Philo of Alexandria: Judaism as Greek Philosophy

so the topic uh today is judaism as greek philosophy and there's a uh mosaic of moses as you see looks just like moses as we always picture him right without the horns is without the the renaissance horns and everything else and uh and without a lot of the characteristics that we maybe sometimes picture moses okay so it doesn't look like charlton heston so um what the topic we're going to talk about is philo of alexandria and so we have like for example a lot of surviving works from uh this jewish uh thinker from the first century of the common era and he's from ezra's name as you say philo of alexandria alexandria which was one of the great cities of the roman empire really the great city of the hellenistic kingdoms that predated uh the roman conquest of the eastern roman empire so the city founded by uh one of many cities that alexander named after himself but anyway the one of the ones that actually took off or the one that took off the most and became the most important and so it also became the center of learning uh for the after after athens and the whole classical period of greek thought now when we get to this later what's called hellenistic period where uh greek thought expands now because of alexander and his successors all across the eastern mediterranean and frankly dominates also rome and the west too then alexandria is actually where the center of learning happened and we're aware very much of the famous library and all the different times that it's burned and and all of the different laws that that represented and the library then being part of a very famous um learning complex school in temple which is called the as dedicated to the muses and it was therefore called the museon or the museum and so then all of our museums are named after that in the same way that all of our academies are named after plato's school in in athens all over lycea are named after aristotle school in athens so all of our museums are named after this learning here in alexandria so it's the capital of egypt in the hellenistic period so when we think of the last pharaoh of egypt the last queen of egypt cleopatra um she is uh and you know not she's you know the queen of egypt but she's greek right and so she's from this family descended from ptolemy uh alexander's general alexander's generals is when alexander died they all split his empire up and ptolemy my opinion was the smartest he just ran straight for egypt you know and decided crown himself pharaoh and you know and that's the most solid chunk of any part of empire to kind of make your base and the ptolemies did very very well for themselves all the way up until uh when anyway none of the eastern kingdoms were able to hold out against the strength of rome and rome's capacity and power although cleopatra did a pretty good job playing the roman general game uh just picked a losing side a couple too many times so i won at least two one too many times so uh it continued then to be the center of hellenistic culture and learning once it was part of the empire alexandria the population we never know in terms of these ancient cities a lot of times people always want to say there's a million people whatever it's a huge number it's one of these big ancient cities uh like babylon before it rome uh later constantinople in the west here but anyway alexandria so they say maybe half a million and it did include um the very largest concentration or the largest community so a big percentage of the that that 500 000 are jewish people uh israelites from the second temple judaism and so although a lot of times when we think of this kind of time period uh you know which is the time period uh when uh this particular time uh judea and the land with palestine and israel now uh are part of um are part of essentially a client kingdom or later a province of the roman empire rule directly so under the the last dynasty the herodians so herod who is essentially a part jewish part i do mean king who is essentially the successor of this maccabean dynasty which was the last kind of independent uh uh jewish dynasty of this kind of kingdom prior to that it had been a um a province of the both the first the ptolemy first the ptolemies and then the the syrians which is to say the greeks that are ruling that and then prior to that of persia so anyway so even though when when the second temple is in jerusalem and it hasn't yet been destroyed now by the romans which is going to happen in 70 of the common era we kind of focus on the temple and we focus on the sadducees that are around it the pharisees the essenes and qumran we're thinking about the land but actually there's a lot more people a lot more jewish people in a big city like alexandria and in some sense they're way more important because alexandria is so important in um in influencing the whole planet and so anyway so this is a very important diaspora community and in fact the religion of judaism um from the destruction of the first temple enter in in the by the babylonians you know in the sixth century uh bc is often practiced or mostly practiced in diaspora which is to say in the exile community as opposed to people that are living in the land right now as maybe half of jews in the world now have also moved back to uh now the state of israel and are in the land and half are not in diaspora still okay so diaspora judaism and the septuagint so we've also talked about this so egypt had been home then to a very large community of diaspora jews since the destruction of the first jerusalem temple in the 6th century and so the babylonians destroyed that a whole bunch of the exiles we know which is called the babylonian captivity a whole bunch of the nobles get taken to babylon and it's called the babylonian captivity but a whole bunch of leaders flee on their own to egypt and that includes people like the prophet jeremiah and so they establish a very significant exile or diaspora jewish community in egypt in the course of the time period under the direction of the ptolemies commissioned potentially by them according to legend according to legend again 70 you know 70 jewish scholars in alexandria translated the text of the hebrew bible into greek uh it occurred over the course of now we see the third two second centuries bce and this important text became known as the septuagint which means 70 in greek so essentially the translation of the 70. taking the hebrew scriptures the hebrew bible and bringing them into greek for the first time so as it's now constituted much later than that translation of the sabbath again so uh in rabbinic judaism after the destruction of the second temple the canon of the hebrew bible is in these components torah naveem ketuvim i don't speak hebrews i always translate these wrongs but that makes an acronym tanakh and so this is um essentially 24 books and that's how what's canonized now in the hebrew bible canon within rabbinic judaism there were lots though and lots of other books that are scripture-like and that could have gotten made it put in and some you know maybe could have and maybe would have been what were revered as uh a hebrew bible or scripture by all kinds of people including for example uh the qumran folks and the essenes who are writing the dead sea scrolls so there's all kinds of texts that they revered that didn't make it into what's the canon now right and but they would have put it in the canon as far as they were concerned so that's also true then for the 70 or what becomes the septuagint in alexandria so these are also organized in quite a different way and this is the earlier organization actually and so these are the books that are called law which is to say the pentateuch the five books of moses the torah history which is a different kind of category the wisdom books and the prophets and so uh the minor prophets which is just one book in the hebrew canon is like separated out into 12 little tiny books and so essentially there's more books that are in the septuagint than than in the current rabbinic canon okay for christians the new testament authors exclusively quote the sib two again and so this is kind of a a strange or an