Codex 103

[Philo Judaeus, Allegories of the Sacred Laws,and On the Civil Life]

Read the Allegories of the Sacred Laws,and On the Civil Life,by Philo Judaeus.[1]

[1] c.20 B.C.-A.D. 40. The most important Jewish Hellenist, called the Jewish Plato, born at Alexandria of a priestly family. Hardly any particulars are known of his life. In the year 40 he was head of a deputation of his countrymen to the emperor Caligula at Rome, to protest against the persecution of the Jews in Alexandria. He was the author of numerous works, purely philosophical, exegetical (on the Pentateuch), historical, and apologetic. Amongst them are: On the Indestructibility of the World; That every Good Man is Free; Allegories of the Sacred Law,full of allegorizing and constant attempts to combine Judaism and Hellenism; On the Contemplative Life; Against Flaccus(governor of Egypt); and The Embassy to Gaius.His philosophy is a sort of neo-Platonism----an endeavour to reconcile the teaching of Plato and of the Bible. There are two worlds, an intelligible and a sensible, the latter formed by God on the model of a world of ideas, invariable and coeternal, personified under the name of logos (Reason), an emanation from God. “The Logos, intermediate between God and the world, dwells with God as His wisdom, and as the abiding place of the Ideas.”