Philo of Alexandria

Jean Danielou, James G. Colbert

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871956
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Philo of Alexandria was a few years older than Jesus of Nazareth and lived longer. He belonged to a wealthy and cultured family, prominent in the Jewish community in Alexandria. Philo had contacts with the highest level of Roman authorities. He was on a risky diplomatic mission to Caligula on behalf of the persecuted Jews of Alexandria during what turned out to be Caligula's last days. Herod Agrippa was a friend in Rome during Philo's hour of greatest need.Philo is a sympathetic source on what sounds very much like a contemporary Jewish monastic movement. He is also one of the creators of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Some of his exegesis is reminiscent of Pythagorean numerology. It has been argued that Philo, who was well educated in Greek thought, was the founder of medieval philosophy.St. John seems to adapt Philo's thoughts about the Logos, the Word, in the prologue to his Gospel. There are also close ties between Philo's thinking and the Letter to the Hebrews.Jean Danielou, a paradigm of scholarship and clarity, makes Philo speak to us in his own voice. Anyone interested in patristics, exegesis, or simply Christian beginnings will benefit by reading Danielou's treatment of Philo.

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, which was part of the Alexandrian canon of the Bible. We encounter philosophers like Aristobulus, dramatic authors like Ezekiel the tragedian, and poets like the authors of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles.

Philo unites the different aspects of this Alexandrian Judaism within himself: Hellenistic culture, loyalty to Rome, Jewish faith. He belonged to the moneyed high bourgeoisie. We know two of his brothers. The first, perhaps the elder, was an important figure mentioned by Josephus. He was named Caius Julius Alexander. The first two names are characteristic of his Roman citizenship. His birth must be placed around 13 B.C.1 He was the Alabarch of Alexandria, that is, the person charged by the Roman government with collecting taxes. The protégé of Claudius’s mother Antonia, he had ties of friendship with Claudius (Josephus, Antiquities, XIX, 5, 1) of whom he was an almost exact contemporary.

His fortune was enormous. Josephus tells us that he furnished the gold and silver to cover the doors of the new Temple of Jerusalem started by Herod the Great, but unfinished at the time of Christ’s death, since the apostles speak of its construction in progress. In 35, when Herod Agrippa I grew bored of life with his uncle Antipas at Tiberiades and needed money to lead a sumptuous existence at Rome, he went to Alexandria to seek out Alexander and borrow a large sum from him. This supposes relations between the Herod family and that of Philo about which we will speak again.

Alexander the Alabarch had two sons, Tiberius Julius Alexander, the elder, is well known.2 He abandoned the Jewish religion, entered Roman service in 40, and was epistrategus of Syria in 41 and procurator of Judea in 45. Prefect of Egypt under Nero, he repressed a Jewish uprising at Alexandria. He contributed to Vespasian’s coming to power. He was second in command of the Roman army during the siege of Jerusalem in 70. Philo mentions him in one of his works, De Animalibus. Tiberius Julius was then a cultured young man who had already carried out a mission in Rome. The episode must be situated around 39 before his entrance into Roman service. He must have been about 25. Thus he was born around A.D. 14.

The Alabarch had a second son, Marcus Julius Alexander, undoubtedly born in A.D. 16. He died young in 44. A. Fuks connects him, rightly it seems, with a major Alexandrian exporter of the same name.3 But Josephus has bequeathed us the most astonishing facet of his biography. He obtained the hand of the Herodian Berenice, daughter of Herod Agrippa I, his father’s friend, no doubt thanks to the Emperor Claudius’s support. Once more we observe the ties between the families of Philo and of the Herods. As we will explain later on, the episode takes place at Rome in 41, precisely at a time when Philo was there.

Besides the Alabarch, Philo had a younger brother, Lysimachus. He appears in De Animalibus, which is a dialogue between two brothers. Schwartz places his birth around 10 B.C.4 He has often been confused with the Alabarch, as a result of errors in the manuscripts of Josephus. He surely must be identified with one Julius Lysimachus who belonged to the council of the Prefect of Alexandria, Caecina Tuscus. Philo’s dialogue informs us that he had a daughter who was betrothed to her cousin Tiberius Julius Alexander.

The most interesting point is certainly the connection of Philo’s family with the Herod family. The former represented major international Jewish banking, the latter an equally cosmopolitan Jewish aristocracy. The elder Herod, founder of the dynasty, was the kind of oriental kinglet who used to pass part of his life in Rome and there spend his fabulous wealth. One thinks of an Aga Khan. He was connected to Agrippa, Augustus’s son-in-law. We will have to speak here especially about his grandson, Herod Agrippa I, and the latter’s daughter, the famous Berenice.

For the moment, we only note that the close ties that we observe between the Herods and Philo’s family suggest that the two families were related. J. Schwartz assumes this. The connection could only have been through the Hasmoneans, among whom Herod the Great’s wife Mariamne was numbered. The link would confirm St. Jerome’s report connecting Philo to a priestly line. From that it would follow that the family was Palestinian and that only Philo’s father had settled at Alexandria. Support for this is found in the fact, emphasized by Schwartz, of the family’s Roman citizenship.5 This citizenship was impossible for Alexandrian Jews. That implies that Philo’s father possessed citizenship before his arrival in the city.

All this data lets us delineate Philo’s social and chronological situation with considerable certainty. His birth is often placed around 20 B.C. What we have said allows Schwartz to put it at a latter date.6 If Alexander the Alabarch was born between 15 and 13, Philo, who came immediately before or after him must have been born around then. Philo seems rather to be the second son. Thus, we can fix his birth around 13 B.C.

Family circumstances might have steered Philo toward business. The highest aspirations were possible for him. From his family’s elevated position, he gets a sense of political responsibility. But only at the end of his life do we see him play a role in this order and come into contact with government circles. His interests were directed elsewhere, and primarily toward the philosophical life. His family’s position allowed him to get a full education. Frequent allusions in his writings to academic culture, as it was then organized in Alexandria, show that he had passed through all its levels.

He could have been a brilliant rhetorician, the profession at which contemporary culture aimed. But his ideal lay elsewhere. He tells us that very young “he began to feel the sting of philosophy” (De Congressu, 17).7 He first cultivates grammar, the servant of philosophy, only to prepare himself. Philo identifies with the second of the two great models offered by his contemporary culture, the rhetorician and the philosopher. For him and his contemporaries, philosophy is a conversion. It involves an ascetical effort of detachment that leads to discovering the true meaning of life in the possession of inner goods.

Philo’s own testimony confirms that he lead a “philosophical” life.

There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor groveled in search of reputation or wealth or bodily com...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Translator's Preface
• Author's Foreword
• Chapter 1: Life of Philo
• Chapter 2: Philo and His Time
• Chapter 3: The Bible at Alexandria
• Chapter 4: Philo's Exegesis
• Chapter 5: Philo's Theology
• Chapter 6: Philo's Spirituality
• Chapter 7: Philo and the New Testament
• Bibliography