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Philo of Alexandria and the New Testament

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Philo of Alexandria and the New Testament

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Step 1 of 11

Philo’s Life and Interpretation of Scripture

Explore Philo’s interpretation of Jewish scripture through Greek philosophy and parallels with John, Hebrews, and Paul.

Philo of Alexandria and His Writings

Philo of Alexandria lived from roughly 20 BCE to 50 CE in the largest Jewish community outside the land of Israel. He came from a wealthy and politically prominent family within Alexandrian Jewish society, and in 39 to 40 CE he led a Jewish delegation to the emperor Caligula to defend his community against violent civic disputes. The bulk of his surviving writing, however, is not political. It consists of detailed commentaries on the Torah that read each verse on two levels at once, the literal story and a deeper symbolic meaning Philo called the allegorical sense, alongside biographies of Moses and the early Genesis figures as embodiments of virtue, philosophical books about the soul and the universe, and writings defending Jewish life to a Greek-speaking audience. The volume of this output is substantial, around two thousand pages of Greek prose, much of it dense, technical, and steeped in the philosophical schools of his day.1

Philo interprets the Torah through the Greek philosophical traditions he studied. The leading Greek school of the period, Middle Platonism, taught that visible reality is a copy of an invisible world of perfect ideas. Stoicism, the other influential school, taught that the universe is held together by a single rational order. Philo borrowed from both, treating Genesis and Exodus as texts that, alongside their literal narrative, encoded an account of the soul, the universe, and the relationship between God and the world that was consistent with what he valued most in Greek philosophy. The pioneer of this kind of reading had been the second-century BCE Alexandrian writer Aristobulus, but Philo carried it out on a scale and with a sophistication that no Jewish writer before him had attempted.2

The Alexandria in which he wrote was the leading center of Greek intellectual life. Its Jewish community had translated the Torah into Greek several centuries earlier, and many Alexandrian Jews, including Philo himself, encountered scripture only in that translation. Their daily language was Greek, their literary culture was Greek, and the Greek philosophical schools that surrounded them, especially the schools founded by Plato and the Stoics, supplied the words and ideas they used to think with. The result was a hybrid intellectual world, deeply attached to the Torah and the unity of the Jewish people, yet equally at home with Plato’s writings about the universe and Stoic accounts of nature.3

Out of this Alexandrian setting Philo developed a set of concepts that would have a long afterlife in Jewish, Christian, and later philosophical thought. The Logos, the divine Powers, the heavenly pattern of the earthly sanctuary, the contrast between a heavenly and an earthly Adam, and the soul’s ascent through reading scripture for its deeper meaning all received their most elaborate first-century Jewish articulation in his pages. None of these ideas are uniquely Philonic. The way he developed them, often in the course of unfolding a specific Genesis or Exodus verse, gave them a shape that turns up in the early Christian writings of the Gospel of John, the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Pauline epistles.

Whether the writers of the New Testament read Philo directly, drew on shared streams of Greek-speaking Jewish thought, or arrived at similar conclusions independently is a question that remains genuinely unsettled. The earliest unambiguous Christian use of Philo appears in Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, more than a hundred years after most of the New Testament was written. Many of the conceptual similarities between Philo and the New Testament can be explained by shared currents within first-century Greek-speaking Judaism rather than by direct dependence, and there are also points where Philo’s categories and those of the New Testament writers diverge sharply.4

Philo himself wrote primarily for fellow Jews engaged in the same project of holding biblical loyalty together with universal philosophical aspiration. His books divide into series with different audiences in mind. The Allegorical Commentary, his closest reading of Genesis verse by verse, was aimed at fellow Jewish readers steeped in scripture. The Exposition of the Law was pitched more broadly to readers curious about the Torah.5

After his death his writings were almost entirely abandoned by the Jewish community, which consolidated around the rabbinic movement and its different ways of reading scripture. The Christian theologians of Alexandria kept, copied, and built on his commentaries, and modern editions of his texts descend ultimately from the manuscripts that Origen brought from Alexandria to Caesarea in the third century.6

Notes

  1. 1C. Mondésert, The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 3: The Early Roman Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 879–882.
  2. 2George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 219.
  3. 3Ronald H. Nash, Christianity and the Hellenistic World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 82–84.
  4. 4Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between, 220.
  5. 5Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes (Atlanta: Scholars, 1996), 13.
  6. 6Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between, 221.

Step 2 of 11

Literal and Symbolic Readings of Genesis

Literal and Symbolic Readings of the Torah

Philo reads biblical narratives as accounts of events and as symbols of the soul’s development, applying both approaches to Genesis.
The third book of Philo’s Allegorical Interpretation opens at one of the strangest moments in Genesis. After eating from the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve hear God walking in the garden and try to hide among the trees.
Genesis 3:8
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the orchard at the breezy time of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the orchard.
Read literally, the scene raises a difficulty Philo refuses to ignore. God fills the universe, and nothing is hidden from him. To suppose that Adam and Eve could conceal themselves behind a tree turns God into a limited and almost comic figure. Philo’s response is the move that sets him apart from earlier Jewish retellings of Genesis. He does not deny that the event happened, and he does not strip the verse of its literal meaning. He insists, however, that the surface narrative is a sign of something else.
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 3:1
“And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God in the midst of the forest of the garden” (Gen. iii. 8). He introduces a doctrine showing that the bad man is an exile. For if virtue is a city belonging to the wise, the man who has no capacity to share in virtue has been driven away from the city, in which the bad man is incapable of taking part. Accordingly, only the bad man has been driven away and sent into exile. But by incurring such exile, the exile from virtue has hidden himself from God. For if the wise, as His friends, are in God’s sight, it is evident that all bad men slink away and hide from Him, as is to be expected in men who cherish hatred and ill-will towards right reason. The prophet, moreover, finds proof that the bad man is without city or dwelling-house, in the account of Esau, the hairy man, crafty in wickedness, when he says, “Esau was skilled in hunting, a countryman” (Gen. xxv. 27); for vice, which hunts after the passions, is by nature unfit to dwell in the city of virtue. Rather, in utter senselessness, it follows rustic grossness, the life of the untrained. Jacob, the man full of wisdom, belongs to a city, and he occupies virtue as his dwelling-house. The prophet says of him: “But Jacob was a simple man dwelling in a house” (ibid.). In keeping with this, too, the midwives, since they feared God, made houses for themselves (Exod. i. 21); for those (souls) that search out God’s hidden mysteries—and this is what is meant by “saving the males’ lives” or “bringing the males to the birth”—build up the cause of virtue, and they have chosen to make their abode in it. These instances have made clear how the bad man is without a city or home, since he is an exile from virtue, while the good man has received wisdom as his lot for both city and dwelling.
Wickedness, on this reading, is a form of self-banishment. The mind that turns from virtue is no longer at home in the city of the soul, and what Genesis describes as hiding among trees is what happens to a soul cut off from God by its own choices. Adam and Eve are particular figures in a particular story. They are also placeholders for the human mind and the senses, the garden is virtue, and the trees are the particular virtues that surround the most general virtue at the center. Philo reads every Genesis verse this way, on two levels at once. The literal sense holds its place while the deeper symbolic meaning, what he calls the allegorical sense, unfolds a teaching about the soul.1

