The note of triumph rings through the political references to be found in the last parts of Philo's allegorical commentary, and no doubt it was accentuated in the lost book which he added as an epilogue, or palinode, to his history of the embassy. God had again preserved his people, and discomfited their foes; recently-discovered papyri have revealed that the arch anti-Semites, Isidorus and Lampon, were tried at Rome and executed. Claudius was well-disposed to the Jewish race, and before the final storm there was a calm. Howbeit, after the death of Agrippa, in 44 C.E., Judæa became a Roman province, and under the rapacious governorship of Felix Florus and Cestius Gallus, the hostility of the people to the Romans grew more and more bitter. But in Alexandria there was tranquillity, or at least we know of no disquieting events during the next decade. [pg.71] "Old age," said Philo, "is an unruffled harbor,"[81] and the saying refers possibly to his own experience. For he must have died full of years and full of honors. Through his life he was the spiritual and philosophical guide, and finally he had become the champion of his people against their persecutors, giving dignity to their cause and inspiring respect even in their enemies. He was happy in the time of his death, for he did not live to see the destruction of the national home of his people and of that temple which he had loved to contemplate as the future centre of a universal religion. The disintegration of his own community at Alexandria followed full soon on the greater disaster; the temple of Onias was dismantled and interdicted against Jewish worship by Vespasian in the year 73 C.E., and though, as has been noted, this was not in itself of great importance, it is symbolic of the uprooting of national life in the Diaspora as well as in Palestine itself. On the downfall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. many of the extreme anti-Roman party, known as the Zealots, fled to Alexandria and stirred up rebellion and dissension. Nothing but disaster could have attended the outbreak, but it is a sad reflection that the governor who put it down and ruthlessly exterminated the rebels was none other than Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, who was in turn procurator of Judæa and Egypt. By another irony of history he had in the previous year been largely instrumental in securing for Vespasian, [pg.72] who was besieging Jerusalem, the imperial throne of Rome.[82] With him ends our knowledge of Philo's family, and it ends significantly with one who has ceased to be a Jew. The ruin of the Jewish-Alexandrian community was completed by a desperate revolt in the reign of Trajan, 114-117 C.E., after which they were deprived of their chief political privileges; and finally, after incessant conflicts with the Christians, they were expelled from the city by the all-powerful Bishop Cyril (415 C.E.).
Philo himself passed out of Jewish tradition within a short time, to become a Christian worthy. The destruction of the nation and the gradual severance of the Christian heresy from the main community compelled the abandonment of missionary activity and distrust of the work of its exponents. The dangerous aspect of the Alexandrian development was revealed. Its philosophical allegorizing might attract the Gentile to the Jewish Scriptures, but it also led the Jew away from his special conduct of life. The Alexandrian Church, which claimed to continue the tradition of Philo, departed further and further from the Jewish standpoint, and formulated a dogmatic creed that was utterly opposed to Jewish monotheism. A philosophical Judaism for the whole world was a splendid ideal, but unfortunately in Philo's time it was incapable of accomplishment. The result of the attempt to found it was the establishment of a religion in which, together with the adoption of Hebraic [pg.73] teachings about God, certain ideas of Alexandrian mysticism became stereotyped as dogmas, and Jewish law was abrogated. When Babylon replaced Palestine as the centre of Jewish intellect, the works of Philo, like the rest of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature, written as they were in a strange tongue, fell into disuse, and before long were entirely forgotten. The Christians, on the other hand, found in Philo a notable evidence for many of their beliefs and a philosophical testimony for the dogmas of their creed. They claimed him as their own, and the Church Fathers, to bind him more closely to their tradition, invented fables of his meeting with Peter at Rome and Mark at Alexandria, They traced, in the treatise "On the Contemplative Life," a record of early Christian monastic communities, and on account of this book especially regarded Philo almost with the reverence of an apostle. To the Christian theologians of Alexandria we owe it that the interpretation of Judaism to the Hellenic world in the light of Hellenic philosophy has been preserved. Of the two Jewish philosophers who have made a great contribution to the world's intellectual development, Spinoza was excommunicated in his lifetime, and Philo suffered moral excommunication after his death. The writings of both exercised their chief influence outside the community; but the emancipated Jewry of our own day can in either case recognize the worth of the thinker, and point with pride to the saintliness of the man. [pg.74]
III
PHILO'S WORKS AND METHOD
The first thing that strikes a reader of Philo is the great volume of his work: he is the first Jewish writer to produce a large and systematic body of writings, the first to develop anything in the nature of a complete Jewish philosophy. He had essentially the literary gift, the capacity of giving lasting expression to his own thought and the thought of his generation. Treating him merely as a man of letters, he is one of the chief figures in Greek literature of the first century. We have extant over forty books of his composition, and nearly as many again have disappeared. His works are one and all expositions of Judaism, but they fall into six distinct classes of exegesis:
I. The allegorical commentary, or "Allegories of the Laws," which is a series of philosophical treatises based upon continuous texts in Genesis, from the first to the eighteenth chapter. Together with this, the best authorities place the two remaining books on the "Dreams of the Bible," which are a portion of a larger work, and deal allegorically with the dreams of Jacob and Joseph.
II. The Midrashic commentary on the Five Books of Moses, for which we have no single name, but [pg.75] which was clearly intended to be an ethical and philosophical treatise upon the whole law.
III. A commentary in the form of "Questions and Answers to Genesis and Exodus," which is incomplete now, and save for detached fragments exists only in a Latin translation. In its original form it provided a short running exegesis, verse by verse, to the whole of the first three books of the Pentateuch, and was contained in twelve parts.