interesting phenomenon because when they're when we're talking about for example gospel narrative jesus and his immediate like 12 disciples all of those folks would have been second temple jewish practitioners from the galilee region mostly who probably spoke as their primary language aramaic and so then if they were quoting scripture they unless they all knew greek they would have maybe been quoting it either uh they probably would have been quoting in hebrew you know so there is because they didn't bother to translate it because the languages are close enough um however any time you get to a bible quote a hebrew bible quote in the new testament it's not like somebody has taken you know has taken a text that was just written let's say in aramaic and then they just quote let's say the bible directly in hebrew and now they have now translated that into greek and so then you would have a very different translation of that text than what the septuagint gives instead you get to that point and then you just get accepted quote so so essentially the comp the people who are composing the texts of the christian new testament are all writing in greek to start with in other words and they are the themselves supplying the quotes they are not working from some kind of crypt notes that they were writing around after jesus or eyewitness accounts or whatever that where we're they're just taking down the aramaic so uh there we go so then uh so part of the other thing is then the septuagint also then became the basis for the christian old testament right so initially the christian church uh is primarily a greek speaking church and so they didn't go back to the original hebrew make a new translation they just have that greek and indeed when the latin church gets going uh in the west they don't they just translate uh saint jerome they do have the hebrew available jerome only knows hebrew so well they translate it into they translate from the subtwo again okay and so the canon becomes fixed in the fifth century so anyway in part in reaction to greek christianity rabbinic judaism ceased to use the septuagint and also much of the other hellenistic jewish writing that was in greek and so we'll talk about that in the course of this and then during the protestant reformation in modern times protestants translated the old testament into current vernacular languages directly from the hebrew rejecting then the subtle against and therefore the books that didn't make it into the rabbinic cannon so a very weird thing that happens is protestants in modern times then because they want to do a direct translation from the hebrew they pick up the neighbors in europe who are jews who have all of these scrolls uh they translate directly from that they realize hey all these books are that are in our bible aren't in this so they chuck them and that becomes uh what christians call the uh protestants called the apocrypha catholics and people in the east called the deuterocanticals we get that yeah i just wondered if you would go back about five slides starting with the knock because it was it was hard to follow the progressions i just like to have another look at the some other i think i'm going to have one more here let's see if i have it no i'll have to go back okay so this one so you can't see them all but essentially um essentially it's law prophets and writings and so this is the hebrew bible as what's kind of considered to be have made it into the canon what the rabbi is allowed in and as of the again the modern you know but in in common era times right so a.d times and so um so the prophets are things like joshua judges samuel kings isaiah jeremiah ezekiel and all the minor prophets all lumped together in one book so that's like micah and all those guys the writings over here are psalms proverbs job song of solomon ruth lamentations ecclesiastes esther daniel ezra nehemiah as one book and chronicles together as one book so that's the that's the hebrew canon then in terms of the the broader christian canon the essentially catholic and orthodox canons same same five books of moses genesis exodus leviticus numbers deuteronomy then the history books are what are some cases the prophet books in in uh in the hebrew canon so joshua judges ruth samuel so ruth gets stuck over here so they kind of try to order this in kind of a more historical order as they understand it first and second samuel first and second kings first and second chronicles esdras ezra nehemiah tobit judith esther maccabees maccabees maccabees and maybe maccabees so all those maccabees books uh psalms manasseh job proverbs ecclesiastes song of solomon wisdom of solomon sir rock song psalm of solomon the minor prophets isaiah jeremiah baruch lamentations lamentations of jeremiah ezekiel and daniel so those are tiny writing i'm sorry so anyway you can see lots more books make it in to the septuagint than are in the either protestant or rabbinic canons so these books don't make it in to the uh what's now the rabbinic judas jewish canon or protestant right okay uh that's why like i say there's a weird dividing line then so rabbinic judaism protestants over here orthodox and catholics over there okay so that's just kind of a context so that is the um the septuagint uh is the uh scriptures that that also that philo uses so philo is in uh essentially the the from the beginning you know he's born and he's a young man in the in the bc times bce times and then as an adult in the common year at times he comes from a very wealthy and important hellenized jewish family that's in alexandria his brother alexander so a lot of times you know people will have these greek names also when you're hellenized uh so alexander is a roman customs agent who's responsible for collecting all the duties on all imports into alexandria from the eastern part of the empire so this is a hugely important and also a kind of a job that you make a lot of money on so can anybody read the hebrew that's on the top of his cloak not me don't know not me either here take the mic ashore it says on his hat yeah okay i'm sure do you know what it means or is it just the name it's the name of the city isn't it is the name of one of the tribes of israel um or asher or no ashur is different no no okay one of the twelve no i think it's an evil don't be shy it says uh i can't make out what this says eliel i don't know okay so we don't know if this is not this is not an ancient portrait oh no so yeah so this so just so we're aware i'm going to show this a bunch of different types you are my god uh so it's probably a prayer right kind of thing from the psalms okay anyway it's not a it's not an ancient portrait so this is something that somebody in the renaissance would have done and they would have anyway so okay philo's plant family and their prominence so uh one of philo's nephews married a daughter of herod agrippa the first so we mentioned these herodians who from herod the greater this dynasty of the client kings of uh judea and the surrounding areas uh and to the romans another one of philo's nephews then became procurator for judea another roman official in other words and he was later actually prefect of egypt so again all of these guys are high officials and quite wealthy uh philo himself was elected to lead the jewish delegation to emperor caligula and make a presentation right in front of the emperor in the year 38 caligula is not the number one emperor that you want to make a delegation in front of however fortunately it unfortunately went okay forgot for for we'll see we'll see we'll show you what what josephus has to say so josephus who is a first century hellenized jewish historian who writes in greek very important histories or more or less almost all the context we know or literary context we know of jewish life in the first century of the common era he has a section here on philo's embassy because it's important enough to make it into the history and so he says there was now a talmud tumult this is josephus arisen out alexandria between the jewish inhabitants and the greeks so there's a big riot that takes place and between the greeks and the jews there's also obviously egyptians so there's multiple