Philo of Alexandria

• a founder of Christianity

5:4.14It must there­fore be ev­i­dent that com­pos­ite Chris­tian the­ol­ogy en­coun­ters great dif­fi­culty in at­tain­ing con­sis­tency. This dif­fi­culty is fur­ther ag­gra­vated by the fact that the doc­trines of early Chris­tian­ity were gen­er­ally based on the per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of three dif­fer­ent per­sons: Philo of Alexan­dria, Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, and Paul of Tar­sus.

• great religious teacher

92:5.135. The first cen­tury af­ter Christ. As a re­li­gious teacher, Je­sus of Naz­a­reth started out with the cult which had been es­tab­lished by John the Bap­tist and pro­gressed as far as he could away from fasts and forms. Aside from Je­sus, Paul of Tar­sus and Philo of Alexan­dria were the great­est teach­ers of this era. Their con­cepts of re­li­gion have played a dom­i­nant part in the evo­lu­tion of that faith which bears the name of Christ.

• a founder of Christianity

92:6.18The Chris­tian re­li­gion is the re­li­gion about the life and teach­ings of Christ based upon the the­ol­ogy of Ju­daism, mod­i­fied fur­ther through the as­sim­i­la­tion of cer­tain Zoroas­trian teach­ings and Greek phi­los­o­phy, and for­mu­lated pri­mar­ily by three in­di­vid­u­als: Philo, Pe­ter, and Paul. It has passed through many phases of evo­lu­tion since the time of Paul and has be­come so thor­oughly Oc­ci­den­tal­ized that many non-Eu­ro­pean peo­ples very nat­u­rally look upon Chris­tian­ity as a strange rev­e­la­tion of a strange God and for strangers.

• harmonizer of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology
• profoundly influenced religious thought

121:6.3Though the Hel­le­nized Jew­ish be­liefs were very lit­tle in­flu­enced by the teach­ings of the Epi­cure­ans, they were very ma­te­ri­ally af­fected by the phi­los­o­phy of Plato and the self-ab­ne­ga­tion doc­trines of the Sto­ics. The great in­road of Sto­icism is ex­em­pli­fied by the Fourth Book of the Mac­cabees; the pen­e­tra­tion of both Pla­tonic phi­los­o­phy and Stoic doc­trines is ex­hib­ited in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon. The Hel­le­nized Jews brought to the He­brew scrip­tures such an al­le­gor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that they found no dif­fi­culty in con­form­ing He­brew the­ol­ogy with their revered Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. But this all led to dis­as­trous con­fu­sion un­til these prob­lems were taken in hand by Philo of Alexan­dria, who pro­ceeded to har­mo­nize and sys­tem­ize Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy into a com­pact and fairly con­sis­tent sys­tem of re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. And it was this later teach­ing of com­bined Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy that pre­vailed in Pales­tine when Je­sus lived and taught, and which Paul uti­lized as the foun­da­tion on which to build his more ad­vanced and en­light­en­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.

• great religious teacher

121:6.4Philo was a great teacher; not since Moses had there lived a man who ex­erted such a pro­found in­flu­ence on the eth­i­cal and re­li­gious thought of the Oc­ci­den­tal world. In the mat­ter of the com­bi­na­tion of the bet­ter el­e­ments in con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous sys­tems of eth­i­cal and re­li­gious teach­ings, there have been seven out­stand­ing hu­man teach­ers: Sethard, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Bud­dha, Philo, and Paul.

121:6.5Many, but not all, of Philo’s in­con­sis­ten­cies re­sult­ing from an ef­fort to com­bine Greek mys­ti­cal phi­los­o­phy and Ro­man Stoic doc­trines with the le­gal­is­tic the­ol­ogy of the He­brews, Paul rec­og­nized and wisely elim­i­nated from his pre-Chris­tian ba­sic the­ol­ogy. Philo led the way for Paul more fully to re­store the con­cept of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity, which had long been dor­mant in Jew­ish the­ol­ogy. In only one mat­ter did Paul fail to keep pace with Philo or to tran­scend the teach­ings of this wealthy and ed­u­cated Jew of Alexan­dria, and that was the doc­trine of the atone­ment; Philo taught de­liv­er­ance from the doc­trine of for­give­ness only by the shed­ding of blood. He also pos­si­bly glimpsed the re­al­ity and pres­ence of the Thought Ad­justers more clearly than did Paul. But Paul’s the­ory of orig­i­nal sin, the doc­trines of hered­i­tary guilt and in­nate evil and re­demp­tion there­from, was par­tially Mith­raic in ori­gin, hav­ing lit­tle in com­mon with He­brew the­ol­ogy, Philo’s phi­los­o­phy, or Je­sus’ teach­ings. Some phases of Paul’s teach­ings re­gard­ing orig­i­nal sin and the atone­ment were orig­i­nal with him­self.

