Philo of Alexandria

A comparative study of Gregory of Nyssa's and Philo of Alexandria's exegesis on Genesis 1:25.

A paper I wrote for a class on Hellenistic Philosophy back in graduate school. It is a bit rougher than some of my other works, but it is what inspired me to write my thesis on Gregory of Nyssa.

The use of sacrificial language is a given widely certified by the first Christian authors to describe the redeeming death of Christ and of Christian moral behavior. This article aims to highlight the hermeneutical strategies employed in dissociating the sacrifice of Christ and of Christians from the connections with Jewish ritual and pagan superstition. From the Patristic period onwards, it is therefore possible to find some criteria to offer to today’s theological research on the use of the references to the world of sacrifices in the proclamation of the faith and that of Christian morals.

Ephesians 3:16-19 is filled with syntactical oddities. My survey of the scholarly literature indicated that 3:17 has received less attention than the other verses. It is also enigmatic on the issue of the portrayal of Christ’s habitation in their hearts. The grammar seems to indicate a request for Christ to take up habitation (inception), while its context suggests they are already indwelt by Christ (2:22).

A majority of the consulted commentators understand the inception of Christ’s habitation and the inception of salvation as being equal. Naturally and sensibly an inceptive interpretation creates a problem for them, and so they interpret the prayer as a request for Christ’s work in the Ephesians. However, the verb κατοικῆσαι is an aorist tense verb, which leads a minority of the consulted commentators to interpret the habitation as inceptive. The majority view favours the context in forming an interpretation, while the minority view favours the grammar. This study seeks to contribute to the literature available on Ephesians 3:17 by inquiring into the nature of Christ’s habitation in this verse. The hypothesis is that the minority view is correct.

The first step is a philological analysis of κατοικέω and some cognates in the Old Testament and the New Testament. The second step is a conceptual and historical analysis of divine habitation in Second Temple Jewish Literature and the New Testament. The third step is a theological and exegetical analysis of Ephesians 3:17 and its context. Verbal aspect plays a major role in the exegetical section.
Verbal aspect indicates that Ephesians 3:17 is a prayer for Christ to take up habitation, which indicates that the minority view is correct. However, the communicative purpose behind the verbal aspect is in line with a durative reading, lending some credence to the majority view. Paul’s communicative purpose (aim) in asking for Christ to take up habitation in the Ephesian believers was found to be spiritual insight and maturity. The significance of the study is that it contributes to the literature available that specifically focus on Ephesians 3:17 and it also solves the enigmatic contradiction between the grammar and context of κατοικῆσαι in Ephesians 3:17.

In light of the retelling of the Golden Calf episode in Hosea 13, Philo of Alexandria, Pseudo-Philo and some Targums, the missing link between Moses’s destruction of the Calf and the slaughter performed by the Levites is identified as a judgment by ordeal. After drinking the golden dust, some Israelites developped a symptom which enabled the Levites to identify the guilty and spare the innocent.

In this essay I argue that 1 Tim 3:16 establishes its own contentious position within a marketplace of competing claims about piety and the nature of the divine. The author reappropriates an elite philosophical discourse that functioned to distinguish philosophers’ intellectual goods over against other competing intellectuals and religious experts. Both the author’s rhetoric of piety and conceptualization of the Christological hymn as a mystery serve to legitimate not only the teaching but also the authorial voice of the author for audiences habituated to discern the symbolic capital or cultural prestige associated with such terms and concepts. This short foray into reading 1 Timothy alongside a broader historical scope of tactics of persuasion employed by contemporary philosophers (i.e. Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch) demonstrates the fresh interpretative horizons and questions made possible by such a mode of analysis.

On a societal level Philo argues for a ius talionis based on values of equality, life itself, and health. The first principle results in democracy as the best political system. It also implies that every killing is unjust, including killing in war, as every person who kills in effect gives him or herself a higher value than his or her victim. The second principle implies that when a life is willingly taken, it must be retaliated against—by the death of the offender. In some cases, Philo also considers an intentional assault on someone’s health as murder, especially when the principle sign of life, the ratio (nous), is thereby lost. The condition for the culpability of murderers or potential murderers is in every case the intention to kill. This intention also includes incitement to murder and attempted murder.
On a religious level there is only the one God. God is the creator and the guarantee of the world order (logos) which includes and effectively amounts to natural law. Every offence against God is an offence against this order and cannot be redeemed, and the offender should be completely erased. However, as men are shaped in the image of God, they are, to some extent, also godly. Killing the image of God is, thus, killing a part of God in some way. At the societal level, the victim is to be recompensed by means of the death penalty for the murderer. However, at the religious level, the murderer has broken the law of nature—offended God’s image, and God himself—and must be eradicated, to preserve the goodness inherent in God’s work. To repeat the words of Philo once again:
"The term murder or manslaughter is used to signify the act of one who has killed a human being but in real truth that act is a sacrilege, and the worst of sacrileges."
(Philo, Spec. Laws 3.83; trans. Colson, LCL)

