Justified True Belief

(●) The Jewish philosopher who read Moses with Plato in his hand, and left the church the words it would use to speak of the Word. + Around the time Paul walked into a synagogue in Damascus, a wealthy Jew in Alexandria was writing commentary after commentary on the books of Moses, in Greek, for readers who had been raised on Homer. He is the reason we can say what an educated Jew of the diaspora, meaning the Jewish communities scattered across the world outside the land of Israel, thought about God in the years Jesus was growing up in Nazareth, and his writings are the largest body of Jewish literature to survive from the generations before Jerusalem fell. Philo matters to Christian readers for a plain reason. Almost every idea a reader meets in the opening of John’s Gospel and in the letter to the Hebrews (a Word who is with God and through whom all things are made, an earthly sanctuary copied from a heavenly pattern, a high priest who stands between God and the people) was already circulating in Alexandria in Greek, in the writings of a devout Jew who had never heard of Jesus. What he built was a bridge between the Bible and Greek philosophy, and the church walked across it. Here is the fact worth remembering about him. Everything of his that survives, survives because Christians copied it. Jewish tradition let him go almost completely: no rabbi cites him, the Talmud never names him, and he does not resurface in Jewish letters until the sixteenth century. Monks kept his books for fifteen hundred years, and Jerome went so far as to file him among Christian writers.

(●) c. 20 BC: Born in Alexandria, into the richest Jewish family in the greatest Greek city of the world. + Nobody wrote down the year Philo was born, and the estimate comes from his own remark that he was an old man when he sailed to Rome in 39 AD, which puts his birth somewhere around 20 BC. He grew up in Alexandria, the second city of the Roman empire, laid out on a grid by the sea, with a lighthouse that ranked among the wonders of the world and a library that had tried to collect every book ever written. Its five districts were named after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, and two of them, Philo tells us, were the Jewish quarters. The Jewish community there was the largest anywhere outside Judea. His family was not merely comfortable. His brother Alexander held the office of alabarch, a senior post over customs and revenue whose exact duties are no longer clear, and Josephus, the Jewish historian writing later in the same century, records two things Alexander did with his money. The first is a loan. Alexander put up two hundred thousand drachmas for Herod Agrippa I, the Jewish prince who would later rule as king in Judea, and would hand the sum over only to Agrippa’s wife, thinking too little of Agrippa himself to trust him with it. A drachma was roughly a day’s wage for a working man, so the loan came to something like two hundred thousand days of somebody’s labor. The second is a gift: Alexander paid to overlay nine gates of the temple in Jerusalem with gold and silver. His son, Philo’s nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander, would rise higher still in Rome’s service and, in Josephus’ blunt phrase, would not continue in the customs of his fathers. So this is not a scholar in a garret. Philo was born into the sort of family that hosts governors at dinner, and he spent much of his life trying to explain his people’s Scriptures to men like the ones who came to dinner.

(●) c. 5 BC: He was schooled in the Greek classroom and the Jewish synagogue at once, and never saw why he should choose. + A boy of Philo’s class went through what the Greeks called the enkyklios paideia, the round of general studies: grammar and the poets first, then geometry, music, astronomy and rhetoric, all of it aimed at preparing the mind for philosophy. Philo went through the whole course, and he had a figure for what it was worth. Those subjects, he says, are the handmaids; philosophy is the mistress of the house; and a young man keeps company with the servants until he is fit for the lady herself. He quotes Homer and Euripides easily, he knows his Plato, and he argues like a man who has sat in the lectures of the Stoics, the school that taught a single rational order running through the whole universe. The other half of his education was the synagogue, and there he read Moses in Greek. The Torah, the five books of Moses, had been put into Greek in that very city, in the translation we call the Septuagint, and Philo tells of an annual festival held on the island of Pharos, out past the lighthouse, where Jews and Gentiles alike sailed across to honor the spot where the translation was made, then pitched tents on the sand and feasted with their families, thinking the beach a finer place that day than the king’s palace. He treated the Greek version as inspired in its own right, holding that the translators had been carried along by the spirit of Moses. That detail explains a great deal about him. Philo’s Bible was a Greek Bible, and his interpretations often turn on Greek etymologies of Hebrew names. How much Hebrew he himself knew is still argued over, and the honest answer is that we do not know; the evidence suggests not much.

