Philo, Judaeus
Who Was Philo of Alexandria?
Philo was born into a wealthy and prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, probably around 20 BC, and died sometime after AD 50. Alexandria was home to the largest Jewish community outside of Palestine, and Philo received both a thorough Jewish education and extensive training in Greek learning — grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, geometry, poetry, and music. His brother Alexander served as the chief tax official of Alexandria, indicating the family's high social standing.
The one precisely dated event in Philo's life is his leadership of a Jewish delegation to Rome in the winter of AD 39-40, sent to protest Emperor Caligula's demand that Jews participate in emperor worship. The mission failed, and Philo's account of the episode reveals his distaste for political activity. Apart from this and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in his youth, Philo devoted his life primarily to scholarship and writing.
Philo's Method: Allegorical Interpretation
Philo's greatest intellectual achievement was his systematic attempt to read the Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism and Stoicism. He believed that Moses was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that Greek thinkers had borrowed their best ideas from the Torah. To reconcile apparent differences between the biblical text and philosophical reasoning, Philo employed allegorical interpretation — reading the narratives of Genesis, Exodus, and other books as symbolic expressions of deeper philosophical truths.
For example, Philo interpreted the story of Abraham's journey from Ur to Canaan (Genesis 12:1-3) as an allegory of the soul's migration from the world of the senses to the realm of true knowledge. The Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:8-14) represented virtue, with its four rivers symbolizing the four cardinal virtues of Greek ethics. While Philo never denied the literal truth of Scripture, he consistently argued that the deeper, allegorical meaning was the more important one.
Philo's Theology: God and the Logos
Philo's conception of God emphasized absolute transcendence. God, in Philo's view, was utterly beyond human comprehension, without qualities that could be named, and completely separate from the material world. This raised a profound question: how does a transcendent God relate to a material creation?
Philo's answer was the Logos — a concept he developed from both the Hebrew tradition of God's creative Word (Psalm 33:6; Genesis 1:3) and the Greek philosophical concept of divine reason ordering the cosmos. For Philo, the Logos was the intermediary between God and the world, the instrument through which God created and governs all things. He called the Logos "the firstborn Son of God," "the image of God," and "a second God" — language that bears striking resemblance to the New Testament's description of Christ, particularly in the prologue of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).
Whether John directly drew upon Philo's Logos concept or whether both drew independently from shared Jewish and Greek traditions remains debated. What is clear is that Philo's writings demonstrate that the conceptual framework for understanding Christ as the divine Logos was already present in first-century Jewish thought.
Philo's Doctrine of Humanity
Philo also developed a distinctive understanding of human nature. Drawing on Genesis 1:26-27 and Genesis 2:7, he distinguished between a heavenly, ideal human being created in God's image and the earthly human formed from dust. This distinction between the spiritual and material aspects of humanity parallels Paul's teaching about the "first Adam" and the "last Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45-49), and Philo's emphasis on the soul's struggle to transcend the body resonates with Paul's language about the conflict between flesh and spirit (Romans 7:14-25; Galatians 5:16-17).
Philo's Significance for Bible Readers
Although Philo is never mentioned in the New Testament, his writings are essential for understanding the world of early Christianity. He shows us how an educated Jew could embrace both the authority of Scripture and the insights of Greek philosophy, a synthesis that profoundly influenced Christian thinkers from Clement of Alexandria and Origen to Augustine. His allegorical method became a dominant approach to biblical interpretation in the early church.
Philo also provides crucial background for several New Testament concepts. The book of Hebrews, with its emphasis on heavenly realities behind earthly shadows (Hebrews 8:5; 9:23-24), reflects a Platonic framework similar to Philo's. The Wisdom of Solomon, which Philo likely knew, shares his understanding of divine wisdom as a creative intermediary — a concept that shaped how early Christians spoke about Christ (Colossians 1:15-17).
For modern Bible readers, Philo offers a window into the intellectual and spiritual life of Judaism at the very moment Christianity was being born. His writings remind us that the New Testament emerged not in an intellectual vacuum but within a rich conversation between Jewish faith and the wider world of ancient thought.
Biblical Context
While Philo does not appear in Scripture, his writings extensively interpret the Pentateuch, especially Genesis and Exodus. His Logos theology provides crucial background for John 1:1-18, and his allegorical approach illuminates how first-century Jews read texts like Genesis 1-3, the Abraham narratives, and the Mosaic law. His thought also provides context for the philosophical arguments in Hebrews, Colossians, and Paul's letters.
Theological Significance
Philo demonstrates that concepts central to New Testament Christology — the divine Word, the image of God, the mediator between God and creation — were already developing within Jewish thought before Christianity. His synthesis of Scripture and philosophy established patterns of interpretation that profoundly shaped early Christian theology. His emphasis on God's transcendence and the need for a mediating Logos helps explain why the early church found it natural to identify Jesus with the creative Word of God.
Historical Background
Alexandria in Philo's time was the second-largest city in the Roman Empire and a major center of learning. Its famous library and museum attracted scholars from across the Mediterranean world. The Jewish community there, numbering perhaps 150,000-200,000, had its own governance and produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Philo's approximately forty surviving works provide our most extensive witness to Alexandrian Jewish thought. The early church preserved his writings (while the Jewish community largely did not), recognizing their value for Christian theology. Eusebius recorded a tradition, almost certainly legendary, that Philo met the apostle Peter in Rome.