This study focuses on the exegesis of Gregory of Nyssa, a 4th century exegete, a Church Father, and one of the three Cappadocian Fathers. The main primary source of my thesis is Gregory’s treatise The Life of Moses, an intriguing example of Patristic exegesis based on the Exodus narrative. The main purpose of Gregory’s treatise is not to make a historical presentation of the journey of Moses and the Israelites, but to elevate the reader into a higher state of consciousness in order to perceive the spiritual meaning of the narrative. The kind of exegesis that Gregory applies is often defined as allegorical interpretation or allegorical exegesis, rich on symbols and enigmas, which was at first neglected in scholarly discussion. Fortunately, there has been a growing interest in Biblical interpretation of the Church Fathers since the mid-20th century. The main objective of my thesis is to focus on Gregory’s interpretations of topographical imagery presented in the Exodus narrative. Greg...

Roma İmparatorluğu hakimiyeti sırasında İskenderiye’de yaşayan Philo (yak. M.Ö. 25-M.S. 50), Büyük Herodes, İsa ve Paulus gibi tarihi kişilerle çağdaştır. Kendisinin zengin bir aileye mensup olduğu ve iyi bir eğitim aldığı bilinmekle birlikte, mitzvot hükümlerini yerine getiren dindar bir Yahudi olduğu kabul görmektedir. Sadece Helence bilmesi dolayısıyla kutsal metin yorumlarında Septuaginta’yı kullanan Philo, Eski Ahit ile Helen felsefesini uzlaştırmaya ve onların aynı öze sahip olduklarını göstermeye çalışmıştır. Zira kendisine göre Musa ilk filozoftur ve başta Platon olmak üzere Helen filozofları, felsefeyi ve hikmeti Musa’dan öğrenmişlerdir. Ana önermesi bu hipotez üzerine oturan Philo, Helenistik Yahudilik adıyla anılan oluşumun da en önemli temsilcisi haline gelmiştir. Ayrıca eklektik bir yazar niteliği taşıyarak, felsefe, din ve siyaset içerikli çok sayıdaki kitabı aracılığıyla sadece kendi çağdaşları ya da Hıristiyanlar arasında değil modern araştırmacılar arasında da ilgi odağı olmayı başarmıştır. Bu bağlamda Dursun Ali Aykıt’ın 2011 yılında yayımlanan Hıristiyanlığın Öncüsü Olarak İskenderiyeli Philo adlı eseri söz konusu ilginin Türkçe’deki bir yansıması olarak ortaya çıkmaktadır.

Philo Judaeus of Alexandria represents the earliest link between Judaism just prior to the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in the first century of the first millennium, (70 CE,) and the influx and influence of Graeco Roman culture, between which, Philo walked the narrow lines as a balancing act on a tightrope. While there had been earlier attempts to link the exoteric forms of Greek and Jewish thought, equating Moses with a Greek deity for example, there were none recorded who, like Philo, synthesized the esoteric aspects of Judaism with Greek thought, ethics and metaphysics. The extent to which Philo may have directly influenced later Rabbinic tradition, including Talmud and later Kabbalah, is unknown, however, whether a direct influence or not, the similarities between the writings of Philo and the later Talmudic traditions are in many instances obvious, and Philo was, in many instances, the earliest known source. That Philo’s writings on the Torah were hinged on the axis of Greek logic is well known, and, that Philo was trained in the Greek schools of philosophy is undisputed.

This article advances a new interpretation of Philo of Alexandria’s ‘deification’ of Moses. Though previous scholarship has provided a variety of explanations for how the Jewish writer is able to extend the name ‘God’ to Moses, the present study attempts to improve upon earlier theories by rooting the language of deification in the philosophical distinctions that Philo himself espouses in his doctrine of God. Rejecting the notion that Philo was not a strict monotheist, and that the language of deification implies a mitigated monotheism, this paper argues that Philo’s God is indeed one, but that the singular Deity has both an essence, which remains transcendent and imparticipable, and an energeia, or activity, which is operative and present in the world and shareable with such biblical figures as Moses. The distinction, between ‘what’ God is and how he is present in creation, in turn accounts for the well-known but problematic concept of the Logos, which David Winston has properly called ‘the face of God turned toward creation’. That the name ‘God’ encompasses both dimensions of the Deity is what allows Philo to call Moses ‘God’ without attributing to him the very divine essence.