different peoples in this cosmopolitan city and three ambassadors were chosen out of each party that were at variants who came to gaius as he says which is to say what we call calicula uh gaius julius whatever coliguila's full name is anyway caesar now one of these ambassadors from the people of alexandria was appion so that's the greek uh leader of the greek party who uttered many blasphemies against the jews and among other things he said uh that he said he charged them with neglecting the honors that belonged to caesar for that all who were subject to the roman empire built altars and temples to gaiust building a temple to the genius of the emperor caligula and in other regards universally received him as they received the gods these jews alone thought it a dishonorable thing for them to erect statues in honor of him as well as to swear by his name so this is you know something that actually is correct right which is to say jews are uh have always been iconoclastic and so they don't believe in making statues you know especially of images and especially of making statues of images involving divinities and prayers and also of for example what the romans required is essentially a um when let's say like the americans do with they pledge allegiance to the flag and you say kind of that pledge uh in this case the romans had the same thing you have a little tiny uh like altar or setup a little little statue to caligula the genius of caligula you more or less pick up a little a sensor that is burning a little bit of incense and you do that and uh you know maybe say a little prayer in honor of the genius of the emperor and that means that you're loyal and essentially a citizen of the empire obviously that's blasphemy as far as jews are concerned and so in fact in general the jews would get and accept had an exemption because their religion was relieved and understood in rome to be so very ancient uh that you know and also peculiar and and quirky and the romans didn't really care anyway so that you could get away with not doing that but when you get a crazy emperor you know like caligula then he sort of gets upset about it at a certain point he starts to think now why do those guys you know not do this for me this kind of thing and so um anyway so this is one of those times so many of these uh severe things were said by appian by which he hoped to provoke gaius to provoke caligula to anger against the jews as he was likely to be but philo the principle of the jewish embassage a man of m a man eminent on all accounts brother to alexander the alabark who we've talked about and not one uh unskillful in philosophy as uh as josephus here notes was ready to take himself to meet to make his defense against these accusations but gaius prohibited him and bit him be gone he was also in such a rage that it openly appeared that he was about to do to uh to them some very great mischief a nice way to put it i guess i think it would have been quite quite a horrible mischief probably so philos philo being thus affronted went out and said to those jews who were about him that they should be of good courage since gaius's words indeed showed anger at them but in reality he had already set god against himself and so josephus knowing the rest of the story you know has essentially known that since uh caligula is about to die himself uh be killed himself that he didn't actually get to do all of the kind of anti-jewish things that he wanted to do like set his image up he wanted to set his his own statue up in the temple in jerusalem and that would have caused a whole jewish revolt and all the other things that he wanted to do anyway he died before that happened okay so that essentially is uh philo making it into the one history book we really have about uh jews in the first century of the common era or the or the one historical author um philo then of alexandria unlike his brother alexander whom josephus when he talks about him says does not follow jewish traditions philo was an adherent of diaspora second temple judaism so he is an adherent to uh let law and his observance of it how he understands it however he's also trained in greek philosophy uh and his writings attempt to interpret the septuagints so the greek hebrew scriptures he doesn't really read them probably much in hebrew we might know some hebrew but despite his uh renaissance cloak he was actually pretty pretty focused on greek and uh he's been called you know by biographers and people like that the kind of the apex of jewish hellenistic syncretism which is to say you know the bringing together of these two different uh world views and thought systems as they're occurring in a cosmopolitan place like alexandria wonder if his first name because his philosophy means love of knowledge and his first name is filo philosophy whether his first name means knowledge yeah it means love right you know but so but sophia is knowledge so philip so yeah yeah so he has wisdom and so so sophia's wisdom and philo is love of you know so philosophers and so he has a name that even is talking about which is greek you know which is again showing the situation that occurs um this is also a problem you know when we read all these books of the histories of the maccabees so these um when you're a leader of a hellenistic kingdom whether you're jewish or not a lot of times there's a lot of pressure to take a greek name and to essentially live like greek hellenistic kings are doing and um and when you're a a leader of a religious community in a diaspora community in cosmopolitan alexandria you were very impressed by all of this uh philosophical thought that has revolutionized the entire world and in a lot of cases then the names like his brother's named alexander which is obviously a greek name uh or macedonian name i guess and uh same thing uh philo then is from the greek so as we have i can say a bunch of works that have come down to us uh it's pretty amazing how much has been preserved uh he essentially has written uh commentaries especially on the pentateuch or the torah the five books of the law and these though are very allegorical interpretations of scripture in which philo sees moses who he sees as the author of these books as a real precursor of greek philosophers and so in some ways he's like thales or the other seven sages in greece except for now he's also showing that more or less moses and the other uh hebrew prophets also had more or less these same kind of philosophical concepts that have now come down to us he also has philosophical essays that essentially combine moses which is to say the torah the pentateuch and plato's dialogues with ethics then also drawing upon and explicitly he's talking about plato and aristotle and he'll talk about the stoics so essentially drawing from these other contemporary philosoph schools of philosophy and then three he writes pro-jewish apologetic and historical works like the kind of text that he was going to give to caligula if caligula hadn't decided to do some kind of mischief you know probably a lot worse so okay we want to look uh especially on the allegorical we'll look a little bit of the theology and philosophy but i also want to look on the allegorical interpretation of scripture so in his first treatise on allegorical interpretation philo quotes genesis 2 1 on the sixth day god finished his work that he had made and he asserts it would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days uh or indeed at all in time so you can see right here he's launching away from you know when you could make a very literal interpretation of time and think that the world is great in just six days he's saying that would be great you'd be a simple person to think that because he says all time is only the space of days and nights and these things the motion of the sun as the sun passes over the earth and under the earth and does not necessarily does not necessarily make but the sun is a portion of heaven so that one must confess that time is a thing posterior to the world so in other words you have to have created the cosmos of the universe first as far as he's concerned because in order for the cosm to time to actually be going the cosmos has