(●) c. 10 – 38 AD: He spent his best years going through Genesis line by line, and once sailed to Jerusalem to pray. + For most of his adult life Philo did what a certain kind of person has always wanted to do and rarely gets to: he read and he wrote. The result is enormous. One series works verse by verse through the early chapters of Genesis for readers already trained in his way of reading a text for the meaning hidden under its surface (T4); another retells the law of Moses for outsiders, from the creation of the world to the rewards and punishments of the covenant. He describes those years, looking back, as a time when he lived among the divine oracles and fed on them insatiably, and felt himself carried up to dwell in the regions of the sun and moon. Then it ended. Envy, he says, seized him and threw him into the vast sea of the cares of public politics, where he was still being tossed about as he wrote. He does not say what the public business was, and we simply do not know; the office may have had to do with the community’s standing before Rome. What is striking is that he kept writing anyway, snatching, in his own words, the brief calms between the waves. Somewhere in these years he made the journey every diaspora Jew hoped to make. He mentions it in passing, in the middle of an argument about animals: at Ascalon, on the Syrian coast, on his way to the temple of his native land to offer prayers and sacrifices, he was struck by the sheer number of pigeons in the streets, hovering over the roofs and walking up to people’s tables, and asked why. Because nobody there is allowed to catch them, he was told. It is the one glimpse we get of Philo as a traveler, noticing birds.

(●) 38 AD: A mob emptied four quarters of the city, and the philosopher became a witness. + In the summer of 38 AD the Roman governor of Egypt, Aulus Avilius Flaccus, let a long-running quarrel between the Greek and Jewish populations of Alexandria go where it wanted to go. What followed is often called the first pogrom in Jewish history. A pogrom is a mob attack on a Jewish community that the authorities, who could stop it, choose to let run. Philo, then in his late fifties, wrote the account we have. The crowd drove the Jews out of four of the five districts and packed them into a corner of the fifth, until people were sleeping on the shore, in waste ground, among the tombs. Their houses stood empty and were looted. Their workshops were shut, Philo notes, because the community was observing the mourning for the emperor’s dead sister, so the mob found them closed and unattended, broke them open, and carried the goods out through the middle of the market as if the stock were their own. Then Flaccus arrested thirty-eight members of the Jewish council of elders, marched them through the marketplace in chains, and had them stripped and flogged in the theatre in front of a seated audience. Some of the old men died of the beating. Philo does not write this as a philosopher. He writes it as a man who watched, and the treatise Against Flaccus is one of the few pieces of ancient literature that reports an atrocity from the side that suffered it. He ends it with Flaccus arrested, exiled and killed on the emperor’s orders, and calls that the proof that God has not abandoned the Jewish nation.

(●) 39 – 40 AD: An old man led an embassy to Caligula and was laughed at in a garden. + There was one court of appeal left. The Jews of Alexandria chose a delegation to carry the quarrel over their standing in the city all the way to the emperor, and Philo led it. Josephus, writing later, calls him the principal of the Jewish embassy, a man eminent on all accounts, brother to Alexander the alabarch, and one not unskilful in philosophy. Philo, for his part, says he was reckoned the prudent one of the party because of his age and his education, and that he was the least hopeful of them all. He had reason. While the delegation waited in Italy, word came that Gaius, whom history calls Caligula, had ordered a colossal statue of himself set up in the temple in Jerusalem. A local dispute about civic rights had turned into something else entirely. When the audience finally came, it was not in a hall. The emperor was striding through the gardens of Maecenas and Lamia on the Esquiline hill, inspecting the buildings and giving orders that the windows be filled with transparent stone, and the Jewish envoys trailed after him from room to room while he worked. He rounded on them with what Philo dryly calls a very important and solemn question: "Why is it that you abstain from eating pig’s flesh?" Their opponents laughed. Each time the envoys began to argue, Gaius darted off into another room to inspect the pictures. Exhausted and expecting to die, Philo says, they took refuge in prayer to the one true God. In the end the emperor let them go with a shrug: these men, he said, seem to me not so much wicked as unfortunate and foolish, for not believing that I have been endowed with the nature of God. The statue was never erected. Gaius was murdered in January of 41 AD, and the surviving text of On the Embassy to Gaius breaks off before the recantation Philo promises at the end. Josephus adds a detail Philo does not: that Philo, roughly handled, told his people to take courage, since the emperor had now set himself against God and God would answer.