121:6.6The Gospel of John, the last of the nar­ra­tives of Je­sus’ earth life, was ad­dressed to the West­ern peo­ples and pre­sents its story much in the light of the view­point of the later Alexan­drian Chris­tians, who were also dis­ci­ples of the teach­ings of Philo.

• profoundly influenced religious thought

121:7.7Paul’s cult of Chris­tian­ity ex­hib­ited its moral­ity as a Jew­ish birth­mark. The Jews viewed his­tory as the prov­i­dence of God—Yah­weh at work. The Greeks brought to the new teach­ing clearer con­cepts of the eter­nal life. Paul’s doc­trines were in­flu­enced in the­ol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy not only by Je­sus’ teach­ings but also by Plato and Philo. In ethics he was in­spired not only by Christ but also by the Sto­ics.

• harmonizer of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology

130:3.9Among the many men with whom Gonod trans­acted busi­ness was a cer­tain Jew­ish banker, Alexan­der, whose brother, Philo, was a fa­mous re­li­gious philoso­pher of that time. Philo was en­gaged in the laud­able but ex­ceed­ingly dif­fi­cult task of har­mo­niz­ing Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy. Ga­nid and Je­sus talked much about Philo’s teach­ings and ex­pected to at­tend some of his lec­tures, but through­out their stay at Alexan­dria this fa­mous Hel­lenis­tic Jew lay sick abed.

• harmonizer of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology

146:1.3Many of the bet­ter of the Baby­lo­nian and Per­sian ideas of light and dark­ness, good and evil, time and eter­nity, were later in­cor­po­rated in the doc­trines of so-called Chris­tian­ity, and their in­clu­sion ren­dered the Chris­tian teach­ings more im­me­di­ately ac­cept­able to the peo­ples of the Near East. In like man­ner, the in­clu­sion of many of Plato’s the­o­ries of the ideal spirit or in­vis­i­ble pat­terns of all things vis­i­ble and ma­te­rial, as later adapted by Philo to the He­brew the­ol­ogy, made Paul’s Chris­tian teach­ings more easy of ac­cep­tance by the west­ern Greeks.

• profoundly influenced religious thought

170:5.3But the great step which marked the trans­plan­ta­tion of the teach­ings of Je­sus from a Jew­ish to a gen­tile soil was taken when the Mes­siah of the king­dom be­came the Re­deemer of the church, a re­li­gious and so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion grow­ing out of the ac­tiv­i­ties of Paul and his suc­ces­sors and based on the teach­ings of Je­sus as they were sup­ple­mented by the ideas of Philo and the Per­sian doc­trines of good and evil.

• profoundly influenced religious thought

170:5.16Je­sus’ ideal con­cept largely failed, but upon the foun­da­tion of the Mas­ter’s per­sonal life and teach­ings, sup­ple­mented by the Greek and Per­sian con­cepts of eter­nal life and aug­mented by Philo’s doc­trine of the tem­po­ral con­trasted with the spir­i­tual, Paul went forth to build up one of the most pro­gres­sive hu­man so­ci­eties which has ever ex­isted on Uran­tia.

• mitigated Roman objections to Judaism

195:2.9A suc­ces­sion of Greek-cul­tural and Ro­man-po­lit­i­cal vic­to­ries had con­sol­i­dated the Med­i­ter­ra­nean lands into one em­pire, with one lan­guage and one cul­ture, and had made the West­ern world ready for one God. Ju­daism pro­vided this God, but Ju­daism was not ac­cept­able as a re­li­gion to these Ro­man­ized Greeks. Philo helped some to mit­i­gate their ob­jec­tions, but Chris­tian­ity re­vealed to them an even bet­ter con­cept of one God, and they em­braced it read­ily.

95:4.3This wise man of the Nile taught that “riches take them­selves wings and fly away”—that all things earthly are evanes­cent. His great prayer was to be “saved from fear.” He ex­horted all to turn away from “the words of men” to “the acts of God.” In sub­stance he taught: Man pro­poses but God dis­poses. His teach­ings, trans­lated into He­brew, de­ter­mined the phi­los­o­phy of the Old Tes­ta­ment Book of Proverbs. Trans­lated into Greek, they gave color to all sub­se­quent Hel­lenic re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy. The later Alexan­drian philoso­pher, Philo, pos­sessed a copy of the Book of Wis­dom.

164:3.4There was, through­out all these re­gions, a lin­ger­ing be­lief in rein­car­na­tion. The older Jew­ish teach­ers, to­gether with Plato, Philo, and many of the Es­senes, tol­er­ated the the­ory that men may reap in one in­car­na­tion what they have sown in a pre­vi­ous ex­is­tence; thus in one life they were be­lieved to be ex­pi­at­ing the sins com­mit­ted in pre­ced­ing lives. The Mas­ter found it dif­fi­cult to make men be­lieve that their souls had not had pre­vi­ous ex­is­tences.