The method itself was not new in Alexandria. Greek philosophers in the Stoic and Pythagorean schools had been reading Homer this way for several centuries, defending the gods of the Iliad and Odyssey as personifications of natural forces and ethical principles. Philo’s predecessor Aristobulus had begun applying similar techniques to Moses in the second century BCE. What Philo added was scale, sophistication, and a fully developed conviction that every word of the Torah could be drawn out this way, not as a way to explain away embarrassing passages but as a permanent feature of how the text was meant to be read.2

Philo himself refuses to describe the method as a Greek import. He calls it the practice of those whose eyes have been opened to the inner meaning of scripture, and he traces it back to the Therapeutae and to a long Jewish chain of fathers handing down hidden meanings. The claim matters because the goal of the reading is not to make the Torah respectable to a Greek audience, even if that is one of its effects. The aim is to demonstrate that the particular laws and stories of Moses carry universal meaning, that the Torah embodies the law of nature itself, and that its commands therefore bind every reader who can recognize what they really say.3

The format Philo developed was as consequential as the method. Allegorical Interpretation is the earliest surviving Jewish text that quotes biblical verses one after another and comments on each in turn. Earlier Jewish writers had rewritten scripture into new narratives, as Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon do, but they left the Genesis verses themselves behind in the process. Philo keeps the verse in place and reads behind it. His format became a model for both later Jewish verse-by-verse commentary, known as midrash, and Christian biblical commentary, both of which would later quote a verse, raise a question, and propose an interpretation in the same way Philo had done.4

From this opening Philo applies the same procedure to every passage he encounters in Genesis and Exodus, treating each surface narrative as the entry into a teaching about the soul, the universe, or God himself.

Notes

  1. 1Charles Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis: The Bible in Ancient Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 175–178.
  2. 2Hindy Najman, Past Renewals: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation, and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity, Journal for the Study of Judaism 53 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 103–104.
  3. 3Najman, Past Renewals, 104.
  4. 4Maren R. Niehoff in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. James L. Kugel Louis H. Feldman and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 902–903.

Step 3 of 11

Philo’s Heavenly and Earthly Adams

Literal and Symbolic Readings of the Torah

Philo reads biblical narratives as accounts of events and as symbols of the soul’s development, applying both approaches to Genesis.
Genesis tells the story of human creation twice. The first account, in Genesis 1, describes God speaking the world into existence and culminating in the creation of humankind in his own image, male and female. The second account, in Genesis 2, narrates how God forms a single man from the soil of the ground and breathes life into his nostrils. Modern source criticism treats the two as separate literary sources stitched together by a later editor. Philo, writing in the early first century CE, takes them as one coherent text deliberately telling the reader something different in each passage.
Genesis 1:27
27 God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.
Genesis 2:7
7 The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Reading the two side by side, Philo finds an irreconcilable difference. The man of Genesis 1 is made in the image of an invisible God who has no body, and the verse mentions no material substrate at all. The man of Genesis 2 is shaped from clay, animated by divine breath, and made a living soul. To collapse one passage into the other, Philo argues, would force the text to repeat itself for no reason. He concludes that the two accounts refer to two different beings.
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 1:12
“And God formed the man by taking clay from the earth, and breathed into his face a breath of life, and the man became a living soul” (Gen. ii. 7). There are two types of men; one a heavenly man, the other an earthly one. The heavenly man, being made after the image of God, has no share at all in corruptible and terrestrial substance; but the earthly one was put together out of the matter scattered here and there, which Moses calls “clay.” For this reason he says that the heavenly man was not moulded, but was stamped with the image of God; while the earthly is a moulded work of the Craftsman, but not His offspring. We must regard the man made out of the earth as mind mingling with, but not yet blended with, body. But this earthlike mind would in reality also be corruptible if God did not breathe into it a power of real life; when He does so, it no longer undergoes moulding, but becomes a soul, not an inefficient and imperfectly formed soul, but one endowed with mind and actually alive; for he says, “man became a living soul.”
The two races of humanity are heavenly and earthly. The heavenly Adam, made in the image of God, shares no part in any corruptible or earthlike substance. The earthly Adam is the figure of Genesis 2:7, formed from clay, breathed into, made a living soul. The verbs Philo notices matter here. The heavenly man is ‘fashioned’ according to the divine image, while the earthly man is ‘made’, a wording Philo takes to imply a thing produced rather than something begotten by its maker. Two Adams, two creations, two different relations to the divine.1

The framework behind the reading comes from Plato. Plato had drawn a sharp distinction between an invisible world of perfect ideas, which he called Forms, and the visible world of physical bodies that we see and touch. The two worlds were related as pattern and copy, with the visible world taking its shape from the perfect ideas in the invisible one. Philo finds in this distinction a ready-made tool for explaining why a single biblical text might describe creation twice. The first creation account, on his reading, describes the world of perfect ideas, the realm of patterns and originals. The second creation account describes the visible world that takes its shape from those patterns. The heavenly Adam is the perfect idea of a human being, neither male nor female, immortal, without a body. The earthly Adam is the particular embodied man, mortal, gendered, made of body and soul.2

Philo did not invent the reading from scratch. Alexandrian Jewish thinkers had been reading Genesis through the lens of Plato’s Timaeus since the second century BCE, and Philo inherits a set of competing interpretations from his predecessors and adapts them. Within his own writings he experiments with different ways of drawing the line between the world of perfect ideas and the visible world, sometimes locating it inside Genesis 1 between the first day and the days that follow, sometimes locating it between the two creation accounts as wholes. The interpretive scheme treats the apparent inconsistency of the Genesis text as a clue rather than as a problem to be smoothed away.3

The two-creation puzzle was not Philo’s alone. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Alexandria a century or so before Philo, had already woven elements of both creation stories together in its account of human nature. Rabbinic tradition would later read Genesis 1 as describing a primal human who was both male and female, distinct from the Adam of Genesis 2. The same interpretive question would surface again in 1 Corinthians 15, where the contrast between a ‘first Adam’ and a ‘second Adam’ appears within a different theological frame.4

Philo uses the distinction between the two Adams to explain the soul's relationship to its heavenly model. The heavenly Adam is what the human soul is trying to recover, the perfect pattern that the earthly mind, weighed down by the body and its passions, struggles to remember. Allegorical reading is the discipline by which the soul climbs back from the second Adam toward the first, from the earthly figure toward the heavenly one. The two-Adams scheme shapes Philo’s whole account of the human soul and its moral choices.5

Notes

  1. 1Maren R. Niehoff in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. James L. Kugel Louis H. Feldman and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 904–905.
  2. 2Gregory E. Sterling, New Approaches to the Study of Biblical-Interpretation in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 52.
  3. 3Sterling, New Approaches, 51.
  4. 4Eric Raymond Naizer, “Adam, Humanity, and Angels: Early Jewish Conceptions of the Elect and Humankind Based on Genesis 1–3” (diss., Florida State University, 2013), 133–134.
  5. 5Niehoff, Outside the Bible, 904.