(●) c. 50 AD: He died at an unrecorded date, and it was Christians, not his own people, who kept his books. + Nobody recorded Philo’s death. The embassy is the last event in his life that can be dated, and the usual estimate of around 50 AD is a guess built on his age. His family kept climbing: the nephew who left the faith, Tiberius Julius Alexander, governed Judea in the late forties, became prefect of Egypt, and served as Titus’ chief of staff at the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, when the temple his father had gilded burned. Philo would have been horrified, and he never knew. He also never knew what happened to his writings. In his own community the memory faded fast, and Alexandrian Judaism itself was shattered in the revolts of the next century. What saved him was a movement he shows no sign of having heard of. Christian scholars in Alexandria were reading him by the end of the second century, the library that Origen assembled at Caesarea preserved his books in the third, and Eusebius listed them in the fourth. Where the Greek was later lost, sixth-century Armenian translators had already made copies, which is the only reason several of his treatises exist at all. So the last chapter of his life is one he had no part in: the church adopted him.

What He Taught

(T1) God exists, and what God is lies past the reach of any created mind. + Hand someone a photograph of a friend and they can tell you a great deal: hair, height, the shape of a smile. Ask them what the friend is like on the inside and they will start over in a different kind of language, and everything they say will be an approach rather than a description. Philo pushed that gap to its limit when he spoke about God. That God is, he held, an honest mind can know from the order of the world. What God is, in himself, no mind can know at all. The technical name for this is negative theology: describing God by saying what he is not, because the positive words we own were built for creatures. Philo says God is not in time and not in place, that he is surrounded by nothing and superior to everything, and that even his proper name is beyond us. When Moses asks to be shown God’s own nature, Philo reads the answer as a refusal, and a merciful one. The greatest benefit the searching soul receives, he writes, is to grasp that God’s essence is utterly incomprehensible to any being. That is a real gain and also a real problem, and Philo felt both. It rules out the tame, manageable god of the philosophers and the squabbling gods of the poets in one stroke. But a God that far away needs something to reach across the distance, or the Scriptures Philo loved make no sense at all, because those Scriptures are full of God speaking, walking, calling and giving commands. His answer to that problem is the doctrine he is remembered for (T2).

(Q) "For the great Cause of all things does not exist in time, nor at all in place, but he is superior to both time and place; for, having made all created things in subjection to himself, he is surrounded by nothing, but he is superior to everything." + Source: Philo, On the Posterity of Cain 14 (Yonge translation). Philo is commenting on the verse that says Moses entered "to the thick darkness where God was" (Exodus 20:21), and he reads the darkness as the limit of the mind. He adds at once that God, though superior to and outside the world he made, nevertheless fills the whole of it with himself, and then, in the next section, that the greatest benefit a soul gets from seeking his essence is to learn that the essence "is utterly incomprehensible to any being."

(T2) Between the unreachable God and the world stands his Word, the firstborn of everything he made. + The Greek word is logos, and English has no single equivalent, which is why translators keep reaching for two or three at once. It means a spoken word, and it also means the reasoning behind the word: the thought and its expression together. A builder’s logos is both the plan in his head and the instruction he calls down from the scaffold. Greek philosophy had used the term for centuries for the rational order running through the universe, and the Greek Bible used it for the word of the LORD that comes to the prophets and by which the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6). Philo takes both meanings and puts them in one place. The Logos is God’s reason and God’s utterance, the instrument by which he made everything, and the meeting point where a creature can have dealings with a Creator it cannot approach directly. He piles up titles for it that a Christian reader finds startling: the firstborn, the eldest of the angels, the image of God, the archangel of many names, the name of God, God’s eldest son, and once, pressing an interpretation hard, a second God. That last title turns up in Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.62, where he asks why Genesis says man was made in the image of God rather than in God’s own image. Nothing mortal, he answers, could be made in the likeness of the Father of all, but only in the likeness of the second God, who is his Word. What Philo did not mean by any of that has to be said just as plainly. The Logos is not, for him, a distinct person of the Godhead. Sometimes he speaks of it almost as a being who pleads and announces; elsewhere it is clearly God’s own activity described in figures, and scholars have argued for two centuries about how to hold the two together. Nothing in Philo hints at a Word who could be born of a woman. What he had built, without meaning to, was a vocabulary lying ready when the church needed to say something he would not have said.

