Philo

Philo of Alexandria, also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in the city of Alexandria in Roman Egypt during the late Second Temple period. His surviving Greek-language treatises attempt to read the Hebrew Bible through the categories of Platonic and Stoic philosophy, and they exerted strong influence on early Christian theology and on later Jewish philosophical writing.

He was born around 20 BC into one of the wealthiest Jewish families of the Roman Empire. His brother Alexander served as alabarch, a senior tax official supervising customs on the Egyptian side of the Nile, and his nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander later became Roman prefect of Egypt and Judaea. The family combined adherence to Jewish religious practice with full participation in Greek civic and intellectual life.

The clearest dated event in his biography is his role at the head of a Jewish embassy to the emperor Caligula in Rome around 39 to 40 AD, recorded in his work Embassy to Gaius. The mission sought relief from anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria and from the emperor's demand that his statue be installed in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the account is one of the few surviving Jewish narratives of imperial diplomacy from the period.

His larger body of work, including the allegorical commentaries on Genesis and the treatise On the Creation of the World, treats biblical narrative as a coded exposition of philosophical truth. His concept of the divine Logos, an intermediary principle between God and the created order, is a frequent reference point in studies of the Gospel of John and of patristic theology.

The forename Philo is from the Greek philos, meaning loving or friend, the same root behind words such as philosophy and philanthropy. The toponym "of Alexandria" was added by later writers to distinguish him from other ancient figures of the same name, and his work is the reason the short Greek name remains attached most readily to a Jewish philosopher of the Roman period.