In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. "What’s Divine about Divine Law?" untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition—Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis—struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in the will of a divine being with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. Hayes describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. She shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. Hayes then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the
Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West. A stunning achievement in intellectual history, "What’s Divine about Divine Law?"
sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought and that continues to inform
contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture.

Endorsements:
"For anyone interested in the history of Western legal thought, this lucid, lively, and meticulously argued book is an indispensable text. With verve and a scholar's mastery of the sources, Hayes brilliantly tells the story of an ancient theological quarrel whose echoes can still be heard in every law school classroom today."--Anthony Kronman, Yale Law School

"This is a pathbreaking and ambitious study of a topic of crucial importance for Jewish studies in particular and legal philosophy more broadly. The scholarship is first-rate. Hayes convincingly establishes that the rabbinic discourse on divine law in late antiquity was self-consciously distinct from Greco-Roman conceptions as well as a great deal of prior Jewish literature."--Jonathan Klawans, author of Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism

"This compelling and comprehensive book provides an elegant framework for differentiating between the metaphysical and philosophical givens presumed as the basis for divine law in the Bible, Greco-Roman culture, and a variety of ancient Jewish sources. Hayes articulates an extremely nuanced and periodized understanding of rabbinic law."--Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, author of Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Courtney J. P. Friesen explores shifting boundaries of ancient religions by way of the reception of a popular tragedy, Euripides’ Bacchae . As a play staging political crises provoked by the arrival of the “foreign” god Dionysus and his ecstatic cult, audiences and readers found resonances with their own cultural moments. This dramatic deity became emblematic of exuberant and liberating spirituality and, at the same time, a symbol of imperial conquest. Thus, readings of the Bacchae frequently foreground conflicts between religious autonomy and political authority, and between ethnic diversity and social cohesion. This cross-disciplinary study traces appropriations and evocations of this drama ranging from the fifth century BCE through Byzantium not only among “pagans” but also Jews and Christians. Writers variously articulated their religious visions over against Dionysus, often while paradoxically adopting the god’s language and symbols. Consequently, imitation and emulation are at times indistinguishable from polemics and subversion.

La plupart d'entre nous, ici, aujourd'hui, si non tous, sont des xénoi, des étrangers à cette terre. Ce n'est pas la terre de notre naissance. En fait, cela a été le cas depuis le début du monachisme en Terre Sainte, au quatrième siècle. La grande majorité des moines et des nonnes était ici toujours composée d'étrangers parlant beaucoup de langues différentes. Pour la dernière partie du quatrième siècle, il y avait de nombreux moines et des nonnes dont la langue maternelle était le grecque, le latin ou le syriaque. Plusieurs sont venus comme des pèlerins et ont décidé de rester. Dans son Épître 107.2, Jérôme a écrit avec quelque fleur de rhétorique que : " quotidiennement nous recevons à Jérusalem des troupes de moines venant de l'Inde, de la Perse, de l'Ethiopie... Arméniens, Huns, Goths, Scythes ". À la seconde moitié du quatrième siècle et la première moitié du cinquième siècle Jérusalem a respiré une atmosphère cosmopolite. Nous, qui appartenons au Patriarcat latin, pouvons voir nos ancêtres dans Mélanie l'Ancienne et Rufin d'Aquilée sur le Mont des Oliviers, Jérôme et Paula à Bethléem et nous ne devons pas oublier Jean Cassien, qui a passé trois ans à Bethléem avant de chercher des meilleures formes de monachisme en Égypte. La plupart de ces gens étaient aussi multilingues. En écrivant au milieu du sixième siècle, Cyril de Scythopolis (Beit Shéan) dépeint tous les héros fondateurs du monachisme en

In this book, Ari Mermelstein examines the mutually-reinforcing relationship between power and emotion in ancient Judaism. Ancient Jewish writers in both Palestine and the diaspora contended that Jewish identity entails not simply allegiance to God and performance of the commandments but also the acquisition of specific emotional norms. These rules regarding feeling were both shaped by and responses to networks of power - God, the foreign empire, and other groups of Jews - which threatened Jews' sense of agency. According to these writers, emotional communities that felt Jewish would succeed in neutralizing the power wielded over them by others and, depending on the circumstances, restore their power to acculturate, maintain their Jewish identity, and achieve redemption. An important contribution to the history of emotions, this book argues that power relations are the basis for historical changes in emotion discourse.