to be in motion so therefore what philo's arguing here is that there couldn't have been a certain number of days before the universe is created because there is no time before the universe is created therefore it would be correct to say that the world was not created in time but the time had its existence in consequence of the world or the cosmos here for it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time so anyway it's a um this is not alien to we've done before um our uh like whole lectures for example on ptolemaic or aristotelian uh cosmology and so it's this is not alien to that uh it isn't something you necessarily would immediately derive from reading genesis so yes can we get a microphone to robert so einstein did a clarification of space and time have you factored that into this equation or not well philo didn't you know because he wasn't aware of that um and so i know that a lot of times people would like to um you know kind of put these up against what we know presently and all this kind of thing i'm going to try to pull back from not doing that and instead try to understand it in the context that they understood at the time either by reading the texts on the one hand literally or allegorically in the context of what they otherwise understood from greek philosophical what einstein's cosmology of saying yeah you know so yeah we have to we have to for comments we have to speak in the microphone so that people can you know yeah well i'm trying to speak loudly i mean so that last sentence is similar to what einstein was conceptualizing about time being relative and coming from the coming from the nature of of of of even of gravity and the creation of the cosmos well it's relative it has a it's not i wouldn't necessarily say it's relative in the sense because the idea of it is what he's saying is that the creation occurs before time exists and now that time is here is existing and it's going in a perfect cosmic order as opposed to relative depending on the momentum that anybody has so anyway i want to not i want to take einstein out of this and just go back but i think we can i mean often we can read ancient texts we can read the bible and decide that we maybe think oh well we really now that really is now being um borne out by what we now know modern in modern science but in fact you can actually make the arguments almost always both ways so um if he's taking it based on uh in part uh aristotle's work aristotle had a different definition of motion uh than the term or the way that we interpret motion is not the same way that aristotle did end back a slide when it was talking about uh a great a sign of great simplicity is one of the arguments uh for the simplicity of god that god can't be made up of too many pieces because if he was made up of too many pieces that motion that aristotle is talking about that there's a necessary cause or a necessary cause of motion well so philo is going to argue that god is simple in that sense in terms of not being able to be divided into parts but in this case he's he's in this case he's um saying you're an idiot if you believe this so if you if you believe that the earth was created in six days you're an idiot that's what he's saying you know so okay so he goes on so we'll try to push it forward here guys so he says when therefore moses and so he assumes moses is the author of these of the five books the torah he says when moses says god completed his works on the sixth day we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days but he takes moses takes six as a perfect number since it is the first number which is equal in its parts in the half in the third in the sixth part and since it is produced by the multiplication of two unequal factors two and three right and so this is again getting into arithmology this kind of thing that uh the pythagoreans other kinds of greek philosophers were very interested in and so essentially we take six and so if we take the factors here one-sixth equals one one-third equals two one-half equals three if you add those up one two three plus three equals six and also if you take two with three times three equals six so in other words you're saying this is a really important number as far as uh this kind of numerology and arithmology oh yeah one times two times three you're right you're right i should say that 1 times 2 times 3 equals 6. perfect so um okay he continues filo continues not only what it is akin to the motions of our organic animals for an organic body is naturally capable of motion in six directions forwards backwards upwards downwards and to the left and to the right you know just like the queen she can move in any direction right only four so you can't go up and down so no you're right not like the queen but i like the queen doing that when they play when they play uh fancy chess and star trek oh that's right diana star trek you're right you're right okay good okay he continues if we by the way this kind of numerology or arithmology goes on and on and and on so um i'm just giving you a taste so and at all advance moses desires to show that the races of mortal beings and also of all immortal beings exist according to their appropriate numbers measuring mortal beings i have said by the number six and the blessed and immortal beings by the number seven so seven is going to be this um this perfect number in a different way that's representing heavenly things whereas all of the creation that's happening um in the six days this is of the mortal physical things that uh number six right and so anyway that's enough of that there's he goes on and on with that kind of stuff um so in this course of this he's talking about the creation here in the course of reading early genesis like many serious readers of the bible throughout the ages philo notes that they're essentially two distinct and in some cases contradictory creation stories in genesis that are one right after the other so the first one is genesis 1 1 through genesis 2 3 and the second one is in genesis 2 4 through 2 25 and so most modern scholars explain this by the documentary hypothesis as the works of two separate authors who scholars call the priestly author and the yahwest author so p and j and so we're going to have a whole lecture on that so i'm not going to go into details on that but we're going to have a whole lecture on that in march and it's very interesting stuff but essentially the idea of it is is that modern literary criticism doesn't see moses as the author of any of the of those five books but not having that explanation not having literary criticism not having modern academic history philo is viewing these texts as moses so he has to understand well why does an author give the one and then the other and so philo reads these then as a spiritual physical dualism like we see in almost all of greek philosophical thought quoting genesis 2 7 he says or that genesis 2 7 and septuagint says and god created man taking a lump of clay from the earth and breathed into his face the breath faced the breath of life and man became a living soul and philo's then interpretation then is the races of men are twofold one of them is the heavenly man that is created in that first creation story uh the uh you know god made man a man in his own image and he is actually male and female created he them so in other words it's a uh spiritual creation as far as father was saying and then this one with the clump olympic clay uh is in you know with the spirit infused is a is more of the physical uh creation and so now the heavenly man philo says uh as being born in the image of god has no participation in any corruptible or earth-like essence but the earthly man is of loose material and so as we've done our you know if we've done if you remember all of our pre-socratic philosophy where there is this dichotomy that they're very worried about within between things that are perfect and imperishable so plato's forms all of the things that are spirit and therefore eternal eternal and incorruptible and then all of the things that are physical and that we see erode away and have entropy and all the other kinds of problems are mortal these are the two different