Step 4 of 11

Philo’s Symbolic Reading of Abraham’s Migration

Literal and Symbolic Readings of the Torah

Philo reads biblical narratives as accounts of events and as symbols of the soul’s development, applying both approaches to Genesis.
Genesis 12 opens with a single command. God tells Abram to leave the country, kin, and house where he has lived all his life, and to travel to a land that has not yet been named.
Genesis 12:1
1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you.
Read literally, the verse describes a geographical journey. Abram leaves Ur of the Chaldeans, passes through Haran, and arrives in Canaan. Philo accepts this account as the record of an actual migration by an actual man. He then makes the move that defines his entire treatment of Abraham. The same passage, read at a second level, narrates the journey of a soul out of false philosophy and into the search for God.
Philo, On Abraham 1:68
68 If one goes by the literal wording of the scripture, the emigrations mentioned above were made by a wise man; but if we look to the laws of allegory, they were made by a soul devoted to virtue and occupied in the search for the true God.
For Philo the Chaldean homeland is not just a region in southern Mesopotamia. It is the homeland of star-worship and astrology, where the heavens are mistaken for the highest reality and the visible universe is taken for God. Abraham’s departure from that homeland pictures the awakening of a soul that has spent its life identifying creation with the creator. The soul opens its eye, sees a pure ray of light cut through the deep darkness, and follows the light to the God who stands above the world. The migration of one Mesopotamian figure becomes the migration of every mind that turns from the visible world toward the unseen reality that lies beyond it.1

The framework is partly drawn from Plato and partly from the Stoics. The Platonic side is the contrast between the visible universe and the unseen world of perfect ideas that the philosophical soul searches for. The Stoic side, from a school that held the universe to be governed by a single rational order, is the conviction that the wise person has a single goal, a telos of virtue, which the soul moves toward by stages. Abraham embodies that movement. He is constructed as a Stoic-style sage, the figure who watches the heavens and draws the right conclusion from what he sees, perceiving one divine force holding together and directing the universe rather than the multitude of star-gods the Chaldeans had supposed. He becomes the philosopher whose entire life narrates the structure of moral progress toward knowledge of the divine.2

Philo did not invent Abraham as the rejecter of Chaldean astrology. The book of Jubilees, written in Hebrew about two centuries earlier, has Abraham hear a voice from heaven while sitting alone observing the stars, telling him that the heavenly bodies are subject to the Lord. Josephus, working in Greek about a generation after Philo, presents Abraham as a sharp astronomer who deduced from the irregular movement of the heavenly bodies that none of them could be the supreme God. Philo inherits this tradition and converts it into something more systematic, an allegorical reading in which the figure from Mesopotamia stands for any soul making the same kind of journey.3

Within Philo’s own writing the reading carries weight beyond this one passage. Each of the figures in Genesis corresponds to a different stage or path of the soul’s progress toward virtue. Abraham figures the path of learning, the soul that arrives at God by instruction. Isaac figures the path of nature, the soul born to virtue. Jacob figures the path of practice, the soul that wins virtue by struggle. Migration itself becomes a recurring image for the soul’s progress, and Abraham is named ‘the standard of nobility for all proselytes’, every reader, Jewish or otherwise, who turns from a previous mode of seeing the world toward the worship of the one God.4

Philo does not replace the history with the philosophy. He insists that both readings hold at once. The migration of the literal Abraham really happened, and the migration of the soul really happens whenever a mind turns from the senses to the search for God. The verse supports both at the same time. The literal sage and the universal soul are equally and simultaneously deserving of love.

Notes

  1. 1Ellen Birnbaum in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 939–940.
  2. 2Maren R. Niehoff in Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity, ed. Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 98.
  3. 3Birnbaum, Outside the Bible, 940.
  4. 4Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes (Atlanta: Scholars, 1996), 221.

Step 5 of 11

The Logos and Its Many Names

The Logos and the Cosmic Sanctuary

Philo describes the Logos as a divine intermediary and a pattern for creation. He also interprets the tabernacle through a heavenly model.
Of all the concepts Philo developed across his writings, none is more consequential than the Logos. The Greek word means word, reason, speech, and account, and Philo gives it a specialized sense that draws all of these meanings together while adding several more. The most concentrated single statement of what he means by the term comes near the end of On the Confusion of Tongues, where he gives the Logos a list of names that compress an entire theology into a single sentence.
Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues 1:146
146 And even if no one is yet worthy to be called a son of God, let him nevertheless labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees Israel.
Each name points to a different role the Logos plays, and each is anchored in a specific phrase from Genesis. As ‘firstborn word’ the Logos is the first product of God’s mind, the begotten reality from which everything else proceeds. As ‘eldest of his angels’ and ‘archangel’ the Logos heads a hierarchy of in-between figures that stand between the unseen God and the world. As ‘the beginning’ he is the opening word of Genesis 1:1 treated as a living figure. As ‘Word’ he is the divine speech that calls light into being in Genesis 1:3 treated as a living figure. As ‘the name of God’ he is the medium through which the God beyond all naming becomes accessible to creatures. As ‘the man according to God’s image’ he is identified with the heavenly Adam of Genesis 1:26, the ideal pattern after which the earthly Adam is shaped. As ‘he who sees, Israel’ he absorbs the name given to Jacob in Genesis 32, which Philo reads as meaning ‘one who sees God’.1 The figure has several roles at once, as the foundation of the universe, the chief of angels, the king of creation, the figure embedded in scripture, and the original pattern of humanity.

None of these roles is invented from nothing. The Hebrew Bible already speaks of the divine word as a living agent through which God creates and acts (Psalm 33:6, Isaiah 55:11). The Wisdom tradition of Proverbs 8 had spoken of Wisdom as the first of God’s creatures, present at the founding of the world. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek in Alexandria a generation or two before Philo, had developed this further, calling Sophia the breath of the power of God, the brightness of the everlasting light, and the image of God’s goodness. Philo inherits this Greek-speaking Jewish wisdom tradition, identifies it with the Greek philosophical Logos, and folds the resulting figure into his reading of Genesis.2

The result is a figure whose status sits uneasily on the border between God and creation. Philo is willing to call the Logos a god, though carefully. He reserves the form ‘the God’ for the one true God and uses ‘god’ without the article when describing the Logos, and in another passage he explicitly calls the Logos a ‘second god’. He insists at the same time that no creature can be made in the likeness of the Most High but only in the likeness of the Logos. The Logos is named the Son or Firstborn of God, the authorized representative of a Creator who cannot mingle directly with his own creatures, the figure through whom the divine mind pours its power into a finite world.3

This same figure functions as God’s mediator. In other passages Philo describes the Logos as the ambassador of the ruler to the subject, the suppliant of the immortal on behalf of mortal beings, and the high priest who stands between heaven and earth. The Logos is also styled the chief of the angels, the ambassadors of God who are incapable of evil. In Philo’s account, a God beyond human reach and understanding remains undivided, while a divine figure derived from God mediates every relationship between God and creation.4

A first-century reader encountering this list of names would have heard echoes from many directions at once. The Greek philosopher would have heard the Logos of the Stoics that governs the universe, and the world of perfect ideas in Plato through which the divine craftsman shapes matter. The Greek-speaking Jew would have heard the Wisdom of Proverbs and the personified Word of the prophets. The student of Hebrew scripture would have heard the angel of God who carries the divine name and the heavenly throne-room imagery of the apocalypses. Philo’s Logos is deliberately drawn together so that every one of these traditions can be heard at the same time.5

The Logos is therefore not a peripheral element of Philo’s thought. Philo refers to the Logos to explain how God relates to the created world. Without the Logos there is no bridge between the God who stands utterly beyond reach and the world of bodies and minds. With the Logos, every Genesis verse becomes a statement about how that bridge is built, supported, and crossed. The same figure who stands at creation as the firstborn is also the figure who stands at the end of every soul’s journey as the goal it has been searching for.