The article points to the close connection between the ›prohibition of images‹ and the prohibition of idolatry in ancient Judaism, which had already been established in the Decalogue itself. First, the treatment of the ›prohibition of images‹ in Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus is discussed, followed by a treatment of the archaeological evidence up to the Bar Kokhba revolt. A reluctance to depict animals and humans can be observed here, especially in order to prevent their being worshipped. However, there is no absolute prohibition of images, and the archaeological evidence also yields individual depictions of animals and even humans which points to social and ideological differences in the Judaism of the Hellenistic-Early Roman period. The rabbinic texts refer even more strongly to the aspect of worship: according to Tannaitic sources (above all, Mishnah and Tosefta Avodah zarah), using those images that are ›worshipped‹ is forbidden. The presence of images, even images of gods, in public spaces not designed for their worship is unproblematic, as the famous anecdote about Rabban Gamli’el in Aphrodite’s bath in Akko illustrates, according to which the statue of Aphrodite is considered to be a mere ›ornament‹. The archaeological evidence seems to correspond to this: from the early 3rd century at the latest, one finds animal images preserved on lintels of synagogues, followed soon afterwards by human depictions, e.g. on synagogue mosaic floors, and finally also depictions of Helios and the Quadriga. Only in later witnesses (beginning ith the Babylonian Talmud) do we find prohibitions to depict, for example, the moon even as an ornament, and ›iconoclastic‹ interventions are discernible in the archaeological evidence. – The PDF uploaded is a pre-print version with corrections. I shall be happy to send a PDF of the published version upon request.

Convergences between Platonism and the Abrahamic Religions Parts 3, 4 & 5 Adapted for the De Li Non Aliud Reading Group 2021
Perspectives and Directions:
Light illuminates but blinds eyes accustomed to darkness. Darkness defeats eyes used to light but strengthens weak ones. The invisible enables visibility. That by which we see must be unseen—otherwise we would see only it.
This Powerpoint has been modified by additions to the texts from Plato and by adding material on and from Parmenides’ The Way of Truth and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Much has been deleted. The intention of additions and deletions is to give a greater number of the kinds of knowing in the Platonic tradition in order to assist your analysis, to bring out the kinds and functions of not knowing, and to emphasise the roles of not knowing and nothingness in philosophy, theology, and religion.
Plato is not perfectly consistent in describing the kinds of knowing and not knowing. In consequence reconciling his own texts with one another, and then extending the schema to include subsequent thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Bonaventure, and Cusa requires making difficult judgments.
If Fr Festugière is right, and I think he is, in the Platonic tradition not knowing goes together with knowing for at least two reasons. One is that knowing is also ignorance and alternates with ignorance. Another is that something other than knowing is operative: the desires or love for beauty, and the desires or love for the good beyond beauty, and union beyond good are also present. Alternatively or simultaneously there may be suffering in the sense of affectivity. The one who ascends is struck by or possessed by what is given. Dionysius writes of this pathos.

La providencia divina (πρόνοια τοῦ θεοῦ) en los textos de Filón de Alejandría es un concepto filosófico o religioso que señala el cuidado de Dios por sus criaturas. Como fuente primera debemos acudir al Timeo para encontrar la idea platónica de la providencia sostenida por el axioma de que Dios no es la causa del mal, un principio que Filón sigue en su teodicea. Los filósofos estoicos tomaron de Platón la idea de la providencia divina  y la adaptaron a su propia filosofía materialista. Conjugando elementos platónicos y estoicos Filón expresa en varios lugares su idea sobre la providencia de Dios. Escribió dos tratados titulados Sobre la Providencia –probablemente en la última etapa de su vida–, que aquí comentaremos someramente. En La creación del mundo según Moisés 171-172, Filón ofrece un compendio de su teología donde aparece su idea de Dios, y por tanto su teoría de la creación y el concepto de providencia. El análisis se concentrará en la explicación de la providencia en los tratados históricos y en la particular construcción del concepto en la sociedad patriarcal judeohelenística.

