Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.
We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the Palestinian Memra, and not from the Alexandrian Logos.” Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had [pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”
Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says: “The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.” He calls the Word the “chainband,” “pilot,” “steersman,” of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated ‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the ‘Word’ of Jehovah (Memra, Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself, ‘The Word of God’ had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.” George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”
Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans = the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo: ‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’ Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the ‘I am,’ which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.” See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo: “Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”
The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled “the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). “The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead” (quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, on John 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.
D. Descriptions of the Messiah.
(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.
(a) Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”; Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.” (b) Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”; Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.” Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called “the Lord” or “the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.