Notes

  1. 1Peder Borgen, The Gospel of John: More Light from Philo, Paul and Archaeology: The Scriptures, Tradition, Exposition, Settings, Meaning, NovTSup 154 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 46–47.
  2. 2Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes (Atlanta: Scholars, 1996), 94.
  3. 3Mark Edwards, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 260.
  4. 4Edwards, The Routledge Handbook, 260.
  5. 5Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012), 209.

Step 6 of 11

Creation Through the Logos

The Logos and the Cosmic Sanctuary

Philo describes the Logos as a divine intermediary and a pattern for creation. He also interprets the tabernacle through a heavenly model.
Genesis opens with two short statements that Philo treats as the foundation of his entire account of how the world was made. The first is ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ The second, repeated across the days, is ‘And God said, Let there be light.’ Both verses imply that God brings the universe into being through ordered priority and through speech. For a reader trained in Plato’s Timaeus and in the Stoic account of nature, those verses raise an immediate question, namely how an unchanging God who stands beyond the world could act effectively on a world of changing physical things.

Philo answers through the Logos. Near the opening of his book On the Creation of the World he compares God’s act of creation to the founding of a city, almost certainly with Alexandria’s own founding in mind. A king supplies the opportunity, an architect designs the city in his mind first, sketching every street and building in detail, and a builder then constructs the visible city while looking at the architect’s plan as his model. The opening of the book gives the analogy in full and then lifts it to the scale of the universe.
Philo, On the Creation 1:5
So, just as the city, when it was first sketched out in the mind of the architect, had no place outside him, but was stamped only on the mind of the workman, in the same way the world that existed in ideas can have had no other location than the divine reason that made them; for what other place could there be for his powers that would be able to receive and contain, I do not say all of them, but even any single one of them, in its simple form? And the power and faculty capable of creating the world has as its origin the good that is founded on truth; for if anyone wanted to investigate the cause for which this universe was created, I think he would come to no wrong conclusion if he said, as one of the ancients did: “That the Father and Creator was good; and so he did not grudge the substance a share of his own excellent nature, since it had nothing good of itself, but was able to become everything.” For the substance in itself lacked arrangement, quality, animation and distinctive character, and was full of all disorder and confusion; and it was changed and transformed into the opposite condition, the most excellent one, being invested with order, quality, animation, resemblance, identity, arrangement, harmony, and everything that belongs to the more excellent idea.
The architect’s plan has no existence except in the architect’s mind. Likewise, the world of perfect ideas, the patterns from which the visible universe will be made, has no existence except in the divine mind. Philo gives that mind a name, the Logos. The Logos is the place where the ideas reside before they take material shape, the inward reason of God in the act of conceiving the world that will be made. Philo took the philosophical term for mind that he found in Plato and Aristotle and replaced it with Logos deliberately, keeping the link with speech that Genesis 1 had already established when it described God speaking the universe into being.1

The Logos is more than a static blueprint. It is also the active means through which God carries the design into matter. Plato’s craftsman in the Timaeus looks outward at an eternal pattern that exists independently of him. Philo’s God, by contrast, contains the pattern within himself, in his Logos, and creates through the Logos as the instrument of his own thought. The Logos is the means of pouring infinite divine power into a finite world, the channel by which a God who cannot have direct contact with material things still gives those things their form, their order, and their continued existence.2

The analogy has three roles in the analogy, namely the king, the architect, and the builder, but only two separate persons. The king and the architect are distinguishable in function, yet in the divine case they are not two beings but one God acting in two modes. The Logos covers every aspect of God that is directed toward creation, whether as the inner blueprint or as the active force ordering the visible world. The Jewish belief in one God is preserved while a real distinction between God and his creative reason is maintained.3

The whole framework is held in place by Philo’s strong sense of God as utterly beyond reach. The God of Moses, on his reading, is the only truly existing being, unique in standing beyond the world and beyond every name. The universe cannot reach him directly, and the philosophical soul cannot grasp him by looking at created things. The Logos connects God and the world in both directions, conveying God’s presence to creation and allowing the soul to ascend toward God. Philo reads Genesis as already containing this account drawn from Stoic and Platonic philosophy, with Moses anticipating the philosophers and offering, in his account of the six days, the most accurate description of the universe’s making any lawgiver had set down.4

Within Philo’s writing the same figure recurs under different names. The Logos is identified with God’s Wisdom, in dialogue with Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom of Solomon, and the two terms come close to functioning as a single concept with two designations. The figure who serves as the creative blueprint is also the figure in whose likeness the heavenly Adam is fashioned, the figure through which the universe is held together as a unity, and the figure who supplies the rational structure of the soul. Creation, the forming of humanity, and the ongoing care of the world all run through the same mediator.5

Notes

  1. 1Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 230–231.
  2. 2Mark Edwards, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 260.
  3. 3David T. Runia in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. James L. Kugel Louis H. Feldman and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 889–890.
  4. 4Maren R. Niehoff in Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity, ed. Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 91.
  5. 5Michael Cover in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature, ed. Samuel L. Adams and Matthew Goff (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 243–244.

Step 7 of 11

The Logos Between God and Creation

The Logos and the Cosmic Sanctuary

Philo describes the Logos as a divine intermediary and a pattern for creation. He also interprets the tabernacle through a heavenly model.
The God Philo describes stands beyond reach. He cannot directly touch a world of changing physical things. The question that follows is how God can act in creation while remaining undivided, unchanging, and distinct from the created world, as Philo’s theology insists he must be. His answer turns on the Logos in two complementary roles, as a second divine figure within scripture itself and as the mediator who stands at the border between Creator and creation.