(Q) "And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him 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." + Source: Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues 146 (Yonge translation). Philo has been arguing that those who know the one Creator may rightly be called sons of God, and here he is making room for the rest of us. Even if you are not yet fit for that name, he says, you may still be called a child of God’s eternal image, "for the image of God is his most ancient word." Readers of the New Testament will recognize the pile of titles: firstborn, image of God, the name (Colossians 1:15; John 1:1).

(T3) The visible world was made after a pattern that already existed in the mind of God. + Philo asks his readers to picture a man commissioned to found a city. Before a single stone is cut, the whole city exists in the architect’s mind, street by street, and that version has no location anywhere in the world; it is nowhere but in the man who thought it. Now, says Philo, think of God on the first day. What Genesis 1 describes is not yet bricks. It is the plan. This is where he braids together the two traditions he lived in. From Plato he takes the idea of an intelligible model, meaning one that exists for the mind rather than for the eye, which the visible copy then imitates; from Moses he takes a Creator who answers to nobody and brings a world into being freely, out of sheer goodness. Whether God also made the raw material, or found it already lying there and shaped it, is argued over to this day, because Philo never quite says. And he makes an identification no Greek had made: the intelligible world, the whole blueprint, simply is the reason of God at work, which is to say the Logos (T2). One idea now does the work of two, and creation and the Word are welded together in a way John’s prologue would later assume. Two further things follow, and both matter for what Christians would say afterward. The world had a beginning: Philo argues at length against the Greek consensus that the cosmos is everlasting. And God has not retired. "For God never ceases from making something or other," he writes in the Allegorical Interpretation, "but, as it is the property of fire to burn, and of snow to chill, so also it is the property of God to be creating." What Genesis calls resting on the seventh day is not God stopping, on Philo’s reading, but God causing things to rest.

(Q) "He would not call the world, which is perceptible only to the intellect, any thing else but the reason of God, already occupied in the creation of the world; for neither is a city, while only perceptible to the intellect, anything else but the reason of the architect, who is already designing to build one perceptible to the external senses." + Source: Philo, On the Creation of the World 24 (Yonge translation). He is answering a reader who wants the point said in undisguised terms, and he adds immediately that this is Moses’ doctrine and not his own. A few lines on he calls that intelligible world "the archetypal seal" and "the idea of ideas, the Reason of God." Yonge’s "reason" and "word" render the same Greek term, logos (T2).

(T4) The books of Moses have a body and a soul, and a faithful reader keeps both. + Philo’s method is called allegory, which here means reading a text so that its persons and events also stand for something else: Abraham leaving Ur becomes the soul leaving the life of the senses, the four rivers of Eden become the four cardinal virtues, Sarah and Hagar become philosophy and the school subjects that lead up to it. He did not invent the technique. Greek scholars had been using it for centuries to rescue Homer from the embarrassment of gods behaving badly, and Philo turned the same tool on Genesis, where God is said to plant a garden and to walk in it. Behind the method lies a conviction about the text. Scripture is a body with a soul in it: the plain sense is the body, the deeper sense is the soul, and both are real. Philo can be dizzying in what he draws out of a single word, and he says outright that some passages cannot be meant literally, since God has no hands to plant with. Then comes the turn that separates him from a great many of his imitators. Some men in Alexandria, he complains, had drawn the obvious conclusion: if the sabbath teaches a truth about the uncreated God, why keep the sabbath? If circumcision signifies cutting away the passions, why circumcise? Philo will not have it. Attend to both, he says. You look after your body because it houses your soul, and you keep the laws in their plain sense for the same reason. The people who read only for the hidden meaning are living, he says, as if they were disembodied souls in a desert, with no city and no neighbors. It is one of the sanest things anyone wrote about interpretation in antiquity, and the church would have been better off if it had been quoted as often as his allegories were.

(Q) "But it is right to think that this class of things resembles the body, and the other class the soul; therefore, just as we take care of the body because it is the abode of the soul, so also must we take care of the laws that are enacted in plain terms." + Source: Philo, On the Migration of Abraham 93 (Yonge translation). The passage runs from section 89, where he blames those who study the invisible meaning "with superfluous accuracy" while treating the visible commands "with neglectful indifference," through his examples of the sabbath, the festivals and circumcision. His verdict is that a reader ought to attend to both classes of things, since keeping the plain laws is what makes their symbolism clearer in the first place (T4).

