37 Facts About Philo

Philo was a leading writer of the Hellenistic Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt.

Many critics of Philo assumed his allegorical perspective would lend credibility to the notion of legend over historicity.

Philo often advocated a literal understanding of the Torah and the historicity of such described events, while at other times favoring allegorical readings.

Jerome wrote that Philo came de genere sacerdotum.

Philo had one brother, Alexander Lysimachus, who was the general tax administrator of customs in Alexandria.

Philo accumulated an immense amount of wealth, becoming not only the richest man in that city but in the entire Hellenistic world.

Philo lived in an era of increasing ethnic tension in Alexandria, exacerbated by the new strictures of imperial rule.

Philo says that Philo agreed to represent the Alexandrian Jews about the civil disorder that had developed between the Jews and the Greeks.

Josephus says Philo believed that God actively supported this refusal.

Philo was more fluent in Greek than in Hebrew and read the Jewish Scriptures chiefly from the Septuagint, a Koine Greek translation of Hebraic texts later compiled as the Hebrew Bible and the deuterocanonical books.

Philo identified the angel of the Lord with the Logos.

Philo did not reject the subjective experience of ancient Judaism; yet, he repeatedly explained that the Septuagint cannot be understood as a concrete, objective history.

Specifically, Philo interprets the characters of the Bible as aspects of the human being and the stories of the Bible as episodes from universal human experience.

Philo frequently engaged in Pythagorean-inspired numerology, explaining at length the importance of the first 10 numerals:.

Philo determines the values of the numbers 50,70,100,12, and 120.

Philo stated his theology both through the negation of opposing ideas and through detailed, positive explanations of the nature of God; he contrasted the nature of God with the nature of the physical world.

Philo did not consider God similar to Heaven, the world, or man; he affirmed a transcendent God without physical features or emotional qualities resembling those of human beings.

Philo integrated select theology from the rabbinic tradition, including God's transcendence, and humankind's inability to behold an ineffable God.

Philo considered the anthropomorphism of the Bible to be an impiety that was incompatible with the Platonic conception of "God in opposition to matter", instead interpreting the ascription to God of hands and feet, eyes and ears, tongue and windpipe, as allegories.

Philo endeavored to find the Divine Being active and acting in the world, in agreement with Stoicism, yet his Platonic conception of Matter as evil required that he place God outside of the world in order to prevent God from having any contact with evil.

Philo endeavored to harmonize this conception with the Bible by designating these powers as angels.

Philo conceives the powers both as independent hypostases and as immanent attributes of a Divine Being.

Philo adapted Platonic elements in designating the Logos as the "idea of ideas" and the "archetypal idea".

Philo calls the Logos "second god [deuteros theos]" the "name of God,".

Peter Schafer argues that Philo's Logos was derived from his understanding of the "postbiblical Wisdom literature, in particular the Wisdom of Solomon".

Philo seems to look at humans as a trichotomy of nous, psyche, and soma, which was common to the Hellenistic view of the mind-body relationship.

Commentators can infer from his mission to Caligula that Philo was involved in politics.

Philo did suggest in his writings that a prudent man should withhold his genuine opinion about tyrants:.

The explanation is confined chiefly to determining the literal sense, although Philo frequently refers to the allegorical sense as the higher.

Philo wrote a systematic work on Moses and his laws, which is usually prefaced by the treatise "De Opificio Mundi".

In, Philo describes his diplomatic mission to Gaius Caligula, one of the few events in his life which is explicitly known.

Philo relates that he was carrying a petition describing the sufferings of the Alexandrian Jews and asking the emperor to secure their rights.

Philo says he was regarded by his people as having unusual prudence due to his age, education, and knowledge.

Philo's ideas were further developed by later Judaism in the doctrines of the Divine Word creating the world, the divine throne-chariot and its cherub, the divine splendor and its Shekhinah, the name of God, as well as the names of the angels.

Azariah dei Rossi's Me'or Enayim: Imre Binah, one of the first Jewish commentaries on Philo, describes four "serious defects" of Philo: reading the Torah in Greek, not Hebrew; belief in primordial matter rather than ; unbelief in the Lord as evidenced by excessively allegorical interpretation of scripture; and neglect of the Jewish oral tradition.

Dei Rossi later gives a possible defense of Philo and writes that he can neither absolve nor convict him.

Some 50 works by Philo have survived, and he is known to have written some 20 to 25 further works which have been lost.