Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

Philo, of course, like the rest of his contemporaries, had no idea of criticism in the modern sense ; he was a thorough - going apologist of the Old Covenant documents. These were for him in their entirety the inerrant oracles of God Himself ; nay, he even went to the extent of believing the apologetic Greek version to be literally inspired.1

Nevertheless he was, as a thinker, confronted with the same kind of difficulties as face us to-day with immeasurably greater distinctness. The ideas of God, of the world-order, and of the nature of man, were so far advanced in his day beyond the frequently crude and repugnant representations found in the ancient scriptures of his people, that he found it impossible to claim for them on their surface-value the transcendency of the last word of wisdom from God to man, at anyrate among the cultured to whom he addressed himself. These difficulties he accordingly sought to remove by an allegorical interpretation, whereby he read into them the views of the highest philosophical and religious environment of his time.

Having no idea of the philosophy of history, or of the history of religion, or of the canons of literary 1 Or " divinely prompted " (De Vit. Mos., ii. 5-7).

criticism, as we now understand these things, he never stopped to enquire whether the writers of the ancient documents intended their narratives to be taken as myths embodying an esoteric meaning ; much less did he ask himself, as we ask ourselves to-day, whether these writers had not in all probability frequently written up the myths of other nations into a history of their own patriarchs and other worthies ; on the contrary, he relieved them of all responsibility, and entirely eliminated the natural human element, by his theory of prophecy, which assumed that they had acted as impersonal, passive instruments of the Divine inspiration.

But even Philo, when he came to work it out, could not maintain this absolutism of inspiration, and so we find him elsewhere unable to ascribe a consistent level of inspiration to his " Moses," who of course, in Philo's belief, wrote the Pentateuch from the first to the last word. Thus we find him even in the "Five Fifths" making a threefold classification of inspiration : (i.) The Sacred Oracles "spoken directly of God by His interpreter the prophet"; (ii.) Those prophetically delivered "in the form of question and answer"; and (iii) Those "proceeding from Moses himself while in some state of inspiration and under the influence of the deity." !

But what is most pleasant is to find that Philo admitted the great philosophers of Greece into his holy assembly, and though he gives the pre-eminence to Moses, yet it is, as it were, to a first among equals — a wide-minded tolerance that was speedily forgotten in the bitter theological strife that subsequently broke forth.

1 De Vit. Mos., iii. 23, 24.

THE GREAT IMPORTANCE OF HIS WRITINGS

But what makes the writings of our Alexandrian so immensely important for us is, that the final decade of his life is contemporary with the coming into manifestation of Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world owing to the energetic propaganda of Paul.

Philo was born somewhere between 30 and 20 B.C., and died about 45 A.D. There is, of course, not a single word in his voluminous writings that can in any way be construed into a reference to Christianity as traditionally understood ; but the language of Philo, if not precisely the diction of the writers of the New Testament documents, has innumerable pqints of resemblance with their terminology ; for the language of Hellenistic theology is largely, so to speak, the common tongue of both, while the similarity of many of their ideas is astonishing.