dichotomies and he's dealing with that for people here as he's seeing it in this interpretation allegorical interpretation of scripture uh the earthly man is of loose material which moses calls a lump of clay on which account moses says uh not that the heavenly man was made but that he was fashioned according to the image of god but the earthly man he calls a thing made and not begotten by the maker right so essentially you're having two different um qualities that are infused in each kind of person the the essentially spiritual and the physical phyla thus reads genesis in light of the greek mind body material immaterial perishable imperishable unchangeable changeable dualism that we see so much the earthly material human is something that god makes of perishable material the heavenly or immaterial is formed by the begotten i'm sorry formed or begotten in the image of god which is eternal and imperishable like plato's forms i kind of ad-libbed that without that slide anyway so harry said it again okay so philo goes on and actually throughout to caution you against literal readings and he um definitely tells people that you know don't be fooled don't read this literally you're going to be you're going to be taking you know get it get it wrong if you do so when he's talking about genesis 2 7 in his commentary he says now the expression breathed into that we just barely read is equivalent to inspired or gave life to things inanimate for let us take care that we are never filled with such absurdity as to think that god employs the organs of a mouth or nostrils for the purpose of breathing into anything for god is not only devoid of any qualities but he is likewise not the form of a man and the use of these words shows some more secret mysteries of nature so in that same way we're going to get to this idea that not parts right so in other words simplicity and not just um we shouldn't be reading this literally as god walking around in the garden of eden that kind of thing so concerning genesis 2 8 philo then ridicules a literal uh reading of god planted a paradise in eden so he says let us not let not such impiety so he's you're really not even you're not even religious properly you know you're blasphemous here if you ever occupy our thoughts as to suppose that god cultivates lands and plants paradises since if we we were to do so we should presently be raising the question why he does so for it could not be that he might provide himself with pleasant places of recreation and pastime or with amusement god doesn't need those kind of things right let not such fabulous nonsense ever enter our minds for even the whole world would not be a worthy place of habitation for god since he is a place unto himself and he himself is full of himself and he himself is sufficient for himself filling up and surrounding everything else which is deficient in every respect or deserted or empty but he himself is surrounded by nothing else as being himself one and the universe and so um so essentially here what we're having is a very strong you know ridicule against literal reading and instead philo is essentially presenting his own theology which is very strongly monist it's different from either rabbinic judaism or christianity or islam or anything because in fact it's a god in philo really is part you know the universe is also part of you know part of god in terms of all in in isn't separated out from god so it's more monist and more uh than than let's say transcend transcendent god that we'll get in christianity and yeah more like the stoics that's like the old child's way of of of writing down their address their street address and their town and their country and the earth the universe the mind of god [Laughter] so there you go that would be like at the end of the address you know or in god's case his address is zero zero zero zero zero one you know and you can just always go there okay so let's go and get a little bit of a um the greek background that is informing these kind of thoughts that philo's having so uh reasoning by analogy how are we where are we giving these things where we're not uh doing literal reading what are we doing instead so greek philosophical thought made use of reasoning by analogy the um you know word analogy means proportionality and could be used mathematically so we're doing just very no no you're right analogy sorry yeah um it could be used mathematically to mean proportion so when we're doing these kind of things if we do geometry of remember a you know is the b as then c is to what you know and so we d turns out or whatever it is so simple analogies as uh hand is to arm you know as foot is to leg exactly so we can all we can all reason and now and by an algae um so there's also more sophisticated analogies in plato and aristotle we've done this before when we did the uh plato uh the allegory of the cave uh or when we're doing the reading the republic and so this is um plato's analogy of the divided line and it's kind of important to this you can also see why philo talks so much about numbers and this also talks about proportions so when we draw a line we divide it into two unequal sections and it doesn't matter where we did i just did it lower that way and then if we then do by proportion we make two further cuts so that those cuts are each in the same proportion as the others so again this is almost because we're talking about proportion which also is how you translate proportio is how you translate an alogia into latin uh so proportion um then what they'll end up noting is you know by a wonderful magic of geometry that b and c are equal in length and that i'm not proving for you mathematically but can be done so anyway so essentially there is kind of showing already this kind of mathematic um that also you know we we heard philo talking about with numbers like six and seven and things like that so um we have this divided line as plato's way of ordering more or less his whole system so essentially he takes those two different lines he's dividing things and his ideas about the universe into sensible objects things that we can touch and feel and see and hear and all that taste and then intelligible objects things that can't be sensed but can only be understood in our minds by understanding them conceptually intellectually and so uh each one of these as we understand them we have to understand them in analogies to each other and going upwards so the lowest category is images and these are things like shadows so the shadow that my hand is casting is only you know it only has its existence because my hand is casting it and so the image is here in d is the very lowest kind of thing and it is only then you understand that how how less a thing that is to my hand is how much images are to sensible things like my hand that you can you know feel if i jab you with it right and so in that whole kind of thing that whole class of things that we can sense and then from that then getting across to the next one we have to understand and you know analogously so um in the same way that a shadow is to an actual physical object like a hand mathematical objects that make up the hand are that much more important and that much more real than the sensible things and then ultimately those mathematics are formed by the ultimate images or forms or ideas that are for plato the end-all of everything right and so that essentially is again reasoning by analogy and proportion and it actually is the central idea of that plato has uh and it uses the mathematics and also proportion to even show it so analogy can be very very important to ancient greek thought we also talked about plato in order to get at um his form of forms which is good the good or goodness for goodness sake he uses an analogy of the sun or allegory of the sun in order to understand again the physical world the sun is lighting lighting that and illuminating that the same way then the greatest form the forma forms the good is illuminating uh you know in this non-in this intelligible realm uh everything that makes up the intelligible realm so likewise aristotle who you know as we know doesn't agree with plato on everything and indeed their argument