(T5) The image of God in a human being is the mind, and the good life is the mind’s journey home. + When Genesis says man was made in God’s image, Philo heads off the obvious misreading immediately. God has no body, so the likeness cannot be in the shape of a face or a pair of hands. It lies in the mind, which he calls the sovereign part of the soul, and he presses the comparison further than most readers expect: as the great Governor stands to the universe, so the mind stands to the person who carries it about. The mind is invisible and sees everything; it cannot be examined and examines everything else. That is the resemblance. From this comes his account of the good life, and it is a journey rather than a rulebook. The soul begins bogged down in the body and the senses, moves out toward learning and the virtues, and ends, if it goes far enough, contemplating the God it cannot comprehend. Abraham is his standing example, because Abraham was told to leave his country and his kindred and his father’s house, and Philo reads each of the three as a layer of attachment the soul has to shed: the body, the senses, and speech. There is a warmer note in it than the scheme suggests. Philo is emphatic that the traveler does not get there under his own power. The mind that thinks it produced its own wisdom is the mind that has gone wrong; every good thing is God’s gift, measured out to what the creature is able to receive, and the soul reaches God only because God draws it. A Christian reader will feel the pull of that and also the difference. Philo’s ascent is still, in the end, an ascent, and the people best equipped to make it are the ones with the leisure to study.

(Q) "Nothing that is born on the earth is more resembling God than man. And let no one think that he is able to judge of this likeness from the characters of the body: for neither is God a being with the form of a man, nor is the human body like the form of God; but the resemblance is spoken of with reference to the most important part of the soul, namely, the mind." + Source: Philo, On the Creation of the World 69 (Yonge translation). Philo has reached the sixth day in his commentary on Genesis 1. He goes on to say that the human mind was created after the likeness of "that one mind which is in the universe as its primitive model," and then describes it ranging over land and sea, rising on wings past the planets, and pressing on toward what only the intellect can reach (T5).

(Q) "And the Father who created the universe has given to his archangelic and most ancient Word a pre-eminent gift, to stand on the confines of both, and separated that which had 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." + Source: Philo, Who is the Heir of Divine Things 205 (Yonge translation). The sentence that follows is the one that has kept readers arguing. Philo has the Word speak for itself, taking up the words Moses spoke to Israel at Sinai, "While I stood between the Lord and you" (Deuteronomy 5:5), and glossing them: "neither being uncreate as God, nor yet created as you, but being in the midst between these two extremities, like a hostage, as it were, to both parties." A few years later Paul would write that there is "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). The likeness in shape, together with the distance in content, is the whole story of Philo’s Christian afterlife.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church adopted him, copied him for fifteen centuries, and half believed he was one of its own. + Christianity reached Alexandria early, and when Christian teachers there began to write, they found Philo already on the shelf. Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, borrows from him so freely that scholars can reconstruct passages of Philo out of Clement’s pages. Origen, a generation later, cites him by name and carried his works into the library he built at Caesarea. Ambrose of Milan preached on Genesis with Philo open in front of him. Eusebius gave him several chapters of the church history and catalogued his books, which is a large part of why we know what has been lost. Affection ran ahead of the evidence. Eusebius reports that Philo met the apostle Peter at Rome, and reads Philo’s description of the Therapeutae, an ascetic Jewish community outside Alexandria, as an account of the first Christians there under Mark. Neither claim stands up: the dates are strained, Philo plainly describes Jews, and he never mentions Christianity anywhere in a very large body of work. Jerome repeated the story anyway, and went further, giving Philo a chapter in On Illustrious Men, his catalog of Christian writers, where he passes on the Greek proverb that "either Plato philonized, or Philo platonized." The consequence is odd and worth stating plainly. Christian copyists preserved a Jewish philosopher whom Jewish tradition had let fall; no rabbinic text names him. He returns to Jewish letters only in 1573, when Azariah dei Rossi discussed him in Me’or Einayim under the Hebrew name Yedidyah, and took him to task for allegorizing away the plain history of Scripture.