The first move comes from how Philo reads scripture. In a strange line of Genesis 31:13 the Greek translation has God say to Jacob, ‘I am the God who was seen by thee in the place of God.’ Philo treats the doubled reference as a deliberate clue. There are, on the surface of the verse, two distinct divine figures.
Philo, On Dreams Book 1 39:5-7
(1.228) It is a very glorious boast for the soul that God should see fit to appear to it and converse with it. And do not pass by what is said here, but examine it accurately, and see whether there are really two Gods. For it is said: “I am the God who was seen by you;” not in my place, but in the place of God, as if he meant the place of some other God. (1.229) What, then, should we say? There is one true God only: but those called Gods, by an abuse of language, are many; and so on this occasion the holy scripture uses the article to indicate that the true God is meant, the expression being, “I am the God (ho Theos);” but when the word is used incorrectly, it is put without the article, the expression being, “He who was seen by you in the place,” not of the God (tou Theou), but simply “of God” (Theou); (1.230) and what he here calls God is his most ancient word, without any superstitious regard for the position of the names, but setting himself only one goal, namely, to give a true account of the matter; for in other passages the sacred historian, when he considered whether there really was any name belonging to the living God, showed that he knew none properly belonged to him, and that whatever name anyone may give him will be an abuse of terms; for the living God is not of a nature to be described, but only to be.
The form ‘the God’ (with the definite article) names the one true God. The form ‘God’ (without the article) names the Logos. Both can be called theos in Greek, but only the one true God is ho theos. Philo uses the phrase ‘second God’ freely to describe the Logos in this passage and elsewhere, and he shows no sense that he has compromised the belief in one God by doing so. The teaching of a ‘second God’ turns out to be a feature of pre-Christian Jewish thought, at least in its Alexandrian form, with nothing in it that excluded the worship of one God.1

The other side of the Logos’s role is its work as mediator. The same figure who can be called a second divine figure in scripture is the figure who stands between God and the world, holding the relationship together between an unreachable Creator and the creatures he has made. The clearest single statement of the mediator role comes in Who is the Heir of Divine Things, where Philo describes the Logos as both ambassador and suppliant.
Philo, Who is the Heir of Divine Things 1:43
But on minds that are ill-disposed and produce no knowledge, it pours out a whole body of punishments, bringing on them the most pitiable destruction of the deluge. And the Father who created the universe has given his archangelic and most ancient Word a pre-eminent gift: to stand on the border between the two and separate what has been created from the Creator. And this same Word is continually a suppliant to the immortal God on behalf of the mortal race, which is exposed to affliction and misery; and is also the ambassador, sent by the Ruler of all, to the subject race. And the Word rejoices in the gift, and, exulting in it, announces it and boasts of it, saying, ‘And I stood in the midst, between the Lord and You;’ being neither uncreated like God nor created like you, but in the middle between these two extremes, a hostage, as it were, to both parties: a hostage to the Creator, as a pledge and security that the whole race would never break away and revolt entirely, choosing disorder rather than order; and to the creature, to lead it to hold a confident hope that the merciful God would not overlook his own work. For I will proclaim news of peace to the creation from the one who has resolved to put an end to wars, God, who is always the guardian of peace.
The Logos moves in both directions at once. It pleads with God on behalf of human beings caught in their own weakness and need. It carries the will of the ruler down to the subjects who depend on him. It is neither uncreated, in the sense in which God is uncreated, nor created, in the sense in which the world is created. It stands at the border, holding both sides together. Greek-speaking Jewish thought before Philo had been working out exactly this kind of figure, a way of speaking about how an unchanging God could remain related to a world of motion, mortality, and need. The Heir passage is the most concentrated answer Philo gives, and it would have been recognizable to any reader trained in the Platonic school of his time as a Jewish answer to a problem the philosophical schools had been trying to address.2

The Logos in this mediator role is not a static abstraction but a living projection of an essential aspect of God, what one careful description calls the face of God turned toward creation. The same figure who is the inner blueprint of the universe is the one who carries the divine presence across the gap that separates God from matter. He gives the visible world its order, supports its continued existence, and supplies the rational structure that makes human knowledge of God possible at all. The philosophical framework draws its vocabulary from the Platonic school of his time and some of its assumptions from the Stoics, but the figure being described is recognizably the Logos of Greek-speaking Jewish scripture, the Word through which God reaches into the world he has made.3

This account allows Philo to reconcile two convictions that would otherwise conflict. The God of Israel remains utterly beyond reach, beyond every name, untouched by the created world. The same God remains in active relationship with that world, present to creation, supporting its order, hearing the soul’s cry. The Logos is the way both can be true at once. There is one true God, and there is also a second figure who carries that one God’s reality into the world without diminishing it. Philo can name the Logos a god, an angel, a son, a high priest, an ambassador, and a suppliant, and he can do all of this within a recognizably Jewish frame because he never confuses the Logos with the one true God who has sent him.4

Notes

  1. 1Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” HTR 94.3 (2001): 249–251.
  2. 2Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 9–11.
  3. 3Andrei A. Orlov, Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 10–11.
  4. 4Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism, SJLA (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 173–183.

Step 8 of 11

The High Priest and the Cosmic Tabernacle

The Logos and the Cosmic Sanctuary

Philo describes the Logos as a divine intermediary and a pattern for creation. He also interprets the tabernacle through a heavenly model.
When Moses receives the instructions for the wilderness tabernacle in Exodus, the closing instruction provides the basis for Philo’s allegorical reading. God tells Moses to build the tent and its furniture exactly as they have been shown to him on the mountain.
Exodus 25:40
40 Now be sure to make them according to the pattern you were shown on the mountain.
For Philo, this single line is enough to establish the architecture of his entire temple theology. The verse implies that the tabernacle Moses constructs is the copy of an original. The original is not another building somewhere out of sight. It is the perfect pattern that Moses contemplates with the eye of his soul on Sinai. The book On the Life of Moses sets out the framework directly.
Philo, On the Life of Moses Book 2 1:15
71 And while he was still staying on the mountain he was initiated into the sacred will of God, being instructed in all the most important matters which relate to his priesthood, the first in order being the commands of God concerning the building of a temple and all its furniture. 72 If, then, they had already occupied the country into which they were migrating, it would have been necessary for them to erect a most magnificent temple of the most costly stone in some place unencumbered with wood, and to build vast walls around it, and abundant and well-furnished houses for the keepers of the temple, calling the place itself the holy city. 73 But, as they were still wandering in the wilderness, it was more suitable for people who had no settled home yet to have a moveable temple, so that, in all their journeyings, and military expeditions, and encampments, they might be able to offer up sacrifices, and might not feel the lack of any of the things which related to their holy ministrations, and which those who live in cities need. 74 Therefore Moses now determined to build a tabernacle, a most holy edifice, whose furniture he was taught to supply through precise commands that God gave him while he was on the mountain, contemplating with his soul the incorporeal patterns of bodies which were about to be made perfect, and he was bound to make the furniture in their exact likeness, so that it might be an imitation, perceptible to the outward senses, of an archetypal sketch and pattern that only the intellect can perceive; 75 for it was suitable and consistent that the task of preparing and furnishing the temple be entrusted to the real high priest, so that he might with all due perfection and propriety make all his ministrations in performing his sacred duties correspond to the works which he was now to make.
The visible tabernacle is the physical copy. The pattern Moses sees is the perfect original in the divine mind. Between them stands the figure whose soul has been raised high enough on the mountain to grasp realities without bodies and bring them into matter. Moses is the bridge from which the earthly cult takes its shape. Every pillar, every curtain, every vessel inside the tabernacle is a translation of something that exists, in Philo’s words, only in the realm of pure thought, and the visible Jerusalem temple itself becomes, in Philo’s later writing, an earthly form of a reality on the scale of the universe, whose personnel and services symbolize the entire created order.1