has been one of the major uh uh bases for all of western philosophy ever since at the heart of aristotle's empiricism and his argument with plato is the idea that actually all of these physical things that plato's quite dismissive of because the real things are really these forms and ideals that he's trying to reason to aristotle by contrast says you can take all of those things and use them and study them in order to get to something's final cause which is to say the all that same ultimate purpose that plato is talking about and so that can be deduced from these lower types of causes some things material cause uh uh and this is anyway how aristotle explains it which is to say uh i should say matter they're not mature but anyway the material caused what is the thing made of you know so the book here is made of paper right uh the formal cause what is its configuration right what is its essence uh of it how did it happen how did we manuface it how did we manufacture it you know what is its efficient cause what agent made it and then finally what's its purpose and so in other words you can use empiricism aristotle things in order to get to what the purpose of everything is and in order to do that to or show that he uses analogy so analogy is also very important here for this so to get to that idea of teleology or end or final cause or purpose in other words um the final cause aristotle says of an acorn i missed a slide anyway whatever is to be an oak tree uh in the same way then he relies on an analogy of that that that in the same way that we can't you know to assert it you look at an acorn and you don't necessarily understand that the final purpose of it is to make an oak tree because it's natural generation and there may well be other explanations but he does say that in a in in an artistic creation in something that is built for example by humans like a house all of the whole process and everything and components that went into building that you really can't understand what almost all of these things were if you don't understand what the final product or the purpose of the house in that sense was and so he uses then that analogy from art artistry and we're fairly familiar with that so that's also been used cosmologically right where people will use that in in talking about intelligent design we'll say like the what or the dias said about the watchmaker god so essentially just like god has created a uh you know i'm sorry when you find a watch it's very complicated and it's winding and going you presume that there must have been a maker and so by analogy you see this universe that's all going that you presume somebody wound that up to begin with so that's an argument that has been made so that kind of analogy so finding then final causes uh in nature and uh and also in what the greeks had that's kind of equivalent of their scripture so these original epic poets homer and hesiod so as early as then you know the sixth century bce so even before uh some of these things a guy named uh theogony's of regium argued uh for essentially an allegorical interpretation of homer so we shouldn't be reading homer literally we shouldn't be reading all of these terrible things that the gods are doing in the same sort of unethical or or literal sense because instead we should understand these uh as having deeper or more allegorical truths and so the struggle of the gods in homer is an analogy for example he said of the opposition between the elements so as we now have started to understand or in greek science they have earth fire and water and there they have these different opposition to each other in that same way we can be reading about those allegorically in homer as opposed to you know in the struggle between uh hera and whoever's against her well zeus usually yeah i'm just saying on the trojan and that's different side anyway so she's on the greek side and aphrodite is on the on the trojan side so um proticus then of co chaos in the uh uh fifth century interprets the gods and homer as personification of substances so demeter who's the god of grain you know represents bread and grain dionysus is you know the god obviously of wine and refrivality he represents wine poseidon the god of the sea represents water hephaestus uh the the god of the forge represents fire so essentially reading all of these or reinterpreting all of these kind of mythological stories uh allegorically has something that is you know well in the greek tradition by the time you get to philo so philo's uh allegorical interpretation that of since two again is completely in keeping with um the way greeks already are reinterpreting their own mythological texts and greek speaking jews in the first century for example so there's other greeks now i'm sorry other jews who are greek speaking in the first century and will mention the ones that who then did become convinced that jesus of nazareth is the christos or the messiah they likewise read the septuagint as we've mentioned but they also read it allegorically rather than literally so they're in the same kind of school as philo so beginning with paul who's the earliest christian whose writings are preserved paul is a he's self-identified as had been a pharisee so he's a greek speaking uh jew from anatolia he said the diaspora in other words so christians in antiquity in the middle ages similarly argue against literal interpretation of scripture you may not think that because you maybe you know a lot of um christians today who you think maybe are kind of medieval you know uh who are very fundamental or literal in their interpretation but that's quite quite a new thing so paul in one of his letters so ii corinthians or two corinthians as donald trump calls it 2 corinthians 3 6 says god has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant which is the same word as testament to ministers of a new covenant new testament not of the letter but of the spirit for the letter literal kills but the spirit gives life right so um cautioning here against literal uh interpretation new testament readers also read the new testament authors also read the septuagint typologically as it's called so um stories in the text are understood this is again like a greek things would be a type uh typos or tipon is just to say an image or a reflection of the perfect anti-type uh which we might we call like archetypes if you think of like archetypes right but essentially it's a term of anti-type and it's almost the same kind of thing where we have with plato where the the form is like the um the the person that has the you know like a moneyer you're making a coin and he's got the the actual thing that you know like you need to stamp the stamp and then it creates the coin so the the um the coin is simply the image of the of that or actually they use it with what the coin is kind of solid so they usually use this with wax so essentially the wax and seal so the wax and seal is simply the image of the what the uh the stamp does right and so essentially the the seal is the type you know of the anti-type that makes it and we sometimes and so we know archetypes now right so thus the um in that same exact way the person who's the author of the first epistle of peter who's not actually peter but anyway first peter 3 20 and 21 compares the flood story in genesis to baptism and he calls then baptism christian baptism the antitype and therefore the flood is the type or the reflection or image of that eternal perfect truth right of the idea of baptism as far as that author's concerned so that's actually an explicit use of type and anti-type right these both of these paul in his letter to the romans interprets the story of adam in genesis explicitly typologically again he calls adam a type of the one who is to come so christ in this case is the anti-type in this particular interpretation so the person who's conquering death the person who brings death upon everybody according to paul's theology likewise in the gospel of matthew jesus gives a typological interpretation of the story of jonah so he says quote for just as jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster so for three days and three nights the son of man will