(†) He taught the church how to read the Old Testament, for better and for worse. + Philo’s method (T4) went straight into Christian hands. Origen built a full theory on it, holding that a passage may have a bodily, a moral and a spiritual sense, and that the difficult places are difficult precisely to drive the reader deeper. From Origen it passed to Ambrose, and from Ambrose it reached the man who mattered most. Augustine tells the story himself. As a young man he had turned away from the Scriptures because the Old Testament looked crude to him: a God who walks in gardens and loses his temper. In Milan he heard Ambrose preaching, taking one difficult passage after another and opening its spiritual sense, and the obstacle came down. Augustine names the verse he heard Ambrose quote for the principle: "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3:6). The chain of custody runs from a Jewish commentator in Alexandria, through Origen and Ambrose, to the conversion of the most influential theologian in the history of the Western church. The debt has a cost, and Christians have argued about it ever since. Allegory can be made to prove anything, which means by itself it proves nothing, and the later church spent centuries building guardrails: the school at Antioch pressed for the historical sense, Thomas Aquinas laid down that every doctrine must rest on the literal sense of some passage of Scripture, and the Reformers hammered on the same point. It is worth remembering, in that argument, that Philo himself insisted on keeping both senses (T4). His successors were often less careful than he was.

(†) His Logos gave the church a vocabulary it needed, though not the doctrine it confessed. + Read Philo on the Word (T2) and then read "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1), and the family resemblance is impossible to miss. Read the letter to the Hebrews on an earthly sanctuary built after a heavenly pattern, on Melchizedek, the priest and king of Genesis whom that letter takes up again, on a high priest who stands between God and the people, and the same thing happens. The question is what the resemblance shows, and here it pays to be careful, because the case gets overstated in both directions. There is no evidence that John or the author of Hebrews had read Philo. The likelier explanation is that all of them were drinking from the same well: the Wisdom literature of Israel, where Wisdom is beside God at the creation as his craftsman (Proverbs 8:22-31), the word of the LORD that goes out and does not return empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the synagogue habit of speaking of God’s Word where the text says God himself. Philo is the best surviving witness to how that language was being used in Greek-speaking Judaism in the very decades the New Testament was written, and that is a large claim without needing to be a claim about borrowing. What is not in doubt is the second century. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement and Origen all reached for Logos language when they had to explain Christ to educated pagans, and the categories they reached for had been shaped, in part, in Alexandria. That inheritance was also a trap. A Word who is "neither uncreate as God, nor yet created" fits a graded universe very comfortably, and something close to that is what Arius proposed in the fourth century: a Word who is the highest of creatures. The church answered at Nicaea in 325 AD that the Son is of one substance with the Father, which is to say not the highest of the creatures but God in the very sense the Father is God, and in saying so it said something Philo had left no room for.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: flesh, history, and a body that rises. + Start with the fact that governs everything else. Philo was a devout Jew who died without becoming a Christian, and there is no sign he ever heard the gospel. The later stories that made him Peter’s acquaintance are pious fiction. Whatever the church took from him, it took from a man who would not have recognized what it was building. - The Word became flesh. Philo’s Logos stands on the border between Creator and creature and never crosses it; that is precisely its job. John says the Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Every Philonic title the New Testament reuses is transformed by that one sentence, and it is the sentence his whole account of God’s transcendence (T1) was built to make unnecessary. - God has a name and gives it. For Philo the highest knowledge of God is the knowledge that we cannot know him. Scripture agrees that no one has ever seen God, and then says the rest: God tells Moses his name at the bush (Exodus 3:14), and Jesus tells Philip that whoever has seen him has seen the Father (John 14:9). The incomprehensible God is real in Christian theology, and he is not the last word. - History, not only meaning. Philo’s allegory tends to turn Abraham into a stage of the soul’s progress. Christian faith cannot afford that move at its center, because it rests on something that happened at a datable time to a body: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Credit where it is due, Philo kept the plain sense alongside the deeper one (T4). But the weight falls the other way, and where the weight falls matters. - The body itself. Philo, with the Platonists, treats the body as ballast the soul must drop in order to rise. Scripture calls it God’s good work and promises that it will be raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). What Philo hoped to escape, Christians expect to get back. Set against those differences, what he gives is still considerable. Philo is the proof that a serious Jew, four hundred years after Plato and a few years before the church, could hold that the God of Israel is the God the philosophers were groping after, and that Scripture rewards the hardest thinking a person can bring to it. Christian readers have never quite settled whether he is a forerunner or a warning. He is probably both.