The framework extends outward beyond the wilderness sanctuary. The whole universe, on Philo’s reading, is itself God’s temple, with heaven as the inmost sanctuary, the angelic powers as priests, and the Logos as the high priest who stands before God on behalf of all creation. The tabernacle Moses builds in the desert is therefore a small copy of a copy. The universe images the perfect patterns in God’s mind. The tabernacle images the universe, and the priestly cult reenacts in miniature what the universe performs continuously in its order, motion, and beauty. The Logos in this priestly office is not a metaphor but the figure who actually performs the work of mediation between the one true God and the world he has made.2

The high priest who walks through the visible tabernacle therefore wears, on Philo’s reading, the universe itself. Philo reads the priestly vestments as a deliberate sign system that maps onto the structure of the universe. The blue robe is the air. The pomegranates and bells along its hem are the fruits of the earth. The breastpiece with its twelve stones is heaven with its twelve signs of the zodiac. The two emeralds on the shoulders are the two hemispheres of the sky. When the high priest enters the holy of holies on the day of atonement, he carries the universe with him into the inmost place where the divine presence dwells. The vestments contain, in Philo’s allegorical reading, the living powers of intellect and the senses that hold the universe together.3

This way of seeing the temple draws on a larger move within Philo’s writing. He presents Moses as a philosopher and lawgiver who first set down a full account of the universe as the work of one true Father and Maker. That same Father and Maker is, in Philo’s framing, the world’s true Lawgiver, and the rational order of nature is therefore identical with the moral order Moses delivers in scripture. Read in this frame, the Jerusalem cult is not the narrow concern of one people. It is the particular Jewish form of a worship that the ordered universe is already performing continuously, with the Logos at its center.4

Philo bases this interpretation on the pattern Moses sees on the mountain. He is not given the tabernacle as a finished object. He is shown a pattern. The pattern is the world of perfect ideas, the same reality that the Logos both contains and projects into matter. The tabernacle is the visible record of what Moses saw, and the high priest who serves in it carries that vision into the inmost shrine. Every act of worship inside the tent is a re-enactment of the moment on Sinai when the prophet’s soul received the original. Earth and heaven are linked at that point, and the worship established there maintains the connection.

Notes

  1. 1Jonathan Robert Trotter, The Jerusalem Temple in Diaspora: Jewish Practice and Thought during the Second Temple Period, JSJSup 192 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 208.
  2. 2Mark Edwards, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 260.
  3. 3Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 42 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 379.
  4. 4Maren R. Niehoff in Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity, ed. Lance Jenott and Sarit Kattan Gribetz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 95.

Step 9 of 11

The Logos in John's Prologue

New Testament Parallels to Philo

John, Hebrews, and Paul use ideas comparable to Philo’s Logos, heavenly sanctuary, and heavenly Adam, applying them to Jesus in different ways.
The Gospel of John opens with a hymn whose vocabulary nearly every educated first-century Greek-speaking Jew would have recognized. None of its key terms is invented, not the Word, not the beginning, not the role in creation, not the light shining in darkness. It is the language Greek-speaking Jewish writers had been using for at least a century to describe how the unreachable God of Israel touched the visible world.
John 1:1-5
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God. 2 The Word was with God in the beginning. 3 All things were created by him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of mankind. 5 And the light shines on in the darkness, but the darkness has not mastered it.
Set the opening verses of John beside the opening verses of Genesis in Greek and the borrowing is unmistakable. The same key terms, the phrase ‘in the beginning,’ the verb of creation, and the contrast between light and darkness, appear in the same order in both texts. The Prologue is not a free meditation on Genesis but a deliberate pickup of Genesis 1:1–5 in the same sequence the older text uses. It takes the language of Genesis as a point of reference and rewrites it into a hymn that introduces the Word as the figure standing at that beginning.1

The verse-by-verse parallels with Philo are unmistakable. Both Philo and the Prologue use the form ‘God’ without the definite article when speaking of the Word as a god, while reserving ‘the God’ for the one true God who stands utterly beyond reach. Both connect the Word with the ‘beginning’ of Genesis 1:1. Both describe the Word as the instrument through whom the universe was made, using the same Greek phrasing. Both link the Word with light. Both say that those who receive the Word become children of God. None of these features can be explained as coincidence. They reflect a shared interpretive tradition working with the same opening verses of Genesis and the same Wisdom and Word vocabulary inherited from Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom of Solomon.2

The Prologue can be read not as a Christian hymn imposed on Genesis 1 but as a Jewish midrash on Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8, the kind of verse-by-verse interpretation any Greek-speaking Jewish writer of the late first century could have produced. Read this way, the first thirteen verses of John’s hymn say what Philo himself could have said. The Word stands with God at creation, takes the role Wisdom plays in Proverbs, gives life to those who receive it, and walks through a world that does not always recognize him. What is now called Logos theology, on this reading, was not a feature of early Christianity that John borrowed from outside Judaism but a strand of first-century Jewish thought that Philo, the Aramaic Targum traditions, and the Fourth Gospel each draw from.3

The same conclusion can be reached by reading the Prologue as the product of a Greek-speaking Jewish interpretive tradition that had been working with Genesis 1 for generations, placing John’s hymn in the same stream as Philo’s reading of the opening verses of the Torah. The author of the Prologue did not need to read Philo directly. Both writers inherit a body of Greek-speaking Jewish reflection on the first day of creation, in which the Word is the figure through whom the world comes into being and the light of the first day is the light shining in the divine mind before any sun is made.4

Where the Prologue parts company with Philo is concentrated in a single verse. The shared vocabulary holds through the first thirteen verses. The fourteenth breaks it. The Word, the hymn says, became flesh and lived among us. Philo’s Logos is by definition without a body, the figure standing at the border between the world of perfect ideas and the visible world specifically because it cannot be confused with matter. The Prologue keeps the Logos vocabulary and then makes a claim Philo’s framework would not allow, namely that the same figure who stands at the beginning has taken on a single human body. The question that follows is what kind of theology this leaves the reader with, and what room remains for the Greek-speaking Jewish framework once the Word has been identified with one person.5

The shape of the Prologue is therefore not a replacement of Greek-speaking Jewish tradition but a compressed reworking of it. The Prologue retains the roles Philo assigned to the Logos: the firstborn and agent of creation, a second figure called god within belief in one God, a mediator between God and creation, and a giver of life and light. What the hymn adds is the assertion that this figure has a name and a face. The earlier Greek-speaking Jewish tradition, Philo included, gives no warrant for that identification. The Prologue is best read as an independent Jewish text working with the same materials and pushing them in a direction Philo never went.