be in the heart of the earth so in other words jonah uh and the whale is not to be read literally but it's meant to be read allegorically you know as a type of christ's resurrection which is the true archetype or antitype right and so this is throughout all of the christian new testament it's just this is how christians compose the new testament this is how they understood um their understanding of how the septuagint relates to the christian understanding of of what's going on in christian theology and so it's all read allegorically typologically as opposed to literally so can you fix your microphone because you put it under your shirt well it doesn't yeah let's put it in the pocket okay is that working that's better thank you okay so let's go back to philo so another very interesting thing so we talked about all this allegory and how this is actually common in greek speaking actually for greek greeks for their own mythology and also for other greek speaking jews for their interpretation of uh the hebrew bible this two again let's go back to another one of philo's major ideas and this is his conception of logos so the heart of a bunch of his ideas and it's actually all over the place throughout all this text philo derives when he's doing all of his allegorical reading of scripture is to kind of win aloud and to bring forward and explain his idea of logos which is this amazingly important greek word that means everything from word but not not so much just like any individual word but word itself in a bigger sense discourse region logic all kinds of different things logos means for philo he says in different places logos is the firstborn of god which is to say the highest intermediate between um highest intermediate being necessary to bridge the enormous gap between the infinite and humans so in as much as philo as we were just i was saying when i explained we kind of did that whole um god is all of this stuff right and viola went on and on and on and that address of oneness this way too much that god actually represents to get between god then and then individual guys like philo and me there needs to be then some kind of intermediary so we can kind of you know even understand like you know have some kind of connection and the most important um intermediating bridge between god and individuals is the logos which philo then calls here the firstborn of god is what he would equate yes could you repeat the question the question is does philo call the logos of form or you know the form and i and he does at some point or other equate it with the form of forms so for for him um it's it's not the ultimate the ultimate is essentially um the god and then this is the next one so it's like uh uh you know so aristotle has like a demiurge you know so there's like the different kinds of levels essentially uh the very first one after god so form after god so for filorites for the father of the universe has caused him the logos to spring up as the eldest son whom in another passage moses so again he's quoting moses or he's deriving this from moses or his allegorical interpretation of moses moses calls the firstborn and he who is thus born imitating the ways of his father has formed such and such species looking to his archetypal patterns so essentially all of creation is happening through this form of the logo scott's logos so in different texts we can't go into it as a really long complicated different way and it's actually somewhat contradictory sometimes all the different things philo's also a mystic and so he has different ways that he thinks about the logos but he calls the logos as things such as the form of form so that's almost like what plato's good is the firstborn of god who is then unbegotten also divine wisdom the daughter of god he goes through a whole long way in which the form of god is or the logos is neither male or female or is actually both and so therefore can be even the wisdom in both hebrew and greek is a female word and so therefore the female divine we shouldn't get all hung up about that he says so essentially it's both the son of god and the daughter wisdom um and a second hypothesis hypostation of god and so if you might be aware of this word hypostasis but only if you're a christian theologian so so we'll get to hypers or maybe if you're valerie sorry um i'm reminded that um uh and this is in view of the idea that god speaks the universe into being you know god said let there be light and there was light etcetera right and uh in apparently in various cultures and times gone by there was word magic you know where the pronunciation the pronouncement of words yes carried a magical whammy and some words were very sacred and some were so sacred you weren't supposed to speak them like the name of god and so i'm wondering you know how much this is rooted in this very ancient belief possibly oh i think it's it's very rooted in this so this is he's driving this from this same story you know like so we've already read like some of this so the creation story where god says let there be light and there was light so the word is right there and you know in terms of that's the word right and so then and that word is creation and so all things are created through this logos but there has been like all the way back even before um it being magic uh and a lot of in a lot of uh things you know we have like in uh the ten commandments they say so let it be written so let it be done right it's one of the little phrases but essentially if you say it it is real and that's we've come back to that with um post-modernism right but this actually was the way so yeah so saying the thing and then this is true for example in all of let's say egyptian spells and everything like that you speak all of these words and that's what allows the souls of the dead to make it through all of the different things in the book of the dead the book of breathings and things so the spoken word has those kind of powers and just even saying things makes it so and also this is why up until very very recently when the culture was you know oral um you know giving an oath is really huge and if you um if you swear or some kind of oath and you say oh i'm going to do this thing in a rash oath i mean people make rash oats like that in the hebrew bible i swear you know if god gives me this victory i'll sacrifice whatever i see when i come home to my you know when i you know come home and the first the first thing he sees is his daughter so he has to commit you know human sacrifice right and so this um you know so this is those kind of power that those kind of oaths have um when you get to the middle ages when the kings are oath so like we're gonna do with beckett henry who has becka killed maybe or anyway who's knight's kill beckett um is an oath breaker and that's he's a great king but he he's not trustworthy you know and so anyway that's the that's a big problem for everybody so o's are huge and that you know is a big thing it's a word so it's all in there yeah um and so anyway a second hypothetion of god in the form of god's creative power so in other words the logos in in some senses essentially is god but different from the creator the hypothesization of god's power so essentially a second person of god and the mediator then between the creator and the created universe and and the thing that's filling the uh the universe and mediating between the two different kinds portions of god the justice and the uh and the mercy so there's all kinds of different things in in in this conception of logos but what's especially interesting uh for because otherwise philo would just be his own speculation he doesn't have any descendants on this but how much the logos then makes it into christianity's own peculiar theology and so in the retelling of this same genesis story that we've been reading philos commentary on from the fourth gospel as we say that's attributed to john um in the beginning was the logos and the logos was with god and the logos was god i mean it's usually we say word we're not using that greek but the agree curious logos he was in the beginning with god all things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being right