Abstract
The importance of Philo of Alexandria for the study of Christianity can hardly be overestimated. He provided a productive model for the early fathers (such as Clement of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind and Origen) who were seeking to restate Christianity in Greek philosophical terms that would make it more palatable to educated Greeks of their day, and he exemplified a method of exegesis, allegorization – a method which had been developed by the Stoics to save Homer from his cultured despisers – which allowed this philosophical re-presentation of Christian teaching to be anchored in Scripture. Philo was the most impressive product of the great flowering of Hellenistic Jewish culture in Alexandria at the turn of the eras, a culture that was effectively brought to an end by the decimation of the Jewish community of the city during the Jewish revolts under Trajan (115-117). Philo would never have survived if he had not been taken up by the Church: copies of his voluminous works were conveyed from Alexandria to Caesarea Maritima, and probably from there diffused throughout the Christian world. In the period after his death, the historical development of Judaism flowed through other channels – the Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Rabbinic Batei Midrash of Palestine and Babylonia. Philo was not really taken up in the Jewish tradition till early modern times, when, relying on the recently published Latin translations of Sigismundus Gelenius (1558), the Italian Jewish scholar Azariah de’ Rossi devoted a substantial chapter to him in his Me’or cEinayim (1573-75). He gives him the Jewish name Yedidyah! Thus began the recovery of Philo for Judaism, the re-emergence of Philo Judaeus – a recovery which has continued down to our own times. Modern Reform Jewish thinkers, such as Samuel Sandmel, have seen him, and the Alexandrian Judaism which he typifies, as a sort of antecedent to modern Reform Judaism, and as an alternative to the halakhic Judaism of the Talmud.
Before de’ Rossi’s day, Philo was very much Philo Christianus, not just in the sense that he was studied avidly by Christians, but in the sense that some believed he was actually a Christian, or at least was acquainted with Christianity and very sympathetic to it. Eusebius of Caesarea was the main proponent of this legend. He has Philo go to Rome to study with Peter (Ecclesiastical History 2.17.1). It was well known that Philo had visited Rome as a member of a delegation of Alexandrian Jews who came to complain to the emperor Gaius about the behaviour of the Roman governor Flaccus. Philo himself tells the story in his Embassy to Gaius and his Against Flaccus. Now Peter would not have been in Rome as early as the reign of Gaius, so the legend presupposes either that he stayed on in Rome till the time of Claudius, when Peter was in Rome, or that he returned to Alexandria and then came back for a second visit under Claudius. Christianity according to tradition was established in Alexandria by Mark, a well-known disciple of Peter, and the implication seems to be that it was he who mentioned Peter to Philo, and told him that Peter was now in Rome. Eusebius cites as evidence of Philo’s sympathetic attitude to Christianity his treatise On the Contemplative Life, which, astonishingly, he takes as an accurate account of an early quasi-monastic Christian community in Egypt (Ecclesiastical History 2.17.2)! Probably relying on his contacts in Rome, Eusebius also records stories of the impact Philo had in Rome, including an invitation to address the Senate in the reign of Claudius (Ecclesiastical History 2.18.8). This rather chimes with the thesis of Maren Niehoff’s important monograph, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography (2018), in which she argues that Philo’s visit to Rome on the embassy marked a turning point in his intellectual development. In Rome he engaged actively with Roman intellectual circles and this led to a re-alignment of his thinking away from the Platonism of his earlier career in Alexandria, and more towards Stoicism which was popular in Rome.
The Eusebian Philo Christianus legend dominated Christian reception of Philo down to the 16th century when it was challenged on historical grounds by humanists such as Justus Scaliger, though many Catholic scholars still embraced it, because it had good Patristic pedigree. Gradually Philo Judaeus vanquished Philo Christianus, but this did not put an end to Christian interest in Philo. Numerous parallels were drawn between his writings and the New Testament, particularly the Logos doctrine of the Gospel of John and the heavenly Tabernacle in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Johann Benedict Carpzov’s Sacrae Exercitationes in S. Paulli Epistolam ad Hebraeos ex Philone Alexandrino (1750), which also included Johannine parallels, marks a turning point in New Testament study, and established what became the consensus Christian view in the 19th century that the background to John and Hebrews was to be found in Alexandrian Hellenistic Judaism. This trend reached its apogee in the work of the Catholic biblical scholar Ceslas Spicq in his French commentary on Hebrews (L’Épitre aux Hébreux, 3rd edn, 1952-53), in which he argued that the author of Hebrews was an Alexandrian Jew (he later identified him with Apollos) who had attended Philo’s school and heard him lecture. Few, if any, would go that far nowadays, but one could hardly imagine a more total reversal of the Philo Christianus legend which had Philo sitting at the feet of St Peter.
All this and much more is covered in this magnificent volume. There have been other attempts to write histories of the reception of Philo, such as Philo in Early Christian Literature (1993), by the doyen of Philo Studies, David Runia, who is one of the editors of this volume (he contributes to five chapters as well as the Introduction). But this is the first comprehensive survey and it carries the story down to modern times. The editors have assembled a stellar team of some 33 scholars. Chronologically and systematically organized, it is divided into six sections: I. The First Centuries (pp. 17-144); II Late Antiquity (pp. 145-258); III The Middle Ages (pp. 259-366); IV The Renaissance and Early Modern Period (pp. 367-452); V From the Eighteen to the Twentieth Centuries (pp. 453-517); and VI Contemporary Perspectives (pp. 517-586).
It is somewhat invidious to single out particular contributions: all are of a very high standard and a credit to their authors, but a number caught my eye, for somewhat personal reasons. As an expert in the history of Judaism the number of essays on Philo and Judaism was welcome: Philo and Rabbinic Judaism; Philo and Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Mysticism; The Rediscovery of Philo in Early Modern Europe; Philo and the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah); Philo and Wissenschaft des Judentums; Philo and Contemporary and Future Prospects among Scholars of Judaism. Some of the essays give highly competent surveys of the status quaestionis on much discussed themes, such as Torrey Seland’s chapter on ‘The New Testament’ (pp. 32-46). Others break new ground or present in accessible form research which is hidden away in hard-to-find literature. This is true of Alexander Treiger’s chapter on Philo in ‘Christian Arabic Literature’ (pp. 322-332), and Olga Vardazaryan’s Philo in ‘Armenian Literature’ (pp. 299-321). The Armenian tradition reminds us that however large Philo’s oeuvre might seem to be, we have lost much in its original Greek. His important Questions on Genesis and Questions on Exodus survive only in Armenian versions.
The reception history of the NT has burgeoned in recent decades, and it is now becoming clear that how the texts were received is a valuable resource for understanding them in their historical context. We should not draw too firm a line between what the texts from a modern critical-historical perspective originally meant and what they were understood to mean by later pre-critical readers. Ancient readers were often shrewd readers, and what they saw latent in the texts can reveal potential meanings that we from our modern perspective might fail to see. This book is beautifully produced (OUP at its best), but it is pricey. If it is too much for readers of the journal, they should recommend it to a library. It is certainly well-worth dipping into, however they manage to get access to it.