Notes

  1. 1Gregory E. Sterling, Studia Philonica Annual XVII Studies in Hellenistic Judaism (Brown Judaic Studies, 2005), 119–122.
  2. 2Peder Borgen, The Gospel of John: More Light from Philo, Paul and Archaeology: The Scriptures, Tradition, Exposition, Settings, Meaning, NovTSup 154 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 198.
  3. 3Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” HTR 94.3 (2001): 267.
  4. 4Thomas H. Tobin, “The Prologue of John and Hellenistic Jewish Speculation,” CBQ (1990): 252–269.
  5. 5Marianne Meye Thompson, The Incarnate Word Perspectives on Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988), 33–40.

Step 10 of 11

The Heavenly Sanctuary in Hebrews

New Testament Parallels to Philo

John, Hebrews, and Paul use ideas comparable to Philo’s Logos, heavenly sanctuary, and heavenly Adam, applying them to Jesus in different ways.
The Letter to the Hebrews opens its long meditation on the tabernacle by citing the warning given to Moses on Sinai. The earthly priests, the writer argues, serve in a sanctuary that is only a sketch and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary, and the proof is that Moses was told to build everything according to the pattern shown to him on the mountain. The proof text is the same line from Exodus that stood at the center of Philo’s temple theology, though the writer of Hebrews puts it to a different use.
Hebrews 8:1-5
1 Now the main point of what we are saying is this: We have such a high priest, one who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, 2 a minister in the sanctuary and the true tabernacle that the Lord, not man, set up. 3 For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices. So this one, too, had to have something to offer. 4 Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest, since there are already priests who offer the gifts prescribed by the law. 5 The place where they serve is a sketch and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary, just as Moses was warned by God as he was about to complete the tabernacle. For he says, “See that you make everything according to the design shown to you on the mountain.”
Philo, two generations earlier, had built an entire theology of mediation on the same verse. In his reading, the visible tabernacle is a copy of a perfect original in the divine mind that Moses contemplated on Sinai, and the craftsman who built it works only from the shadow of what Moses saw directly.
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 3:31
This, moreover, is the reason why God proclaims Bezalel by name, and says that He has given him wisdom and knowledge, and that He will appoint him artisan and chief craftsman of all the works of the Tabernacle, that is of the soul (Exod. xxxi. 2 ff.), though He has so far pointed to no work or deed of Bezalel’s that would win him even commendation. We must say, then, that here too we have a form which God has stamped on the soul as on the tested coin. We will know what image is impressed on it if we first determine the exact meaning of the name. Bezalel means, then, “in the shadow of God”; but God’s shadow is His Word, which he used like an instrument, and so made the world. But this shadow, and what we may describe as the representation, is the archetype for further creations. For just as God is the Pattern of the Image, to which the title of Shadow has just been given, even so the Image becomes the pattern of other beings, as the prophet made clear at the very outset of the Law-giving by saying, “And God made the man after the Image of God” (Gen. i. 27), implying that the Image had been made as a representation of God, but that the man was made after the Image when it had acquired the force of a pattern.
The shared scriptural move is unmistakable. Both Philo and the writer of Hebrews read Exodus 25:40 as evidence that the wilderness tabernacle is a copy of a higher original. Both speak in the same vocabulary of pattern, shadow, and copy. Both treat the visible cult as a translation into matter of something that exists already in another register. Hebrews uses precisely the language drawn from Plato’s school that Philo uses, even down to the contrast between an ideal pattern and its inferior material expression. Where Philo deploys the verse to prove that the revelation granted to Moses was of the higher world of perfect ideas, the writer of Hebrews deploys it to prove that the wilderness tabernacle itself was part of the material world and therefore an inferior copy of a higher reality.1

The writer of Hebrews almost certainly did not read Philo directly. The two texts share a vocabulary and an interpretive habit because they draw from a common Greek-speaking Jewish interpretive pool, in which Exodus 25:40 had long been a key verse for thinking about the relation between earthly cult and heavenly reality. The parallels are not borrowings but inheritances. Both writers belong to a Greek-speaking Jewish world in which the Plato-influenced language of pattern and copy had become a standard way of explaining how the visible tabernacle related to what stood behind it.2

The language of Hebrews 8 belongs thoroughly to that world. The terms ‘shadow’ and ‘pattern’ were standard vocabulary in the Platonic school of the period for the relationship between physical appearance and the higher world of perfect ideas. The writer of Hebrews picks them up without explanation, on the assumption that the audience will recognize what they mean. The earthly cult is the visible projection of something that has its true existence elsewhere. To call the earthly tabernacle a ‘shadow’ is not to dismiss it but to locate it on one side of a vertical axis whose other side is the heavenly sanctuary the writer is about to describe.3

The shift becomes visible when the writer of Hebrews turns the framework toward an argument about Jesus. Hebrews keeps the imagery of the universe, treating the outer court as the realm of created matter and the inner sanctuary as the unshakeable heaven, but folds it into a temporal scheme in which the heavenly cult becomes the place Jesus enters once for all on the Day of Atonement. The Platonic vertical axis between earth and heaven is not abandoned. It is laid alongside a temporal axis in which the old age and the new age each have their own cult. Where Philo’s framework only relates the visible world to the world of perfect ideas, the writer of Hebrews adds a second axis between the present age and the age to come.4

The result is a reading of Exodus 25:40 that begins from the same Greek-speaking Jewish ground Philo occupies and ends somewhere different. Philo, on this single verse, builds a theology in which the high priest who serves in the visible tabernacle wears the universe and stands as the meeting point of perfect ideas and the physical world. Hebrews, on the same verse, builds a theology in which Jesus enters the heavenly sanctuary as the high priest of a new covenant and the wilderness tabernacle is left behind as the shadow of what has now arrived. The figures of Israel’s past, including Moses, are recast in Hebrews into a sequence whose meaning depends on the figure who comes at the end. The vocabulary from Plato’s school remains, but the use to which it is put has shifted.5

What Hebrews shows is not that the writer of the letter has abandoned Greek-speaking Jewish thought for something foreign to it, but that this kind of thought was being put to many uses in the late first century. The same Exodus verse, the same vocabulary of pattern and shadow, the same conviction that the visible cult reflects a heavenly reality, all of this turns up in Philo, in Hebrews, and in other Greek-speaking Jewish texts of the period. What changes between Philo and Hebrews is not the framework but the figure who occupies its center. In Philo it is the cosmic high priest, in Hebrews it is Jesus. The framework itself is shared, and the writer of Hebrews could not have argued as he does without the long tradition of reading Exodus 25:40 that Philo represents.

Notes

  1. 1Marie E. Isaacs, Sacred Space An Approach to the Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1992), 149–153.
  2. 2Ronald Williamson, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 142–159.
  3. 3Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Fortress, 1989), 218–224.
  4. 4Kenneth L. Schenck, Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews: The Settings of the Sacrifice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143–158.
  5. 5Pamela M. Eisenbaum, The Jewish Heroes of Christian History Hebrews 11 in Literary Context (Atlanta: Scholars, 1997), 9–13, 165–172.