and so it's almost the same in that portion of it the same idea of the logos and in this case this hypostasis of god you know who is god right is with god and is is god uh then is understood the second person of the trinity to be christ in christianity right so it's possible but uncertain whether philo uh was read by the author of john and also the letters there's a bunch of different stuff in it that kind of indicate that they're kind of akin to some of philo's stuff uh the letter to hebrew and or paul even we've seen have some have some things there's nothing though that shows literary dependence so they're not quoting him or anything however philo's work does influence very important uh schools of early christian thinkers including clement of alexandria and his very brilliant student origin of alexandria who's really the first uh super great christian theologian and also amazingly prolific and influential so especially influential in just more or less securing for antiquity and the middle ages for christians allegorical interpretation of scripture so i'm just going to say then you know when we're going back to this in terms of this overall influence it's not the same hypostatic union so this monism that we've talked about that's a little closer to the stoics and that kind of thing that that philo has created is different from what the christians ultimately come up with with theology but i'm going to suggest here it's like the same kind of philosophical ballpark so philo you know is envisioning then a hypostasis between the creator and his unbegotten first son the logos and that's not the same necessarily as the it's not the same actually as the three co-eternal consubstantial persons with that word person here hypostasis of the trinity creator sun and spirit but we are really kind of in that same uh hellenistic alexandrian theological ballpark so in that sense i mean whereas it may not see indirectly and also somewhat directly christianity philo is arguably sort of massively influential uh over especially that interpretation of scripture but also gave a lot of tools to later christian theologians in developing doctrines like the trinity what kind of influence did philo have on judaism not much i'll go ahead go ahead well i'm thinking that this surely influenced the neoplatonists surely it did because they were like what third century second third century and through neoplatonism yep yeah so indirect so that's true so in as much as philo influenced christians who influence neoplatonus who reinterpret and also influence christians or in as much as then christians also um influence judas jews it would be indirectly that way but in terms of a direct influence though rabbis for example did not preserve file as texts and they're therefore only known we have these as the christian monks who are preserving them right so these are not this is not stuff that made it into the talmud even though he's obviously a very important first century jewish thinker from the standpoint obviously of jews who saw no compelling reason to view jesus as the messiah the experiment with hellenism you know led to the disaster of christianity which is to say a greek speaking community who used philo's ideas to allegorize away that idea that you even had to uh um obey law anymore so christians in fact didn't in like one generation um actually argued quite strongly that uh if you if you obey torah if you obey um uh the hebrew commandments in the in the hebrew bible that means you're rejecting christ so paul quite strongly at a certain point when he's really arguing strongly if you get circumcised that means you might as well you might as well christ might as well died for nothing you're getting nothing out of it you know so he is quite strongly against christians going ahead and doing that and in fact even though christians today often read like leviticus and they think that that somehow applies to them because they don't really know anything any better you know in fact actually even things like the ten commandments augustine uh who again was our major thinkers who's uh uh influenced by people like origen and going back to clement and philo augustine says you should christians absolutely should not follow the ten commandments uh the ten commandment you know specifically uh to keep the sabbath day holy christians should not be keeping the sabbath day holy because the celebration of christianity is on the lord's day which is sunday and so um it's a thing that got lost in english and so people you know became seventh-day sabbatarians and all this kind of a thing but anyway it's a long confusing history that christianity has but anyway going all the way back to this um this was obviously inimical to what the rabbi's interpretation of and how they then in the wake of the destruction of the second temple re-end also creating then a new diaspora judaism how that what they wanted to adhere to so in these circumstances i think it's really not surprising that the rabbis decided to consign philo's text you know to the scrappy so anyway goodbye so anyway so judaism is greek the philosophy i read somewhere sometime oh yeah i read somewhere sometime that at some point and you probably know about this um there the um ancient jews uh weren't sure whether they should carry on whether hebrew or greek should be the language of of religion and i guess this was i don't know what do you know about it well so definitely at vilo's time it doesn't seem it doesn't seem like there is that much so hebrew isn't necessarily being used especially through the whole western diaspora and i would say that it may well be that through the east um certainly the common tongue is aramaic but because they're close enough i think that they the people who are the aramaic speakers didn't feel the need to translate the hebrew but when you're doing dealing with this kind of time period where the population of the jewish population of alexandria if it's maybe possibly as much as a third of the city if you could imagine that's so many more people you know largest urban population of jews so those guys many of whom then you know did all of their scripture reading in greek they may well have been philo is not clear how much hebrew how good he was at hebrew um and so it may well be you know when augustine was no good at greek you know so anyway it may well be that um uh that they were already doing that um but then when the when they i'm not as familiar we'd have to um do a bunch of study on how exactly the rabbis went about it but they definitely um uh in the next centuries as the rabbis are putting together uh talmud and everything they um they privileged the babylonian talmud over uh the western one the one that's from uh you know judea uh because of again maybe because of this contamination you know that's happening because the christians you know have run away you know hijacked their religion and and done all these crazy things with it this synagogue yeah synagogue is a greek word so you turned off the microphone again sorry okay he's distracted with the conversation um at one point i kind of looked and i could see where darwin had climbed in uh and [Music] figured out this species from that i forgot what frame it was where he suddenly came to my mind yeah so i mean he's so darwin is you know it is how we're like like the fun one of the final um steps of getting past like aristotle's ideas of categories and everything like that and so um instead of having like ancient ancient thinkers you know kind of understood uh often animals has all become as as being essentially part of one species that has always been that way and always would be that way as far as as far as they were concerned but it's uh again in the 19th century people uh like darwin come understood the actual mechanism you know which is to say that there's uh evolution wouldn't have been privy to that so all right we'll have i've run out the clock so so thank you guys so very much and we'll go ahead and have snacks and anyway appreciate it so much [Applause] [Music] you

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Length: 73min 10sec (4390 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021