The Fathers of the Church were acquainted and influenced by both Jewish exegesis and Greek philosophy; the doctrine of the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος (inner) and προφοροκός (exteriorised) was one of those influences. Stoic in its genesis, it dealt with the psychological dualities mind/speech, thought/utterance in man. Philo adopted the theory for his hermeneutical system so that it was transmitted to the Fathers, who used it as a resource for their explanations of the nature of the Son of God (long identified as the λόγος of God). My goal is to let the texts speak for themselves as sign-bearers of the routes taken by the doctrine. I limit my examination to the Greeks Fathers of the first four centuries who witness the doctrine and/or the terms related to it (Theophilus of Antioch, Hippolytus of Rome; Justin Martyr, Tatian and Athenagoras of Athens). Finally it shall be seen that the doctrine, especially from the 4th on, was rejected by theologians (e.g. Athanasius of Alexandria) as well as by Councils’ and Synods’ decrees (namely the Synod of Sirmium in 351 a.D.).


KEY-WORDS: λόγος ἐνδιάθετος and προφορικός; Philo of Alexandria; Patristic Christology.

The Ancient Stoic doctrine of the human soul as a spark (apóspasma) of the Divine Nature is specially important in the authors of the Imperial era. Some Roman philosophers rely on the universal Fatherhood of God to attribute an impregnable inner freedom to all humans. In Epictetus, this dignity - shared by men and women, slaves and free men- demands to be protected in each person by an appropriate use of their faculties, and requires also to tolerate (anékhomai) other humans as brothers and sisters. Now the tolerantia of the Stoic sage is still very far from challenging the rigid political structures and social roles of their time, which supported strong inequalities and abuses of all kinds. Meanwhile, the authors of the Patristic tradition inherited the link between Divine filiation and the value of each person, very akin to the Biblical topic of the 'Image of God', but we have to wait until the late Fourth Century for this thesis to be carried into further consequences and for some of the social models and asymmetries to be put into question. This is evident in the work of Gregory of Nyssa, whose view of women, children and slaves distances itself from many of the Ancient paradigms prevailing in his time.

From the forthcoming collection: *Revisiting Aristotle's Fragments. New Essays on the Fragments of Aristotle's Lost Works*, ed. A-P. Mesquita, Brill, 2020.
In this paper I argue that several passages containing arguments from design that have been collected as fragments of Aristotle's lost dialogue *De Philosophia* are spurious. In the process, I highlight many of the common features and non-Aristotelian influences present in these passages.

This dissertation establishes a reflection about the ways in which the interculturality produced leads in the work of Philo of Alexandria, Greek speaker Jewish exegete who lived in the first half of I C.E.. The notions of own and common are considered specially relevant to this study, as they are brought to the text in the intercultural negotiation which Philo develops in his writing. At first, I establish initial reflections on Philo's thought, developed in dialogue with selected passages from the Hebrew Bible, about three different subjects. Chapter 1 deals with the question of alterity in face of the Egyptians. Chapter 2 is about the difference between Diaspora and Exile, and the Philo's perspective on the idea of a “return” of the Jews to Judea. In chapter 3, I study the idea of the conversion of non-Jewish people to Judaism. In the second part of this dissertation, two big chapters approach different kinds of intercultural trails found
in occurrences of the intertextuality in Philo's text. Chapter 4 studies quotations and other more subtle references to Greek authors in a number of Philo's treatises. In chapter 5, I analyze the appropriation of characteristics of a literary and spectacular genre proper of the Greeks, the tragedy (then, I propose the notion of traJic, in order to explain this phenomenon originated from the Jewish appropriation of the tragic). The hypothesis which goes through all this dissertation is that in the diverse appropriations which Philo makes from the Greek cultural heritage, there is no unthinking submission to Hellenic culture, but an attentive negotiation which recognizes as necessary the configuration of limits of the own and, simultaneously, the recognizing of common elements.

"Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215 CE) is one of the most significant theologians of the second-century, and his work is still the subject of intense academic debate. This book provides a new perspective on Clement’s thought, through a critical examination of the work of one of his critics, Photios (c.820–893 CE). Photios, the Patriarch of Constantinople, based his critique on Clement’s (now lost) treatise ‘Hypotyposeis’, claiming the work contained eight ‘heresies’. The book examines each ‘error’ listed in the 109th codex of Photios’ ‘Bibliotheca’ in depth, using evidence from Clement’s existing work to consider the likely accuracy of Photios’ critique. Focusing on these eight ‘heresies’ offers a unique opportunity to illuminate what in terms of post-Nicene orthodoxy are Clement’s most problematic opinions, setting them in the context of their original philosophical and theological frame
"