Step 11 of 11

Paul’s Two Adams

New Testament Parallels to Philo

John, Hebrews, and Paul use ideas comparable to Philo’s Logos, heavenly sanctuary, and heavenly Adam, applying them to Jesus in different ways.
In his argument about resurrection at the end of 1 Corinthians, Paul quotes the account of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7. He quotes the line from Genesis 2 in which God breathes life into the man formed from the soil, and then he sets a second figure beside the first.
1 Corinthians 15:45-49
45 So also it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living person”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 However, the spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man is from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 Like the one made of dust, so too are those made of dust, and like the one from heaven, so too those who are heavenly. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, let us also bear the image of the man of heaven.
The contrast Paul draws here is structurally close to one Philo had been making for years. Philo had read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as accounts of two different kinds of human, the heavenly figure made in the image of God and the earthly figure shaped from clay. The same interpretive move appears across his books, often in vocabulary close enough to Paul’s that the parallel cannot be missed.
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 2:2
It is not good that any man should be alone. For there are two races of men, the one made after the (Divine) Image, and the one moulded out of the earth. It is not good for the man made after the Image to be alone, because he yearns for the Image. For the image of God is a pattern of which copies are made, and every copy longs for that of which it is a copy, and its place is at its side. It is far less good for the man moulded of the earth to be alone. Indeed, it is impossible. For senses, passions, vices and ten thousand other presences are linked in closest fellowship with the mind so formed. With the second man a helper is associated. To begin with, the helper is a created one, for it says, “Let us make a helper for him”; and, in the next place, it comes after the one who is to be helped, for He had formed the mind before and is about to form its helper. In these details again, while using terms of outward nature, he is conveying a deeper meaning. For sense and the passions are helpers of the soul and come after the soul. We shall see how they help; let us fix our attention on their coming later than the soul.
The two-Adam scheme, in something close to the form Philo represents, was already a fixture of Greek-speaking Jewish interpretation a generation before Paul. Both Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7 lay open to the question of why the Torah describes the creation of the human twice, and Greek-speaking Jewish writers had been answering it by distinguishing a humanity that exists only in the divine mind from a humanity made of flesh and bone. The heavenly figure of Genesis 1 was the image of God, the original pattern, and the earthly figure of Genesis 2 was the embodied descendant, animated by the divine breath but shaped from soil. Paul’s appeal to Genesis 2:7 in 1 Corinthians 15:45 follows the same interpretive pathway and uses the same vocabulary about humanity.1

The contrasting pair Paul sets up between psychikos (the natural body, animated only by soul) and pneumatikos (the spiritual body, alive with divine spirit) is the Greek-speaking Jewish vocabulary for the same distinction Philo makes between the earthly and heavenly humans. Paul does not need to invent the categories. They are sitting ready in the Greek-speaking Jewish interpretive tradition he learned, and his argument depends on his audience recognizing them. When he says that the natural body is sown and the spiritual body is raised, he is using a Greek-speaking Jewish framework about humanity to make a point about Jesus.2

The decisive difference comes in the order. Philo puts the heavenly Adam first and the earthly Adam second, in keeping with a logic from Plato in which the perfect pattern precedes its physical copy. Paul reverses the sequence. The earthly figure of Genesis 2:7 comes first, and the heavenly figure, identified with the risen Jesus, comes second. Paul makes this reversal explicit in 1 Corinthians 15:46. ‘The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and then the spiritual.’ The line reads almost as a deliberate correction of a Philonic ordering, and it is hard to imagine the verse having force unless Paul’s audience was already familiar with the alternative scheme he is rejecting.3

Philo’s view of humanity, in his earlier Allegorical Commentary, treats the two Adams as the architecture of the soul’s ascent. The earthly figure is what the embodied human begins with, and the heavenly figure is the goal toward which the philosophical mind rises through allegorical reading and moral discipline. Paul’s use of the same scheme runs along the same axis but in a different direction. The recovery of the heavenly figure, on Paul’s reading, is not the achievement of the disciplined mind climbing back from the earthly toward the heavenly pattern. It is the gift the risen Jesus brings into the world to come, carried into the future of those who belong to him. The vocabulary is shared, but the engine driving the contrast has changed from spiritual exercise to resurrection.4

Paul’s reversal of the order should not be read as ignorance of the Greek-speaking Jewish scheme but as a deliberate use of it for a different purpose. By calling the earthly figure ‘first man’ and the heavenly figure, identified with Jesus, ‘second’ or ‘last man,’ Paul is not denying that the heavenly figure exists already as the image of God in the divine mind. He is making a point about the order of human history. The earthly Adam comes first into the world, and the heavenly figure comes second, in time, to bring those who share the earthly form into the heavenly one. Paul uses the same distinction between earthly and heavenly humanity found in Philo, and his argument depends on his audience recognizing it.5

What 1 Corinthians 15:45–49 shows, then, is not that Paul has imported categories foreign to Greek-speaking Judaism but that he has taken its vocabulary about humanity and put it to a new use. The two-Adam scheme, the contrast between natural and spiritual, the appeal to Genesis 2:7 as a text about a humanity destined to bear the image of a heavenly counterpart, all of this stands in continuity with the kind of reading Philo represents. The break, where it comes, is in the identification of the heavenly figure with a particular human being and in the order in time Paul gives to the scheme. The break is real, but it makes sense only against the long Greek-speaking Jewish tradition that supplied the scheme in the first place.

Notes

  1. 1Thomas H. Tobin, The Creation of Man Philo and the History of Interpretation (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983), 108–134.
  2. 2Birger A. Pearson, The Pneumatikos-Psychikos Terminology in 1 Corinthians (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1973), 17–26.
  3. 3Stephen J. Hultgren, “The Origin of Paul’s Doctrine of the Two Adams in 1 Corinthians 15:45–49,” JSNT 25.3 (2003): 343–370.
  4. 4Maren R. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 125–145.
  5. 5Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Jesus How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012), 228.

Read More

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  • Birnbaum, Ellen. In Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture. Edited by Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013.
  • Birnbaum, Ellen. The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes. Atlanta: Scholars, 1996.
  • Borgen, Peder. The Gospel of John: More Light from Philo, Paul and Archaeology: The Scriptures, Tradition, Exposition, Settings, Meaning. NovTSup 154. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
  • Boyarin, Daniel. “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John.” HTR 94.3 (2001): 243–284.
  • Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Jesus How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012.
  • Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012.
  • Cover, Michael. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature. Edited by Samuel L. Adams and Matthew Goff. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020.
  • Edwards, Mark, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021.
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  • Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
  • Hultgren, Stephen J. “The Origin of Paul’s Doctrine of the Two Adams in 1 Corinthians 15:45–49.” JSNT 25.3 (2003): 343–370.
  • Isaacs, Marie E. Sacred Space An Approach to the Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1992.
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  • Naizer, Eric Raymond. “Adam, Humanity, and Angels: Early Jewish Conceptions of the Elect and Humankind Based on Genesis 1–3.” Diss., Florida State University, 2013.
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  • Niehoff, Maren R. In Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture. Edited by James L. Kugel Louis H. Feldman and Lawrence H. Schiffman. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013.
  • Niehoff, Maren R. Philo of Alexandria An Intellectual Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
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  • Pearson, Birger A. The Pneumatikos-Psychikos Terminology in 1 Corinthians. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1973.
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