s) trespass was a loss of Virtue, represented by Eden. The Serpent is a symbol for Pleasure

...because in the first place he is destitute of feet, and crawls on his belly with his face downwards. In the second place, because he uses clods of clay for food. Third, because he bears poison in his teeth, by which it is his nature to kill those who are bitten by him. And the man devoted to pleasure is free from none of these aforesaid evils.… And the serpent is said to have uttered a human voice, because pleasure employs innumerable champions and defenders who take care to advocate its interests, and who dare to assert that the power over everything, both small and great, does of right belong to it without any exception whatever.

This interpretation of Adam, Eve and the Serpent is central to Philo’s Allegory of the Soul. Viewed in this way “the text of Genesis is taken to refer not to events of the external world but to conflicting elements within the individual human being, especially to the soul.” This theme forms an important element in Philo’s exegesis. Those interpretations which he classes as ‘literal’ are usually those which are not part of the allegory of the soul.

In Philo we find the first reference to what is known today as “creation with apparent age”. The plants in Eden were created instantaneously with ripened fruit, ready for the animals, as Philo describes:

But in the first creation of the universe, as I have said already, God produced the whole race of trees out of the earth in full perfection, having their fruit not incomplete, but in a state of entire ripeness, to be ready for the immediate and undelayed use and enjoyment of the animals which were about immediately to be born.

The Flood
Philo’s account of the Flood was later copied extensively by Clement of Alexandria and Origen so it is important to note some of the details of his interpretation. Philo accepted the biblical dimensions of the ark (300 x 50 x 30 cubits), but described it as sloping up to a square of 1 cubit like an elongated pyramid. This was probably because he misunderstood the meaning of Genesis 6:16. The interior was divided into “nests” (a translation necessary for the allegorisation of the text) and had up to four decks. He understood Noah’s Flood to be universal, covering all the mountains, islands and continents, destroying all animals and men outside of the ark. However, some of the phrases he uses are regarding the extent of the Flood are ambiguous. He writes, for example, that the flood “...extended almost beyond the pillars of Hercules and the great Mediterranean Sea, since the whole earth and all the spaces of the mountains were covered with water...” Even Davis Young, who believes that the Flood was local concedes that the phrase used meant that the flood was “tantamount to being universal.” This tells us more about Philo’s limited understanding of the size of the earth than anything else. Philo was emphatic that the Flood was anthropologically universal, and destroyed all plants, animals and buildings (except for one house). The roots and seeds of the plants were not destroyed because they were below the surface of the earth and the Lord promised only to destroy what was on “the face of the earth.”

Upon opening the Ark, Noah found a renewed creation, the plants having regrown and fruited in a single day:

Nor ought anyone to wonder that in one day the earth when left to itself produced every thing by divine virtue, both seeds and trees, all complete, entirely and suddenly, with perfect and excellent herbs, and grains, and plants, and fruits; since in the creation of the world on one day of the six he finished and brought to perfection the whole generation of plants.

Philo's Legacy
Though they were not preserved by the Jews, Philo’s works were treasured by Christian writers who seized upon his concept of the Logos, thinking that it was the same as the Logos of the prologue of John’s Gospel. To Philo the Logos was “the instrument by which God makes the world and the intermediary by which the human intelligence as it is purified ascends to God again” However, Philo’s Logos is not Divine, nor is it a person and it has no existence apart from the role it performs. Although it was once generally accepted among scholars that there was some dependence by John on Philo’s concept of the Logos, it seems more likely that both were drawing on a common Jewish background, into which Philo imported Platonic concepts. So important was Philo to the early church writers that some, such as Eusebius and Jerome even went so far as to claim that he was a Christian. Eusebius records a legendary meeting between Philo and Peter in Rome and both writers argue that Philo’s work concerning Jewish ascetics (On the Contemplative Life) is a first hand report of the church (and monasteries!) founded by Mark in Alexandria. It is true to say that by the fourth century “Pious legend would allow no writer so influential on early Christian exegesis to remain unconverted.”