WITH THE ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHER Philo (ca. 20 BCE–ca. 50 CE), we are entering the world of Platonic, or more precisely Middle Platonic, philosophy in Jewish garb.1 Philo’s God is absolutely transcendent. To refer to him, he uses the Platonic term to on, “that which exists,” or ho agenētos, “the Uncreated One.” We know that God exists, but we will never know what he is, his essence. Nevertheless, emanating from this God are “forces” or “powers” (dynameis), facets of the unknowable and unattainable God, which through many stages embody the transcendent to on and enable its transition down to our visible world. Heading these forces are the Logos and Wisdom (sophia): Logos is responsible for the emergence of the purely intelligible world of ideas (the kosmos noētos) and Wisdom for the world perceived by our senses (the kosmos aisthētos); the former is also called God’s “elder and firstborn son,” and the latter, the “younger son” of God.2
Without going into the complex interplay of Logos and Wisdom according to Philo (the two are ontologically identical, but they describe different aspects of God and his creative activity),3 I will limit myself in the following to the Logos. As God’s actual creative power, he is close to God and at the same time, as the creator of the intelligible world of ideas, God and Logos are identical:
Should a man desire to use words in a more simple and direct way, he would say that the world discerned only by the intellect (ton noēton kosmon) is nothing else than the Word of God (theou logon) when He was already engaged in the act of creation.4
When Philo attempts to describe more precisely the relationship between the unknowable and unattainable God and his Logos, he uses not philosophical but rather biblical language.5 The Logos is
God’s First-born (prōtogonos), the Word, who holds the eldership (presbytatos) among the angels, their archangel (archangelos) as it were, the ruler (hyparchos) with many names, for he is called: “the Beginning” (archē), and the Name of God (onoma theou), and His Word (logos), and the Man after His image (ho kat’ eikona anthrōpos), and “he that sees” (ho horōn), that is Israel.6
Similarities with the Prayer of Joseph are immediately obvious. The Logos is the firstborn and oldest among the angels, and is identical with Israel. Yet Philo is more precise than the Prayer of Joseph with regard to the salvific function of the Logos reaching into the earthly world:
“We are all sons of one man” (Gen. 42:11). For if we have not yet become fit (enough) to be thought sons of God yet we may be sons of His invisible image (tēs aeidous eikonos), the most holy Word (logou tou hierōtatou). For the Word is the eldest-born image of God (theou gar eikōn logos ho presbytatos).7
We humans, although we cannot (yet) call ourselves “Sons of God,” can indeed refer to ourselves as “Sons of the Logos,” his “firstborn image,” who elsewhere is even denoted as “second God”:8
For nothing mortal can be made in the likeness of the most high One and Father of the universe but (only) in that of the second God (deuteron theon), who is his Logos.
God reaches into the earthly world of humanity through the Logos, the second God, his personified image and creator of the intelligible world of ideas. He does this through the human soul, which according to Philo is bound in the prison of the body and after death embarks on the journey to return to its true home, the world of ideas. Philo’s Logos is thus God’s creative power, which is not only responsible for the creation of the human soul but as the mediator between God and humans, also links the soul with God. For good reason, scholars have indicated the proximity of Philo’s idea of the Logos to the prologue to the Gospel of John:
(1:1) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
(2) He9 was in the beginning with God.
(3) All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
(4) In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The only difference between Philo and the prologue to the Gospel of John is that in John, the Word becomes human. This is out of the question for Philo, even if some of the concepts or images that he uses for the Logos—such as the “Man after His image” or “he that sees”—seem to play with this idea. Judaism could hardly come any closer to that which would develop in Christology. It is therefore not surprising that Philo did not leave behind many traces in the comprehensive corpus of rabbinic literature, and his writings were forgotten or suppressed until into the early modern period. His actual career would be in Christianity—with such success that he was even viewed as one of the church fathers.10